by Introduction to Marketing Automation
Are you among the majority who struggle to find enough time for all your marketing tasks? Then it will be interesting and relevant for you to take a closer look at marketing automation.
Marketing automation helps you to hit the right target group at the right time with a relevant message, and in this way you create new customers.
You can look forward to reading more about:
- What is marketing automation?
- Why companies are successful with marketing automation
- Conclusion
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation refers to software that exists for the purpose of performing marketing-related actions without requiring you to take a manual action. This can be e-mails, postings on social media and chat bots, for example.
Using this software helps mature your leads with relevant and personalized content that ultimately converts your leads into customers.
If all of this is gibberish to you, you might want to stop by our “What is inbound marketing?” blog post, which will give you an intro to the concepts you will encounter throughout this blog.
Why companies are successful with marketing automation?
In addition, marketing automation has led to higher turnover, more relevant messages and better handling of existing leads.
There are tons of statistics about the effects of marketing automation that you can dive into. Now we focus on the benefits themselves.
You save time
You are probably not surprised that marketing automation saves you time. But exactly how much time you save, a report has actually been made.
- By automating your posts and ads on social media, you can save up to 6 hours a week and at the same time ensure that your profile is updated with new content.
- It costs 5X – 30X more to acquire a new customer than to retain one. With automated e-mails, it becomes easier to retain existing customers and secure repeat or repeat sales.
- You can save up to 80% time on meeting booking by having an automated tool to handle your meeting booking for you.
With marketing automation, you don’t have to go in and schedule your daily postings. You can plan posts far into the future and thus make it a task that you may only work on once a month or every 2 weeks.
There are many different tools that can help you with marketing automation. From a free tool like Mailchimp, which is primarily used to handle automated emails, to ActiveCampaign, which specializes in email marketing automation and to HubSpot, which collects all your automations across your channels.
Get better effect from your CRM
A CRM system is most often referred to as the system where you handle your customers’ and leads’ contact information and possibly the communication you have had with them. Marketing automation is more focused on the whole marketing aspect. For example, what they have downloaded, which web pages they have visited, whether they have opened your emails, etc.
When you combine these two, that’s when the magic happens. Emails can be sent based on the material downloaded. And even personalized emails if you have received personal information such as name, company, position, etc. The big advantage is that your salespeople now have a much better insight into the leads’ interests that may be relevant in the sales process.
At the same time, the content that is broadcast can also be adapted to the customer journey, so that the right content is shown at the right time – and you can keep track of it all in your CRM.
Consistent communication
With marketing automation, you are sure that your target group receives the same relevant and consistent communication based on the actions they have taken.
For example, if they have downloaded an e-book on lead generation, they will subsequently receive a series of e-mails dealing with blogs, tips and cases with lead generation. In other words, the content is kept relevant for the recipient.
So you no longer have to sit and think about whether you remember to be present and handle your new leads. It is handled completely automatically.
Your messages become personal and relevant
The statistics show that personalized emails provide better open rates, but over 70% of all companies fail to take advantage of this. With tools such as GetResponse, Active Campaign or Hubspot, you can personalize your emails. When you collect your lead’s name, you can easily automate your emails and have it integrated – across all your emails.
It gives a personal touch and increases the likelihood that the recipient will open your email. The more data you collect about your recipient, the more you can use it in your email. But of course in moderation.
Delving deeper, you can ensure that the content displayed on your website is uniquely tailored based on what content visitors have downloaded. This is known as dynamic content. We know it from webshops and the like, where it leads to a 20% increase in sales, but we also see it more and more on ordinary websites.
If, for example, you download two pieces of content, I will ask you to fill in different information for content no. #2 than for content no. #1. It gives me more knowledge and thus the possibility of more relevant messages.
In short, it is about presenting your message so that it is adapted to your person’s needs and provides solutions for and knowledge about what they are looking for, when they are looking for it. And with the right tools, you can make the content dynamic and personally targeted at your company’s customers.
You can sit with the big picture
Marketing automation can save you a lot of time and ensure relevant communication. 75% of all companies that use marketing automation have added an increased ROI from marketing automation in less than 12 months.
But it can also be difficult to understand. The more marketing automation you use, the more programs and systems you will probably need to access. For example, we often see that you have different systems for e-mail automation, social media posts, meeting booking, contact information (CRM), lead scoring, etc.
You can advantageously collect all of this in HubSpot as soon as you begin to embrace more forms of marketing automation. This can both save time, provide more overview and ensure that the data is collected in one place. HubSpot is the world’s leading inbound marketing platform and should be considered if you are about to get your teeth into the marketing automation machine.
If you want to know more about HubSpot, we have made a guide about what it contains.
Conclusion
Marketing automation can help you for increased growth and better handling of your leads.
In summary, marketing automation is a powerful tool for maturing your leads from the time you first acquire them until they become customers. Companies that use marketing automation have a 53% higher conversion rate from when a lead is first obtained until it is an MQL(Marketing Qualified Lead).
So has become a marketing-qualified lead, which means a lead that has a challenge or a need that your company can solve.
In addition, companies that work with marketing automation also have an increase in the number of sales-ready leads as well as increased growth.
And as mentioned, it’s all because you no longer leave your handling of leads to chance, but work in a structured way to mature them and create sales-ready leads.
All by creating relevant content that hits your persona, at the right time and with this message.
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