As a B2B company, you've probably heard about marketing automation. In order to determine if you should make the investment, we should clear up what marketing automation is and is not.
Marketing Automation is a software platform that streamlines, automates, and measures marketing tasks and workflows based on lead intelligence. This allows you to be more efficient and sustainable, increase revenue and grow into a more powerful marketing team. Basically, it uses its powers to help you gain intelligence and nurture relationships with leads that aren’t ready to buy.
A marketing automation tool like HubSpot includes email marketing, landing pages, forms, campaign management, lead nurturing/scoring, lead lifecycle management, CRM, social media, SEO intelligence and marketing analytics.
Marketing Automation is not a tool to replace your marketing team. Marketing automation is only as smart as the person or team behind it, and it's crucial to get the planning and strategy right.
So now that you better understand marketing automation, how do you know if it’s time to revamp the way you work using marketing automation to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that converts them into customers?
Either you're a small company that has decided the way you're doing things is not netting you the financial gains needed to grow, or you have seen a little bit of growth but have not been able to scale your processes to allow for even more growth. In order to achieve growth and hit revenue targets, you must have sustainable processes in place to generate, nurture and follow-up on leads.
With marketing automation, you not only set yourself up to drive more inbound traffic to your website, but you also can use the intelligence you gain from their activity to follow up and deliver content that matters most to them. Next, you can monitor when they're ready to have a sales discussion and prioritize your follow-up based on who is most likely to buy.
When we first start working with our clients, we find that many are using several tools that:
A B2B marketing automation tool will have most of the functionality you are using across all of these tools or at least provide an integration between some so you can cut down on cost, time spent maintaining, and pulling reports out of each of the tools independently.
"CRM" and "marketing automation" are not two terms for the same thing. They work wonderfully together to tighten the handshake between sales and marketing, but a CRM cannot replicate functionality offered by a marketing automation tool.
The purpose of a CRM is to maintain information about a prospect and their account as it relates to their sales and opportunity history - not to mass email your database. While some CRMs can send emails for you, they aren't designed to send mass emails. CRMs also have a very manual process to setup and select a list of recipients. In fact, most have set limits on how many emails you can send per day through these tools.
You will definitely not be able to nurture your leads when by sending emails based on their behaviors when using a CRM alone. Since lead nurturing is not a feature of a CRM tool, you won’t receive those benefits.
The best CRM and marketing automation tools work together, maximizing the strengths of each platform.
Inbound marketing has become a core marketing approach across B2B and B2C companies. Rather than relying on attending trade shows, buying ad space or scrapping contact lists - which are all expensive and may even have a negative impact - inbound is all about creating quality content to attract visitors to your website.
By having high-value, technical gated content, you then convert visitors into known leads that you can nurture with more quality content until they are ready to make a purchase. Inbound marketing is just one part of a successful marketing strategy. With the support of marketing automation, you will be able to turn inbound efforts into actual revenue.
Marketing automation tools such as HubSpot are designed for inbound marketing, offering all the tools you could need to plan, execute, report on and improve a marketing campaign.
Small companies are usually full of employees who handle a wide range of responsibilities and never have enough time. Marketing is often a shared role along with sales, support and business development. Oftentimes, this leads to marketing efforts becoming subpar or abandoned altogether.
Marketing automation helps businesses with limited resources run successful marketing campaigns and gain efficiencies. You can do this by creating repeatable workflows, landing page and email templates, and automated reporting and emails, so that employees can take those time savings and focus on other crucial business activities.
Keep in mind that marketing automation tools are not “plug and play.” There is also an investment of time on the front end to get everything set up and to create content. Once created, TREW recommends doing an annual marketing plan that will drive new quarterly campaigns aligned to your business goals to make sure you are focused on the right efforts.
TREW is a marketing agency dedicated to reaching engineering and technical audiences through a range of marketing initiatives. Contact us today to learn more about the services we offer.