Top Tip: Using Marketing Automation Tools

Many business owners and marketers use marketing automation tools for their lead generation and conversion needs. Dozens of tools currently exist to help businesses generate leads, nurture leads, close leads – and a variety of marketing activities in between. The companies that use these tools report benefits such as increased leads and improved closing rates. Sounds good, right?

For the most part, using marketing automation tools makes sense, especially for those businesses with limited time and resources. These tools can make a business owner or marketer’s job easier and more efficient. For example, some businesses use them to tackle their more “mundane” aspects of lead generation and/or conversion, such as creating and sending emails. As a result, the business’ owners and/or marketers have more time to engage in more hands-on lead generation and lead nurturing activities, as well as handle any issues which may arise among their existing clients.

By design, marketing automation tools allow companies to provide added value to their potential and current clients when they are properly used. It’s important to make sure your company has a need for automation before investing in it. These are a couple of questions to think about:

How and why would my business use marketing automation tools?

Automation tools are most often used for the following activities:

• Building targeted leads lists


• Organizing, executing and managing marketing campaigns


• Measuring behavior (through metrics and other data) from emails and/or websites


• Segmenting leads

Is your business thinking about using marketing automation, but wondering how and why? Simon Harvey, Owner and Demand Generation specialist @Demodia, shares some helpful insights and advice in Quora:

i) ensure you understand your sales and marketing process and how you plan to use your MAP {marketing automation platform} to support that.

ii) know who your buyers are.

iii) as others have said one of the most beneficial parts of MAPs is their lead nurturing capability. Unfortunately here technology is not everything and you need to ensure that you have sufficient content in place that you can use to target potential buyers at their different stages of the buying process.

iv) if you followed step i) then you will already understand who your buyers are. Use that information along with the built in segmentation tools within your MAP to split contacts into different groups based on their interests, personas or other buying traits then use that to target emails and nurture them in different ways.

* Read Quote of Simon Harvey’s answer to How do you make the best use of marketing automation tools? on Quora

How do marketing automation tools work?

HubSpot provides an explanation for how using automation tools work in an “ideal” situation:

‘At its best, marketing automation is software and tactics that allow companies to buy and sell like Amazon — that is, to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted customers.’

A word of advice: business owners and marketers who use marketing automation tools should make sure they aren’t relying solely on the tools to do all the work. Building relationships with potential and current clients still stands as one of the most important parts of marketing. No single tool will ever replace the essential “human touch.”

Over to you

Does your business use any automation tools? If so, have they improved your business’ efficiency or provided value? I would love to hear what works for you…please feel free to leave a comment below.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1gZ9tlN