If you’re on the fence about marketing automation, it might be best for you to take a look at how it can transform your business by comparing the before with the after.

First, you may be wondering how a move to marketing automation will benefit your business financially.  It’s a fair question and one with an interesting answer. On average, marketing automation costs less than what it would cost you to hire three to four employees to do the same job.  Combined with payroll taxes, health insurance, and other benefits – this could mean huge savings for companies.

Marketing automation is also able to make a significant impact in small to medium sized companies.  For the most part, those marketing departments are relatively small, so it’s difficult to devote the time and energy to daily tasks let alone things like updating databases and tracking content performance.  Marketing automation can make a major impact in these areas by doing that work for you.

Marketing Automation: The Before

When we start getting into the before of larger, multi-national companies, the impact that automation can have becomes even clearer.  Large companies are often running campaigns and social media accounts for several locations or departments, all at the same time.  As an example, Unilever owns more than 400 brands worldwide.  They have a variety of marketing campaigns for different brands, in different parts of the world, for different products; at any given time.  Marketing automation would help a company like Unilever manage the activity on all of their social media sites, including scheduling content, tracking interactions and followers, and delivering real-time data to see how a strategy is performing overall.

Working the Demographics

Besides tracking how well your campaigns are performing, marketing automation gives you the ability to target them to specific demographics.  If you’re targeting clients of all kinds, marketing automation can help you specify where they fall in the buying pipeline.  Are they marketing managers themselves or are they business owners?  Automation can help you keep that information straight while sending targeted messages to all of your clients.  Most companies will see an increase in sales and conversion rates once they implement marketing automation solutions.

Beyond all this, marketing automation will create a more predictable revenue cycle and align your sales and marketing teams, which will substantially increase your growth.  Some experts say that by using marketing automation, a company can expect a 29% increase in won deals as opposed to 19% won deals, without marketing automation.  Your sales department will benefit as well.  For a majority of companies, 73% of the leads that the sales department receive, go nowhere.  With marketing automation, you’re able to identify and cut out the 73% ahead of time, which means that your sales team is able to focus on high-quality leads.  Not only that but since nurtured leads tend to spend about 47% more than non-nurtured leads, you don’t have to wait around for your sales team to establish relationships.  Marketing automation has already done that for you, with targeted, personalized messages and content.

These are only a few of the ways that marketing automation can benefit your company and transform your sales team.  If the after looks better than the before to you, contact us today to get started with your marketing automation solution!

Have you been asking yourself, is marketing automation a good idea? Or maybe, is marketing automation worth the hassle? To run an effective marketing campaign and gather appropriate leads, marketers should take advantage of marketing automation.  Marketing automation gives you the ability to manage the targeting, timing, and content of your outbound messages in the most effective way possible.  By implementing marketing automation, you’ll be able to personalize your marketing to each prospect’s wants and needs based on where they are in the buying pipeline.

Of course, everyone knows that increased revenues are the number one reason most businesses decide to incorporate marketing automation.  In fact, out of top performing companies, 70% are found to use marketing automation.  But what you might not realize about marketing automation is that it also helps companies build and improve internal communications, making your sales and marketing teams more effective.  When marketing and sales teams come together, their mutual decisions are most effectively implemented through marketing automation.  This improvement results in effective lead nurturing, scoring, and a handoff process designed to meet both the marketing goals of the organization and sales requirements.

Marketing Automation: Is It a Good Idea?

Many times, marketing automation is the solution to specific challenges an organization has. For example, if you’re having issues capturing appropriate and solid leads, marketing automation can help solve this by accurately targeting leads.  It also gives you, the marketer, the advantage of sending out effective and personalized messages but automating this process so you’re able to focus on more important aspects of your campaigns.  Marketing automation will provide you with real-time data and analytics, letting you know what’s working and what’s not.  It takes the guesswork out of marketing and allows you to nail down the details that draw in your targeted audience.

Marketing automation works best for companies who are in specific situations, such as:

• Companies in a large market with numerous leads;
• Organizations with a longer sales process;
• Businesses with sites that are content heavy;
• Processes and systems already in place, to coordinate.

Will Marketing Automation Work?

Marketing automation is not a magic wand or a quick fix.  It’s a process that will take work, time, and adjustments.  Marketing automation strategies will be tested and adjusted continuously based off the information it gives you.  It will take initial effort on your part but your long-term workload will be lessened, if the system is implemented correctly.  For companies who are producing quality content and getting a steady flow of leads from their sites, marketing automation could be a solution to effective and timely follow-up.

If you think that marketing automation might be an effective tool for your campaign and you’re ready to talk, contact us today for a quote!