Does Marketing Automation Improve Smarketing Productivity?

Today, with the wide variety of digital channels available, there is pressure to demonstrate measurable results and prove the ROI of every marketing investment. But more channels mean more challenges and more tasks.

With so much to do and so little time, it’s essential to find ways to increase productivity without compromising marketing and sales results.

This is where Marketing Automation comes in.

But what is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation refers to any software that automates marketing processes. The main goal of this type of software is to help marketers prioritize and execute marketing tasks more quickly and effectively. But what does this mean exactly for marketers?

This type of software isn’t meant to replace marketers’ work but rather to make it more effective and help them achieve their business goals more quickly.

The main goal of marketing should be to generate revenue for the company. But for that to happen, it’s necessary to attract visitors to the website, convert that traffic into leads, and turn those leads into customers.

Marketing automation can help teams be more productive. But how?

While it doesn’t replace all the effort required to create content, it will help promote it and engage your buyer personas at the right time.

By ensuring that your contacts receive relevant, personalized content through the most appropriate channel and at the right time (automatically), your marketing and sales teams will have more time to focus on other tasks that are important to the business.

How Marketing Automation Can Help the Marketing Team

The software will allow you to nurture leads throughout the entire buying process by sending highly personalized and targeted messages addressing specific challenges and objections your buyer personas may have regarding purchasing your product or service.

Here’s an example of a simple automated campaign:

Step 1: Send an email encouraging a segmented list of contacts to download an ebook;

Step 2: Send a thank-you message to everyone who downloaded the ebook;

Step 3: After a few days, send a follow-up email to the list of people who downloaded the ebook, offering them a case study related to the same topic;

Step 4: Finally , when someone downloads the case study, the sales team receives a notification so they can follow up (this lead is now much more qualified and further along in the buying process).

Put yourself in this lead’s shoes for a moment. If you received this type of personalized content, wouldn’t you prefer it over emails sent to a database of thousands, if not millions, of contacts? I believe so, because it’s a much more personalized form of communication.

It’s through workflows like the one in this example that this type of marketing will help marketers generate more revenue for the company and thus have a positive impact on the business.

This is the foundation of marketing automation. It gives you, as a marketer, the ability to segment your contacts and send them content based on their digital behavior according to specific predefined criteria. You’ll be sending them the information they need at the most opportune time. In this way, you’re helping leads move forward in the buying process, and as a result, your conversion rates (and revenue) will increase.

How Marketing Automation Can Help the Sales Team

Based on the examples mentioned above, you might think that this type of marketing only works for marketing campaigns, but that’s not true. Marketing automation software, such as HubSpot’s, can (and should) also be used to optimize the sales process.

Here’s an example of an automated sales workflow:

Step 1: Sales reps receive an automatic notification whenever a lead reaches a score of 80 points (see this article to learn more about the concept of lead scoring);

Meanwhile, sales reps should contact the leads, and ideally, the leads will proceed to request a proposal. After the proposal is sent...

Step 2: Create an automatedworkflow that will track and follow up (automatically via email) on these sent proposals. This is because sales follow-up on specific proposals is very time-consuming for sales teams, who then fail to devote the necessary time to pursuing new opportunities with greater potential;

Step 3: After “X” follow-up emails, you can automatically close these opportunities to focus on new ones.

This example is quite simple, but with marketing automation, you can create workflows of varying complexity to optimize processes and free up time for the Marketing & Sales teams so they can focus on other priority tasks.

Tips for Getting the Most Out of Marketing Automation:

• Analyze which marketing communications and/or sales processes your team spends the most time on and determine whether they can be optimized through some form of automation;
• Identify which phases of your marketing and/or sales strategy aren’t working and do some research to see if marketing automation software could help improve your results;
• Have a clear idea of how you intend to use marketing automation to achieve your business goals.
  
  

4 Ideas for Workflows You Can Create Using Automation:

• No time to qualify leads? Create a workflow to automatically nurture your leads before they’re handed off to the sales department;

• Short on time to follow up on proposals? Design a workflow to help your sales reps with this task;

• Would you like to send a personalized message to all contacts who converted on a specific landing page? Create a workflow just for those contacts;

• Do you need to collect more data on the contacts in your database who have interacted with you in the last 6 months? With the right software, you can create a workflow to engage with these contacts.

Finally, track the time and results before and after implementing marketing automation software and draw your own conclusions.

Software designed to automate marketing processes not only makes the work of marketing and sales teams easier but also fosters genuine engagement with your leads by delivering relevant content to the right people at the most opportune moment. This, in turn, will increase click-through rates and conversions and help the sales department close more deals.

Watch the recording of this webinar and learn, in more detail, how technology can improve the productivity of your marketing and sales teams!