Marketing automation is an integral and critical part of Inbound Marketing.

If you do not already know it, Inbound Marketing is an amazing strategy that can propel your business to the next level.  Any company which wants to grow exponentially using the power of the Internet should seriously look at Inbound Marketing as the most important digital marketing strategy that they can adopt.

In case you have missed my previous post About how every company can cleverly grow their business using Inbound Marketing, then I suggest you read it first to get a heads up regarding the inbound methodology.

Here we will discuss how automating the various parts of the overall marketing process is necessary and how to implement marketing automation.

Why Is Marketing Automation needed?

The Inbound Marketing methodology has come a long way since its inception around a decade back. Today, it is reliable, mature and has gained widespread popularity among the early adopters who tend to swear by the benefits that it has provided them.

A critical step in Inbound Marketing is the implementation of a Marketing Automation system.

Doing Inbound Marketing manually is virtually impossible, especially if your business is large, and it attracts loads of visitors to its website or social media pages. It can become a seriously overwhelming task to track user behavior and handle the tons of data that would be generated.

At the very core of Inbound Marketing lies the ability to personalize user experiences. To do this effectively, tracking how the users interact with the website is crucial.

But it is impossible for any human being to track every visitor and repeat visitor of a website, analyze their social media activities, send out timely emails, and also guide them through the marketing funnel manually.

This is precisely the reason marketing automation is required. Once you have implemented it, instead of doing all the tasks manually, you will let specialized Marketing software handle them.  This will enable you to leave the complex and many routine tasks of Inbound Marketing to the automation software and use your time to focus on the strategic and creative aspects of marketing.

How to implement marketing automation?

There are many Marketing Automation software available in the market. Most of these are quite advanced and capable of doing the job impeccably. Some of these are  HubSpot, Marketo, Act-On, Pardot, Leadsquared, etc.

You can look at the product features and even try out a few demos before selecting the best one for your business. Thereafter, with the help of the software company and the digital marketing company that is providing you with the inbound marketing service, get the software implemented in your organization.

What exactly does marketing automation do?

To put it in a nutshell, the following are the core things that marketing automation will do for you:

  1. Capture a 360° view about the behavior, interests, demographics, taste, and preferences of the customers and segment the customers appropriately. This will allow you to create campaigns targeted towards specific segments of customers.
  2. Personalize the experience of the visitors by dynamically   adapting the content of the website to show them personalized and relevant information.
  3. Provide and uniform experience to the user by integrating all the platforms that the company uses for marketing. So, whether the user visits the company website, receives an email, sees an ad, or visits the company’s social media pages, he will see the same type of personalized communication. This proves to be a clever idea when it comes to boosting your sales conversions
  4. Sends out automated personalized emails to provide useful and timely information and marketing inputs to prospective customers and email list subscribers.  This can be actively used to assist the users in making their buying decision in favor of your business.
  5. Track the conversion path of every single customer, and automatically align the marketing efforts accordingly.
  6. Provides useful insights about how you can further improvise and strengthen your marketing campaigns to boost your conversion rates. It captures and displays relevant data that becomes invaluable in creating the marketing campaigns and helps in taking strategic decisions.
  7. Both the marketing and sales teams can use the Marketing Automation software. This can ensure, to a considerable extent, that both the teams work in tandem and the chances of leads getting lost are minimized.

Conclusion

If you plan to get the full juice out of Inbound Marketing, you cannot ignore marketing automation. However, just as in the case of Inbound Marketing, for marketing automation you would also need to consult an Inbound Marketing agency to implement marketing automation in the right way.

Feel free to contact us If you need any information about how marketing automation can be useful for your business. We would love to hear from you.