MA - 3 Benefits
MARKETING AUTOMATION - 3 KEY BENEFITS
IPSUM AGENCY LTD ADMIN - JUNE 06, 2018
...and some key considerations to take into account

THERE ARE SO MANY TOOLS OUT THERE ON THE MARKET TO HELP MARKETERS CARRY OUT THE MYRIAD OF TASKS AND PROJECTS THEY ARE NOW FACED WITH IN THIS DIGITAL ERA. CREATING SOCIAL MEDIA, DIGITAL, ONLINE, DISPLAY AND PRINT CAMPAIGNS AS WELL AS CONTENT SUCH AS VIDEO, WEBINARS AND PODCASTS – NOT TO MENTION TRADITIONAL PRINT, BRAND AND ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS – OH AND NOT FORGETTING OUTDOOR!!

If you’re considering marketing automation for your business, it’s important to have a good understanding of what you want to achieve, who to get on-board with the project in your organisation to implement, what to expect from the software, and what the key benefits are before you begin comparing the various tools.

Fundamentally, marketing automation is about engagement, personalisation at scale and optimisation.

Automating the marketing department's BAU tasks enables the team to focus on the projects that will really move the dial and create value within your business. Having the system in place and set up effectively means that the sales team can focus their efforts on the seriously relevant and hot leads rather than any lead that comes down the funnel.

What are 3 of the key benefits of marketing automation?
1. Cost reduction

A skilled marketing automation user can set up lead nurturing and marketing campaigns that are automatically triggered based on certain criteria. With some software such as Marketo – campaigns can be easily copied, pasted and edited for different products and services. It does take time to build the perfect workflow for a campaign, but once set up your business could be sending out thousands of personalised emails each day on autopilot. This automation removes the need for single send emails which take time and resource to manage.

2. Increased revenue and average deal size

Marketing automation enables you to automate your cross-sells, up-sells, and customer follow-ups which should in turn increase the lifetime value of your customer, increase revenue through more sizeable deals.

3. Improve accountability of marketing & sales teams

When you have marketing automation fully installed and working, senior leaders of the business can see exactly where the bottlenecks are. Marketing automation software now provide apps on which you can see exactly where leads are in the pipeline real-time and who in your team is processing leads more effectively.

It all sounds very positive, but there are some key considerations to take into account before embarking on a marketing automation project.

Key considerations

Are the senior leadership team bought into the project? Do they recognise and endorse the fact that there will be a shift in the way in which leads are handled – if for example typically leads are generated and managed by the sales team.

Do you have IT teams who are willing to be involved in essentially a marketing led transformation project that has at its heart some pretty powerful software? This isn’t just about implementing a piece of software, taking it through all of the obligatory security and risk processes to test the robustness of the software and then letting it run. It’s a programme of business change and transformation across the whole company.

Bringing the sales team with you. I’ve worked with many sales people in the past, and unfortunately in many organisations marketing are seen as a support function to sales and so seemingly subservient. But if you see the way in which buyer behaviour has changed – clients very often know more about what they want before they engage with a sales person nowadays and this typically happens through the awareness and engagement that has been generated by the marketing department.

If your marketing department could be tasked with raising awareness, driving new leads into the digital realm of your business, engage with them, nurture them and then pass leads down to sales who are ready to sign on the dotted line – wouldn’t that be better?

If everything was perfect and everyone was engaged, systems worked, all pipes were connected, you'd be able to see the entire customer journey from first click to sale, how long it took and how much it cost to achieve. Food for thought!

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