What is this “marketing automation” that has the corporate world so captivated?
It refers to automating marketing actions such as emailing, social media posting and monitoring, workflows, and other marketing tasks.
By using the right marketing automation tool, you can convert prospects into customers by displaying personalized and relevant content. The result? You will generate significant streams of revenue for your organization and produce an increased return on investment.
Here are just a few compelling statistics:
63% of organizations outperforming their competitors make use of marketing automation, according to Lenskold Group.
68% of successful companies consider lead scoring as a highly-effective marketing automation feature, according to Aberdeen Group. However, automation is not one of the easiest marketing tactics. Be sure to navigate your way wisely and with realistic expectations because automation is the middle step not the entire lead to customer process.
HOW IS MARKETING AUTOMATION GOOD?
It helps a company nurture its leads and bring forward the qualified leads for the sales team. Marketing automation tools may provide the following advantages to your business:
Accurate campaign measurement to prioritize, optimize, and justify initiatives
Reduce time spent in administrative tasks
Increase close rates via relevant engagement
Achieving brand consistency across channels and campaigns via templates and standards
Shorten sales cycles with quicker response times
But here’s the challenge: marketing automation isn’t a magic bullet. To make your automation efforts worthwhile, you will need to ask questions and customize it according to your organization’s business requirements.
MARKETING AUTOMATION CATEGORIZED
Before implementing a marketing automation software, you will need to see if it fulfills the requirements of your organization. From a few dollars to a few thousand dollars, the cost of the software can vary dramatically. You are on the right track once you determine which category of marketing automation you should be focusing on.
Enterprise Marketing Automation
If you are a corporation, again you have a vast array of marketing automation tools at your disposal to perform various tasks. Various companies like IBM, Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce have brought forth tools not only for brandishing marketing automation but also things such as A/B testing, web analytics, social listening, and publishing.
TOP-NOTCH MARKETING AUTOMATION TOOLS
According to your company size, here are some good marketing automation tools you may want to check out:
Marketing Automation Tools for Small Businesses:
LeadSquared
With the help of LeadSquared, an entrepreneur can create landing pages and e-mail campaigns as well as manage and track leads. This tool makes the whole process of creating landing pages easy. You can use the drag and drop functions or choose from one of the many templates.
Once you have made the landing page, LeadSquared generates an email to prospective clients and later notifies you when they submit the form on the landing page.
This software combines all of a lead’s information in one clean dashboard and also measures the lead’s qualification and interest in your business, via a lead score. It starts at $125.00 per month.
HubSpot
This marketing software increases online visibility of your business and converts website traffic into leads. With HubSpot, you also have access to tools for SEO (search engine optimization), web content, CRM (customer relationship management) and social media management. Hubspot is an end-to-end lead conversion and automation software. While each element may not be the most comprehensive it is one of the most robust tools on the market today.
It is a good ‘all-in-one’ option for small business owners. Its price starts at $200 per month.
Act-On
With no requirement for a server, this is a cloud based marketing automation tool. Without the complications of enterprise systems, Act-On delivers you numerous services. With it, you can focus on your customers and evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing programs – all at reduced costs.
Marketing Automation Tools for Mid-Sized Companies:
Marketo
Very popular and rightly so, Marketo helps marketing managers develop and implement email campaigns. Sales teams can use Marketo’s analytics for advanced sales functions including a seamless integration with Salesforce.
This is a well-developed and advanced program so when your small business grows into a large enterprise, this software will ensure seamless integrations of all the campaigns and data. Price starts at $1,195 per month.
Pardot
Pushing forward sales, generating leads, doing vigorous rounds of email marketing, and having sales intelligence is all that is offered by Pardot.
With this software, you have full-fledged access to branded templates, landing pages, lead scoring, a segmentation wizard, an ROI reporting system, as well as real time sales alerts. Coupled with multi-channel social marketing, all this makes Pardot’s automation tool a must-have. It can also easily synchronize with Salesforce CRM.
Per month, it can cost you $1,000 to start.
Eloqua
The big fish of the marketing automation tool software pool, Eloqua has exceptional services. Their customer service team invests time in teaching you the basics and helps you sort out problems with initial implementation. You also have access to a marketplace with many third party services.
If you want secure CRM integration, then this software is for you. The pricing starts at $2,000 per month.
Marketing Automation Tools for Enterprises:
IBM® Campaign
With the help of IBM® Campaign, you can build interactions with your prospects. By using their online history, you can accurately measure a lead’s marketing activities. All campaigns can easily be managed by audience segmentation. In addition, you can rely on this marketing automation tool to deliver your messages at the right time to a huge number of your clients and prospects.
Adobe Campaign
Navigate through campaigns using customer interaction and actions. Providing you powerful and exciting ways to capture, extract, and load data, Adobe Campaign integrates seamlessly with your work processes.
You can access detailed analytics at any point in time. With the help of comprehensive dashboards, you can view at several campaigns at one time.
Teradata Integrated Marketing Management
Last, but not least is this marketing platform. Teradata allows you access to tools for marketing operations, digital messaging, campaign management, and marketing analytics.
THE BOTTOM LINE
A good marketing automation tool has the potential to become your superhero sidekick. Make sure you have done your due diligence in selecting the right software for your business objectives. Otherwise, it would be a daunting task to make the move to a new marketing automation tool mid campaign. In switching marketing automation tools, much of the data may be lost.
However, once you have selected the right tools and are well on your path to automation you will begin to see higher lead conversion and ultimately more qualified leads entering your sales process.
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