It’s been said that the easiest way to gain a new customer is to keep an existing one. Put numerically, experts will tell you that it costs five to seven times more to land a new account than it does to retain one you already have. This isn’t to say that you should abandon your prospecting and focus exclusively on making your existing customers happy—you’ve got to keep bringing in new business to succeed.
As a certified HubSpot Agency Partner, we know the many benefits that implementing a marketing automation system can deliver because we’ve helped businesses of all sizes and in a variety of industries achieve them. From significant time savings and more effective marketing spend, to more productive sales/marketing collaboration and detailed campaign performance tracking, marketing automation tools like HubSpot give companies an immediate and tangible leg up in their market.
Seth Godin is an author, an entrepreneur, and a marketing guru. He was also one of the first people to promote the idea of “permission marketing,” the core concept of content marketing. Seth’s a prolific blogger, with posts that sometimes go into great detail about a marketing concept or business philosophy.
Marketing automation tools, as their name implies, simplify and streamline content marketing processes. However, because tools like HubSpot handle their assigned tasks so reliably and so well, enabling you to turn your attention to other things, it’s easy to fall into some bad marketing habits. As a content marketing agency, we try to ensure our clients are aware of, and avoid, these pitfalls.
Whether it lives on your website as part of your content marketing program or is taken by sales reps to initial meetings with prospects, or both, a solid sales presentation deck can be a powerful tool. But, too often, these items are neglected until the last minute and then hastily pieced together with a variety of mismatching resources. And of course, as they say, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
The marketing automation system you implement can have a pronounced impact on everything from lead generation to website conversion rate. Needless to say, this is an important decision. However, it doesn’t have to be a difficult one. As you evaluate your options, you just need to keep some key considerations in mind. Then, the right solution for you will reveal itself pretty readily.
Marketing automation is an awesome way to get things done without wasting a lot of time on small tasks. Any business consistently utilizing marketing automation is setting themselves up to achieve much more in a shorter span of time, including ad campaigns, email sends, prospect tracking, and of course, social media.
But wait a minute—isn’t the goal of social media to be personal? To tell people your story and allow them to take a closer, more personalized look into your business and the way it fits into the world?
Well, yeah… it is. There are so many social media automation tools, and they all do much the same thing, but should you even be using them? Good question.
John walks out of the restaurant after having lunch with three of his friends. They’re all marketing managers or directors at companies nearby. He pauses before hopping into his car to head back to the office, thinking about their conversation. It covered a wide range of topics, but it’s funny how often the term “marketing automation” made it into the discussion.
While automation of any kind typically delivers a wealth of benefits including increased efficiency, greater consistency, and higher quality to name just a few, when paired with marketing, as in “marketing automation,” the term gives some people pause. Marketing is considered by many to be an “art,” as there are nuances to the practice that can only be mastered with much time and effort. Consequently, there can be some reluctance to introducing the science of automation to the process.
Customer-centric, prospect-centric, persona-centric… All terms that, when applied to “marketing”, refer to an approach in which you are very tightly focused on a prospect’s wants and needs—both what those needs are, and how you can meet them. Now, marketers are all quick to say, “Of course we are customer-centric! All we think about is what our customers and prospects are looking for.” But that emotional (and often, defensive) reaction and the objective truth are sometimes quite far apart.
The year is 2005. Mike, a marketing manager, is sitting at a conference table with some of his coworkers listening to a marketing agency talk about the recent website overhaul that has been completed for his company. When the conversation turns to maintaining the website, the agency rep looks to Mike about whether the company will want to implement a content management system (CMS) to help the marketing team keep the web pages updated—at a rather significant cost. Mike shoots a quick glance to Sara, his boss, and she gives a subtle shake of the head. “No thanks, we’ve got it,” he says.
HubSpot’s latest research, as published in their State of Inbound 2015 report, shows that top marketers use marketing automation software in some form or another. The results from almost 4,000 respondents, the majority of which were marketers who work for B2B small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), revealed that the “main tool in top marketers’ arsenals is a platform for automating their team’s marketing efforts.”
Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, December 17, 1903. The Wright brothers produce what is officially described (thank you, Wikipedia) as “the first sustained, controlled, powered, heavier-than-air manned flight.” Little did they know that a first “flight” (almost a hop, really) of 120 feet lasting 12 seconds would, in a very short time, completely redefine the transportation industry.
A total stranger casually entered our shop the other day, and without saying a word, poked around and looked at everything. You’d have thought he owned the place. In spite of several “Can we help you?” offers, the stranger just kept looking around, ignoring our requests for him to identify himself or give indication of his reasons for being there. Eventually, he just left, never saying so much as a “thank you.”
Those that have worked with me for any time at all are excruciatingly aware of my passion for analytics. Unfortunately, my pursuit of actionable information has often been stymied by a seemingly infinite amount of gobbledygook. When Google Analytics came along, I was delighted to see that it had replaced the aforementioned gobbledygook with a more palatable presentation of website activity. Honestly though, while I am still a regular user, I find that I’m starting to feel about Google Analytics the same way I used to feel about its predecessors, i.e. information overload and a desire to just know what I need to know to drive meaningful action.
While some folks may be completely unfamiliar with the term marketing automation, many others equate the phrase with “smarter” spam and/or impersonal email interactions. But marketing automation has matured greatly in just the last few years to something much more than just “drip” email campaigns. Marketing automation tools today are extremely powerful. Following are just a few of the capabilities you can experience with these amazing tools:
