In the latest edition of our growing business guide, we help to make sense of what Marketing Automation is and what it can do to benefit your growing business.
You’ve probably heard of Marketing Automation. But you probably don’t know what it actually means!
It’s basically, technology that helps you and your business market multiple channels more effectively. It encompasses a broad range of online channels, including email, social media and your website, and automates actions associated with them. It helps your marketing efforts to yield deeper insight into your customers, boosts marketing productivity and empowers your business with the marketing power of an enterprise organisation. Typically, Marketing Automation is bundled with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software like Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation software broadly covers three areas:
- Marketing Intelligence takes advantage of social media, email, search terms and your website to track the behaviour or people interested in your products or services. You’ll be able to identify how your customers are interacting with your business and identify their intentions.
- Qualifying prospects to leads is a key focus of the Automation Prospects are scored based on their activities and as a consequence sent personalised drip campaign messaging. Their score is a clear indicator of what stage of the marketing funnel they’re at, according to their expressed interest – nurturing the prospect and converting them to a sale.
- Operational tasks like budgeting, planning, reporting and digital asset creation are Workflows that benefit from marketing automation. Marketing Intelligence and automated features feed into workflows to give live and up-to-date information to marketers, so they are able to send the correct content to the correct segment of customers.
OK, I get what it is. But what does it do for my business?
A great deal!
- You’ll be able to sell more, and sell more successfully! In marketing, Lead Nurturing is a critical part of positioning your organisation to prospects in order to convert them to leads. Typically, only 20% of leads are sales ready when they first approach your organisation. Marketing automation, helps your organisation feed a steady flow of content to convert your leads to sales.
- Synergy with Sales. Lead scoring helps to empower your sales team with the information they need to make a sale. You’ll want to make sure that your sales team follows up on leads that have made their way to the bottom of the marketing funnel.
- Your business will be more productive. Need to get that monthly marketing report done? Workflows from your marketing automation solution will generate that at a touch of a button for you.
- At the moment, you’re probably using quite a few systems (or none at all) to manage your marketing. Marketing automation, helps your business get everything into one system in one place. Instead of navigating a myriad of systems, you’ll benefit from the efficiency of having one system.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM has been identified as a leader in CRM customer engagement by Gartner. To find out more about Marketing Automation and Microsoft Dynamics CRM, call our experts on 020 3004 4600 or click here.
