What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is the hottest phrase in marketing.
In a nutshell, it is a process of leveraging digital technology to facilitate online discovery of a product or service, acquire a qualified sales lead, and nurture that lead closer and closer to a buying decision — with little or no human intervention until the optimum moment of contact and/or close.
Marketing Automation is also synonymous with a wide variety of software programs that marketers use to facilitate this inbound marketing process.
But software by itself is not worth a hill of beans without a solid strategy designed specifically for your particular business and prospective customer.
So let’s go back to the start…
If you or someone in your organization has identified the need for marketing automation, then there is likely an understanding that two things have changed for the business.
1. The traditional methods of sales are not working. It’s getting harder to sell!
2. Most prospects would rather cut off their ear than listener to a sales pitch.
Consumers want to discover your product either through search or through a social recommendation. In fact, 82% of B2B buyers start with an internet search.
Your team, perhaps with guidance from your digital marketing agency, will help you determine the strategy and marketing automation tools required to design and execute an entire program, to attract visitors to your business, pre-qualify leads and nurture them with specifically crafted content and offers to lead them through the various stages of your deal funnel.
Only at this stage is it a wise to employ a marketing automation software program to carry out the program devised above. If you pour money into a SAAS (software-as-a-solution) without a plan, you will be wasting your precious marketing dollars. Arguably the true value is in the plan, not the software. In fact, the best digital marketing agencies will provide a robust agency-grade marketing automation software program at little or no cost when you work with them to create, measure, and refine a plan to reach specific goals.
The agency will also train your marketers to properly drive the system on an ongoing basis. Of critical importance is the need to assess performance of every campaign every 30 days. Your agency will be able to crunch the data, make adjustments based on the results, and help you make better business decisions as a result.
Most importantly, you will be generating more, highly qualified leads, meaning that the sales department will spend more precious time closing than warming up cold prospects. Companies that use inbound marketing automation campaigns routinely close 15-30% more business with a properly coordinated strategy and execution.
Momentum Marketing offers comprehensive Inbound Marketing strategy and service coupled with our powerful agency-grade Momentum Marketing Automation software – all for less than a monthly subscription alone for other leading SAAS solutions.
Invest your precious marketing into inbound marketing strategy and training that will drive your business and your team forward. (And get the software for free.)
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