How to increase your sales using marketing automation tools

We often wonder how some organisations successfully manage their marketing tasks across multiple platforms. Keeping a close watch on your marketing endeavour becomes essential with the rise in marketing channels and media. The monotonous marketing work, which involves manual processes, makes technology in the form of automation is a necessity today. 

 

Automation tools have aided businesses to grow in leaps and bounds. We have seen that marketing automation has taken over the digital world by storm in the past few years. Marketers focus heavily on lead generation, thereby transforming it to sales-readiness. According to recent studies, marketing automation users witnessed a 14.5% increase in the overall sales results and productivity and a 12.2% decrease in marketing overhead. Sales and marketing teams spend a tremendous amount of time on time-consuming paperwork, repetitive tasks and tedious activities like data entry. The time wasted on such activities can impact the overall conversions. One certainly could be missing many opportunities. With marketing automation technology and the right tools, you can easily automate your marketing strategy, thereby maximising your goals.

 

With the right automation tools, companies experience:

• Improved efficiency of the sales funnel and productivity

• Qualified lead generation 

• Converting better leads into potential customers 

• Improved cross-selling and up-selling strategies 

• Fewer bottlenecks in your sales pipeline

 

What is marketing automation? 

Back in the day, marketing automation was mostly for large organisations. In recent times, businesses are growing by automating all marketing processes, measuring customer engagement and offering personalised experiences to the right customers at the right time. Marketing automation reduces human efforts and ensures tasks are made accessible to a large extent. The term 'workflow.' involves a procedure followed to complete a particular task such as sourcing leads, email campaigns, social media posting. Can we automate these tasks to make employees more productive in accomplishing the goals to help grow your business? 

 

There are essentially three steps to help you create a successful marketing automation strategy to shape your business the way you want it to be. 

 

Step one: Your customer's journey, which comprises what the customer wants. 

The products cater to the customer or the buyers choice. Knowing your customer by collecting information about them and understanding their behaviour is crucial. Marketing automation identifies your customer touchpoints so that you ultimately satisfy them. An excellent place to start is to create a customer journey map. From the time the customer enters the website until the product is purchased. The automated touchpoints help understand the customers' goals. To arrive at this, one must 

1. Identify the types of customers by looking at their profiles. 

2. Research your prospects goals 

3. Learn about customer or prospects touchpoints 

4. Keep a close track of the touchpoints.  

Automation optimises a buyer's journey. With the relevant data in hand, you can understand your buyer well. Marketing automation solutions help businesses streamline marketing activities by discovering the best automation tools, resulting in overall quality leads and sales. 

 

Step Two: Set SMART Goals

The intelligent step to a winning marketing strategy is to plan your business's real-time SMART objectives. Setting your goals and metrics for marketing automation campaigns should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, how much time does a lead take to convert? How many emails do we need to send out before a visitor can view the website? 

Understanding these critical metrics and touchpoints will help you reach the ultimate goal. For example, a crucial business strategy called lead scoring is to analyse the prospects' potential value and interest in a product or service. Companies then assign categories for the leads, for instance, hot, warm or cold leads. 

 

Engagement, performance and ROI metrics are the three kinds of metrics that operate in a marketing automation strategy. Engagement metrics provide insight into how the prospects are engaging with the content. Performance metrics indicate whether the prospects are taking the next positive step or holding back, and finally, ROI metrics justify your marketing automation investment. 

 

Step Three: Hurdles with your marketing automation efforts 

When you realise that your marketing automation strategy does not produce the desired results, you must inspect a few significant factors. 

 

If your data is faulty and you are not targeting the right audience, you will notice that your audience is less engaged, leading to fewer conversions. 

The misalignment in sales and marketing can lead to less conversion. The 'we' power between sales and marketing is crucial to nurture leads.

Your website content should resonate with the audience. The content should be valuable to your readers and meet their needs. Identifying your automation goals can be challenging. The most important is planning, designing, and developing a unique automation strategy aligned with your business goals. Once you identify the right approach, you can implement the techniques or tools to achieve your automation goal. 

Find the Marketing Automation tools for your company.

There are so many tools to choose from in today's technology world. It creates decision paralysis for many startup companies. Here are some questions to ask yourself before choosing a marketing-automation tool for your companies:

• Should be implemented current strategies and attain future goals?

• Know your opportunity pain points, and at what point do your prospects drop off in your sales efforts?

• How can you best complement your inbound plans with marketing automation tools? If you have a plan to automate your actions like Email Sending Out

• If you have a CRM already? That CRM has automated capabilities? Automate tasks through workflows. Many popular CRMs, like Hubspot, LeadSquared, Zoho and Salesforce do.

• Do your sales and marketing team understand the platform? How much support do they need from the marketing automation platform?

Do you have answers to the above questions? Then choosing the right marketing automation platform for your team.

Now that you know how marketing automation tools can help increase your company's brand value, productivity and revenue, get the right strategy started by identifying your right goals for automation. 

So! If you want to set your automation goals, put them in RIGHT NOW.