The Marketing Automation Platform is growing rapidly and has become one of the most crucial trends in digital marketing, especially inbound marketing. Marketing automation has made marketing faster, easier, and more efficient than ever before. Sounds impressive, right? But what exactly is marketing automation, and what can it do for your business?
According to the definition, a marketing automation platform refers to using software to automate manual marketing processes. This includes tasks like sending emails, social media posting, and so on. These systems let you follow a prospective client’s activities on the marketing funnel until they eventually become a customer.
With COVID19, we have learned that markets can change dramatically only within a few weeks, PoT (Point of Trigger) and messages which were converted amazingly on Jan 2020, not relevant in March, and have changed again in May.
Those changes surged fast. Hence, to be able to accommodate and to adapt fast and through all of our channels, we nowadays, more than ever, need to automate marketing and sales as much as you can to increase conversion while saving the budget.
When you talk about Marketing Automation, the first answer from Customers is, “yes, we have CRM, or yes, we have an Email Platform”. But, sorry, no… CRM and Email Platform MAP are not the same and usually do not support the same work, goals, and objectives.
Then, what are the main differences?
It is understandable why it’s confusing. Both CRM, Email Platform and MAP provide information about clients and prospective, stage on the funnel, history engagements. But the main difference is with the type of marketing channels the platform knows how to manage.
In some MAPs solutions such as HubSpot, SharpSpring, Marketo the CRM is a module on the MAP platform.
Research and studies have been conducted over the years to show the effectiveness of MAP on conversion rates and the increase in revenue of companies who implemented MAP and not only email platforms, but more have found that reducing churn rate and support sales cycle can be achieved with the MAP platform. Here are some of the insights:
78% of high performing marketers regard marketing automation as a critical contributor to increased revenue.
By 2020, 85% of the customer-to-business relationships will be managed without human interaction, says Gartner on their Gartner customer 360 summits.
80% of marketing automation users saw an increase in their lead numbers, 77% had an increase in conversion rates, and 91% of marketing automation users agree MAP is essential for the overall success of their online marketing activities.
So why do you need a Marketing Automation Platform?
The main reason is to make your marketing and sales team more accurate with the messages and engagements for your audience. The second reason is to provide you the ability to achieve the ultimate Operative Procedures- Connect between the three departments- Marketing-Sales-Products with the PoTs, messages, and tactics to convert Prospects and leads into revenue streaming.
Hence, on day-to-day work, here are the main five outcomes you can anticipate having from working with MAP, and can lead you to fast ROI:
1. Productivity
One significant benefit of marketing automation is how it simplifies routine marketing tasks. It efficiently eliminates repetitive manual processes by replacing them with effective automating solutions. This, in turn, increases productivity as the marketing team channels their energy into tasks that require more manual monitoring.
Tip: When you build the funnel marketing campaign, define first the segments and the stage of the funnel you would like to aim for, this will provide you the ability to automatically add more contacts (leads) into this funnel.
2. Workflow Automation
A successful inbound marketing campaign will need a range of solutions like calls to action, forms, and conversion pages, but it’s an automated workflow that binds them all together. When performing routine tasks manually, human error can occur. So, marketing automation regularizes activities, processes, and documentation, allowing for a smoother marketing workflow.
Tip: when you build the automation, utilizing the UTM code is crucial to monitor the conversion rate of the campaign, especially when we are using multi-channels (social-media, ads, emails funnel, etc.) on the same campaign.
3. Customer life cycle:
The Inbound marketing philosophy is based on the assumptions we need to engage and maintain a relationship with the Contact all the time. And the engagement needs to be accurate per the segments, the position of the Contacts, PoT, and other variables. The MAP provides us the ability to create engagements per each type of stage on the customer life cycle, from the engagement (lead) stage through the sales funnel, up to the trial or installations period and into the customer success steps to increase retention and decreased churn rate.
Every step, stage, type of life, requires a different approach, a different funnel, and the most important different PoT and channels. The ability of the BI and AI, marketing automation has provided you to make this automaticity.
Tip: with the Customer Life cycle, it’s important for moving a client from one funnel to another automatically. While your teams are notified about it, and every funnel needs to be built from at least 3-4 emails, knowledge blogs or White paper, and use cases, the mix of the type of emails is vital to the success of the campaign.
4. Connecting the Dots:
Versatility between the departments in the company, customers, and prospects is vital for any business success and revenue steaming. Marketing Automation is one of the only software solutions which can help any company to build the metrics of personalizing the relationship per the Contact stage with the specific PoT and messages and with the type of product/solution. And by that to connect the dots between the Marketing-Sales-Product-Customer success engagements’ requirements.
That is the engel-point of how your company would leverage the benefits of the MAP, as it becomes the management platform for our Leads, Clients and Customers life cycle and not only the sales cycle.
Tip: Utilize the same PoT on multiple channels at the same time. When launching an email campaign use the same date of sending the emails and the same PoT, to scheduling Posts via social media to build the Re-marketing ads (Re-targeting) via Ads Campaigns and don’t forget to use the same UTMs all over the channel on this campaign.
5. Revenue
For a business to continue thriving, there has to be a balance between acquiring customers and transitions. One effective method marketing automation uses in keeping customers is through marketing intelligence procedures, which provides significant insight into customer’s (both existing and potential) needs and activity. The MAP provides the ability to see the 'Life of Leads' circle, understanding the conversions process steps from the first engagements thought the nurturing, sales, and any steps of the journey, and most importantly, can understand your audience PoT (Point of Trigger), and what triggered your client.
Tip: To determine the success of any marketing campaign, it has to be supported by relevant and measurable data obtained through accurate and precise tracking and monitoring. Marketing automation platforms not only help in tracking marketing expenditures but also helps in monitoring responses to marketing campaigns based on specific parameters, and sometimes know how to leverage AI to engage with the right content at the right time to the right contact.
Marketing Automation Platform- Provides it All and Affordable for any size of company!
Despite the necessity of a marketing automation platform, it is a complicated market space with a variety of solutions and, with some platform, even expanses.
Hence, we at the RiCH.agency have worked with multiple types and solutions in this market. In the last year we have become a SharpSpring partner and found there is a solution that can be affordable (SharpSpring License start as low as $425/month) and which can include all the modules you may need to get an ROI within a few months.
SharpSpring is a comprehensive, easy to use, and powerful marketing automation platform with robust features, performance, and functionality. It is one of the most flexible platforms in the market, offering a stable behavior-based marketing, blog builders and landing page, social media management, dynamic forms, and many more. SharpSpring is the easiest company to work with, and it’s usually 1/3 less than the costs of other companies.
Kiefer Hazaz, Managing Director,
THE RiCH.agency
800-815-1522
*If you find that tasks are falling through the cracks or need that little bit of extra help with any marketing efforts through these difficult times, don’t hesitate to reach out to The RiCH.agency. We are offering the first 14 days free with month to month options.