So, does your business need marketing automation? Should you invest in a marketing automation platform – here is how to find out.

If you are a startup business:

Flexible pricing – Marketing automation software simple pricing models that can help with any growing and restrictive budget. A startup can grow effectively and use a low-cost model and increase as their budget grows.

Effective database management – marketing automation has a high focus on email marketing and helps startups in developing and growing the contact databases. By utilising analytics and reporting options, the effectiveness of a campaign can be improved by reporting data on email open rates, click-throughs and extra information like social shares, times and how many times opened. This data can then be used to segment leads, set up automated processes, send out further relevant and informative content and further nurture these contacts into warm leads.

Reduced costs for marketing teams – by using marketing automation software, to automate mass marketing services and automate time-consuming tasks, marketing departments can be streamlined.

If you are an SMB (Small to Medium Business)

SMB focused marketing solutions – Marketing automation software can be cost managed to produce effective automated marketing campaigns for small and medium businesses (SMBs).

Supports increasing website traffic of SMBs – Monitoring the effectiveness and ROI (return on investment) from any digital marketing campaign can be daunting. Finding out what is working – blogging, social media, email marketing and more can be time-consuming and then follow up on leads, and scoring these leads for effective outbound calls can be costly. With marketing automation, these tasks can be simple and less time consuming – helping costs.

Increased drip marketing, more conversions – Marketing automation software enables simple building of landing pages, effective and quality emails. The software enables detailed coordination of campaign data ensuring analytics of leads’ journeys through your marketing campaign. Features such as lead scoring, nurturing, automated response emails, help in spreading brand awareness and sales conversions.

Reduced Marketing Budgets  – Inbound marketing campaigns can be A/B tested. This improves campaigns by testing the conversion and open rates of emails. The click-throughs to landing pages by using the software’s built-in analytics.

If you are a large business

Manage multiple campaigns and websites – Powerful analytical data provided by automated software can prove where leads come from. Leads produced from email marketing, outbound marketing – content, blogs and social media. The data can show which posts work best, which landing pages have converted the most, which downloads are most read and which emails provide the best link openings

Manage large databases – By connecting with your CRM (Contact Relationship Management software) data can be streamlined. Cold or dead contacts can be eliminated from the email marketing process. The lists can be grown and reduced effectively with reduced time-consuming labour intensive hours. Lists can be purchased or obtained from forms for downloaded content and pdfs.

Customer segmentation – Does your business provides different services, possibly to different countries?  Segmentation can be set up to ensure that relevant content and language types can be sent to the relevant contacts. So, a person in France will only be sent information in French and relevant for their country.

Lead Sourcing – by using marketing automation software, leads can be targeted to different departments, individual salespeople and monitoring for results and effectiveness.

Business working as one – quite often large businesses can be disjointed. But by combining and aligning marketing and sales, each can see the work of the other. The business can then be seen as one working unit.

 Can we help with inbound marketing?

These are just some of the benefits of marketing automation used in various sized businesses. If you are looking for a software for your inbound marketing campaigns, consider if you have a big enough team to manage it in-house, or need to outsource to a dedicated agency. Choosing the software provider will be down to your budget and personal choice.

If you require an honest and frank discussion on marketing automation and inbound marketing, drop Stuart a call on 01903 791660. We are an inbound marketing agency based in the South of England.