Josh Simpson
The marketing automation industry is expected to grow from 3.3 billion in 2019 to 6.4 billion by 2024. It's being driven by the demand for advanced technologies to automate repetitive tasks and a need for personalised marketing to maximise audience reach.
Marketing automation is the process of streamlining your digital marketing efforts to make them more effective using technology. Automating your digital marketing doesn’t just increase efficiency, but it can offer a more personal experience to your customers.
Automation uses a single platform to manage your entire marketing operation from one place.
When used with a CRM System, like HubSpot, your marketing automation can make tasks such as email marketing easier for your marketing team; whilst also maximising customer experience.
Benefits Of Marketing Automation
Improved Efficiency
Marketing automation can increase the efficiency of your entire department. As less time is spent on basic tasks, automation allows your employees to focus on more important projects.
For example, instead of having to manually post on social media every day, marketing automation software can automate that process. Allowing your team to focus on creative work, such as your next campaign to boost sales.
Personalized Marketing Strategy
Automation eliminates manual data entry tasks, allowing your team to send more targeted and personal emails. There's nothing worse than receiving an email knowing that a thousand other people have had the exact same one.
Personalised emails don't have to be a big task when you use the right tools. Vidyard for example, can aid you in you personalised reach out allowing you to record a 20 seconds video to the individual.
Automation can act as your personal assistant when it comes to lead nurturing, informing you when leads are ready to be nurtured. This can be triggered from email interaction, behaviour on the website and more.
Your entire lead nurturing process needs to consider the relevance to a specific lead. If somebody engaged with an automated email about a sales conference, your next email campaign should invite them to a sales conference that your company is hosting.
This is a way of personalising your marketing strategy, and making your lead feel like the emails they’re receiving are specific for them. This could help guide your lead through the sales funnel, eventually turning them into a customer.
Data Management
As marketing automation tracks the engagement of your leads with your site, it makes data management easier than ever. Your CRM system will store and can update all of your data for you automatically if linked correctly, meaning your team can focus their efforts elsewhere.
The Downsides To Marketing Automation
Like all technologies, there can be disadvantages to to much tech. Not only does it need to be continuously reviewed for optimisation but also for relevance. If company information or images get updated you need to make sure any automated marketing is too.
Too many technologies at play
One downside to marketing automation, is if too many technologies are used, it can have a negative effect, and hinder growth. If too many technologies are in play, it can make reporting increasingly difficult, and decrease productivity, due to having to switch between different marketing automation platforms.
However, HubSpot's CRM allows you to have all these technologies in one place, making reporting easy.
Time spent on learning the software
Like anything new in your business, whether it’s a machine on the shop floor, or a new health and safety policy, your employees will need training. This is no different with the software needed to successfully automate your marketing.
However, this isn’t a 2-day course like with health and safety or even a few hours on a new machine. The training process for implementing marketing tech can take a long time, and once you think you know what you need to know, you find out there’s more to learn.
This time spent learning the software is essential to ensure you get the optimal results from your marketing tech, as your employees will be fully prepared to manage the system. As the saying goes, “fail to prepare, prepare for failure”.
This couldn't be any more true with implementing your marketing automation, and any time lost in the implementation will be made back with the time your team save on very basic tasks.
The key to getting to grips with new software is having a handful of people internally that are on board, so they can lead the others. Having a clear and structured onboarding process also ensures your companies needs are met and it aids their current processes rather than hinders it.
If you’re not sure where to start with your implementation, Insynth can help, and make sure you have your CRM system set up properly.
Which Marketing Automation Software Should You Buy
There is a wide range of options when it comes to choosing your Marketing automation software and several of marketing areas that can be automated such as:
- Analytics and segmentation
- CRM Systems
There are are several market leaders within the email marketing sector. Inkit is one of them, it allows email integration with other marketing channels and makes it easy to track. Some other essential features of Inkit’s automated direct mail include:
- Triggered email based on user behaviour
- A/B split testing to measure the results of future direct mail campaigns before targeting all customers
- Unlimited batch size to send any mail volume
Analytics and segmentation
Even without a specific Analytics tool, you can still analyse and segment your data through a CRM system.
However, if you’re needing to conduct an in-depth analysis of each marketing channel your company has, you may want to consider purchasing a specialized analytics tool.
These tools collect information on real user interactions, which can help to evaluate common behaviours on your site. These tools can range anywhere from very basic tools for free, such as google analytics, up to more advanced tools such as Blueshift, or Chartbeat which can range anywhere from £200 to £800 per month.
Using a system like HubSpot can allow you to have all of the tools mentioned in the blog, for one monthly fee.
CRM Systems
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system helps manage your customer's data. It supports sales management, delivers actionable insights, integrates with social media and facilitates team communication.
Choosing the right CRM system can have massive benefits for your business. It can enable you to monitor customer behaviours on your website, manage email marketing and automation, like creating triggered emails, for when a user takes a desired action.
The right CRM System can tie all of your marketing automation together and can be used alongside any area of your business to ensure it runs smoothly.
The CRM we recommend is HubSpot. Unlike many other CRM’s, HubSpot just makes sense. It’s user friendly and quick to get the hang of.
It even offers training through the HubSpot academy for employees to develop their knowledge and skills which is what makes it different. We can even help you to implement HubSpot into your business.
Conclusion
Marketing automation can completely change your business when implemented properly and take you from strength to strength, which is why it’s so essential to get right.
If you’re still sceptical about automating your marketing, why not try out HubSpot. It’s free to download and use at a basic level, just to give you a first-hand view at how effective having everything in one place can be. If you like it, you can upgrade to unlock your businesses full automated potential.
ABOUT INSYNTH
Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing agency based in Shifnal in the West Midlands.
They use the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to support building product companies to grow their business by proactively driving sales lead generation activity.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.