Marketing automation platforms such as Marketo are widely recognized for their ability to optimize email deliverability, manage customer relations and automate communications, among other functions. However, there are also some lesser-known impacts that Marketing Automation platforms can have on other areas of the business, allowing you to derive more value from other existing marketing tools in your environment.
Below are some of the impacts you may not already be aware of:
1. Better Returns on Social Media Investment
Social media is an excellent way to keep your audiences engaged and in the loop with the latest scoop on your offerings. However, there is a certain unstructured element when it comes to treating your social media followers as qualified business leads, and Marketing Automation Tools can help you bridge that gap.
Marketing Automation tools can provide you with a way to efficiently guide prospects generated from your Social Media platforms into your CRM by providing native features for Forms and Landing Pages that allow you to capture important information, and convert a ‘like’ into a prospect with ease.
You can also track the ROI on your Social Media platforms by monitoring followers that become customers, and the exact revenue generated from such engagements, especially when it comes to paid content. Tools like Marketo provide you with an interface to input period costs to get an accurate picture of the returns gained from your social media efforts.
Many automation tools also come equipped with the ability to scheduling multiple Social media posts, across platforms, from the same interface. This can save significant time from switching in and out of platforms, and the need to log in at an exact time. You can also plan your media schedule well in advance, allowing you to view forthcoming content at a glance, and make changes based on insights from on-going campaigns.
Check out the following article from Marketo regarding Period Costs.
2. Leverage your copywriting and creative efforts
Automation platforms not only deliver your creative assets in the most structured way but also allow you to optimize how and when this delivery occurs. Using a wide variety of tools available, it is possible to gauge engagement, interest, and customer conversions that your content is generating. This provides you with a mechanism to measure success and ensure you’re maximizing the bang for your buck with any creative efforts.
Platforms such as HubSpot and many others also come equipped with features out of the box that allow you to perform A/B testing on varying versions of your content, ensuring that you’re putting your best foot forward with what you present to prospects.
Check out the HubSpot article on A/B Testing for more information.
3. Better Insights and Support for your overall marketing efforts
Automation platforms allow you to monitor the performance of both online and offline marketing efforts by allowing you to gauge how a specific campaign has impacted your organization’s exposure, revenue, and credibility.
Using tools such as Emails, Forms, Landing Pages and Sync capabilities in order to gather as much data as possible around any Marketing campaigns you are undertaking, and utilize that data to gather important performance insights.
For example, if you’re running an offline trade show event, automation tools can ensure that all your intended participants receive timely email invitations and reminders, see appropriate landing pages when they interact with emails, and can provide relevant information about their interests through forms. These metrics can also then be correlated to the actual attendance to the event in order to gain additional insights into how the campaign performed.
The following article from HubSpot highlights some of the crucial metrics that can be used to determine your ROI and overall performance.
4. Get more value out of your CRM and Database Systems
CRM and customer database systems are an excellent source of storing important information about your customers and for managing your relationships with them across various stages and touchpoints.
Combining these databases with a Marketing Automation System allows you to take these relationships a step further by giving you the ability to segment your audience, and allow you to provide dynamic and tailored content with special regards to the roles, industries, buyer stages, and personas of your audience.
Automation Platforms are widely used alongside CRM systems, and most platforms will offer a convenient way of connecting with each other to facilitate this. Once set up, you can have important information from your CRM system synced to your automation platform, and vice versa, allowing you to leverage important customer insights towards your marketing objectives.
5. Make the most out of your Lead Generation efforts
While it’s true that all leads do not become customers, it is entirely possible to improve the chances of this happening by using Marketing Automation tools.
Through your lead generation efforts, there will be a certain percentage of your audience that is simply not in a position to become customers (yet) and trying to force them into speaking to your sales team can put them off.
For situations like these, Marketing Automation platforms like Marketo can provide you with features such as Lead Scoring and a variety of Nurture Campaigns that allow your Sales team to know exactly which prospects are ready to be contacted, and which may still take some time to be ready.
Nurture Campaigns are email campaigns that can keep prospects ‘warm’ by providing light touches through emails that are meant to keep your prospects informed until they are ready for the next steps. Nurtures can even monitor for actions such as ‘email opens’ or ‘links clicked’ to automatically determine which piece of content is most relevant to send next, based on the rules defined. You can read more about Marketo Nurture Campaigns here.
With lead scoring, it’s possible to assign a ‘score’ to a lead, both positive or negative, based on certain actions prospects take such as opening an email, clicking a link, unfollowing a page, or unsubscribing to a list. Read more about Lead Scoring with Marketo here.
Using a combination of both Lead Nurturing and Lead Scoring, you can keep your prospect’s warm until they are ready to make a purchase without putting them off by making contact when they aren’t ready to talk.
6. Utilize Automation Infrastructure for internal communications and projects
Similar to how Automation platforms can help your customers get the right communications at the right time, the same infrastructure can be leveraged to ensure that internal communications and events are receiving the kind of traction you are hoping for, and make the right adjustments in order to reach your objectives.
Automation platform can help keep your employees informed on all on-going activities, automatically keep track of changes in roles, newer employees, and maintain dynamic lists, just the same way it does for your clients. This allows you to leverage the power of automation to reach your internal communications, and take advantage of all the features designed to help you save time, be more efficient, and get the most value out of your outreach.
We have an article that provides more details into various ways we have helped our clients meet their internal communication objectives using the power of Marketing Automation. Read it here.
