A lot of people mistakenly think that marketing automation software is just for for email marketing. While it clearly had its birth there, what we’re talking about is a far more sophisticated application.
According to Wikipedia, Marketing automation refers to software platforms designed for marketing departments and organizations to automate repetitive tasks. Marketing departments, consultants and part-time marketing employees benefit by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes that are then interpreted, stored and executed by software, which increases efficiency and reduces human error. Originally focused on email marketing automation, marketing automation refers to a broad range of automation and analytic tools for marketing.
So how does this benefit your small business?
When it became clear that some 93% of B2B buyers are using the search engines to begin their buying process, it was incumbent upon businesses to discover a way to streamline the inbound marketing process, as well as make it far easier and much less time consuming to manage. Marketing automation software is the tool that makes this happen, allowing marketers to more easily manage all aspects of your lead generation process. Software such as this will get traffic to your site, it will start them on the buying process with offers and relevant emails and additional content. It will also segment your leads by source, interests and any other considerations.
How this works is that the systems have a complex series of rules to trigger action items, whether that is a particular offer, more content, email follow-up or some other action. This enables marketers to deliver just what the visitor is looking for at any given time. Deciding if your small business can be helped by marketing automation software is a question of resources and commitment. Once the decision has been made, a commitment to keeping the content funnel filled, in addition to managing the automation workflow is necessary.
If your company is fighting to keep up with all that you have to do, or if you are looking to bring your business to the next level, then you might need to take a hard look at marketing automation software.