With the arrival of marketing automation on the scene,
digital marketing has been kicked into overdrive.
And we’re not just talking about fast-paced lead nurturing through emails with variable data. Marketing automation platforms (MAPs) are helping in customer acquisition as well as customer retention, while streamlining campaigns and measuring results throughout the entire sales cycle.
Simply put, marketing automation saves time and effort by making the marketing process more efficient and cohesive, by helping integrate your marketing efforts with sales activities. Knowing what your audience is specifically interested in allows you to nurture leads with customized information in a more streamlined, consistent manner.
Specific programs can be designed according to the needs of your business:
What any good platform does is automate tasks to help your marketing and sales teams communicate more effectively with your audience. It also provides opportunities to gain specific insights and develop a profile on individual users, before the first conversation has even taken place.
Landing pages provide segmented, trackable entry points that help define a user’s interests. Personalized content based on these established topics can then be instantaneously and automatically sent to a registrant through a drip email campaign.
On the backend, lead scoring ensures that each user is properly handled as they progress through the sales funnel and keeps your team up-to-date as new information comes into the system.
Further strengthening the power of MAPs is the ability to integrate with other marketing platforms, including web analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) programs. All relevant data is centralized, enabling the marketing and sales teams to use one system.
By combining lead generation, lead capture and lead nurturing into one platform, while providing important features for user engagement and analytics tracking, marketing automation offers:
As easy as the process itself may be, what a marketing automation platform can’t do is create the content and manage the actual campaigns. You’ll still need a humanoid that understands how to speak the language of your target audience as well as the types of information they are looking for and how often to engage each lead.
Traditional marketing won’t be fully replaced that easily by automation. Marketing automation is only part of the equation and other marcom tactics still always hold a place at the table to aid in gathering new leads in the first place!
We’ve worked with many of the top platforms, like Hubspot, Marketo and SharpSpring, developing and managing campaigns in addition to creating content for emails and landing pages. We also design the graphics and additional assets needed to move leads further down the sales cycle.
Selecting a marketing software platform to use is only half the battle. It goes far beyond merely using some templates to make your content ‘look good.’ If the strategy isn’t on point, the message isn’t cohesive, and the imagery isn’t well developed, it’s going to show in your campaign’s success rate.
No one wants to read a boring email with drab visuals. Where we help is in creating engaging campaigns that are effective, creative and anchored in strategy.
Too often, companies invest in the tools, but not the infrastructure to truly make marketing automation successful. By transforming technical data into cohesive assets (whitepapers, app notes, case histories and compelling visuals…infographics, videos, illustrations), your campaign will generate interest and engagement from your audience.