The Top 7 Reasons Why Your Business Might Need Marketing Automation

Are you unsure whether you need marketing automation software for your business? It can be a tough decision to make, so we’ve removed the guesswork for you by narrowing it down to seven key questions. If your business or marketing department faces any of these pain points or challenges, introducing marketing automation might be the solution.

1. Do you wish you had more foolproof ways to make your marketing decisions?

The most critical pain point we often face is how we can best make marketing decisions. Do we base our decisions on what has been tried and tested? On best practice principles? On what is working for our competitors? While there is merit to each of these approaches, they might not be ideal for your business.

The ideal way to make marketing decisions is working from a data-driven approach. Marketing automation software helps mine the data for you in order to refine your customer analysis, channel optimisation and spend. Clearly defined metrics enable you to use marketing automation software to unequivocally demonstrate the ROI of your marketing efforts.

Do you ever battle with working your way through all the analytics produced by your campaigns in order to generate valuable insights and clearly show ROI? Marketing automation software like SharpSpring can dissect metrics in any way you require to produce customised reports for your clients, customers or team.

Marketing automation software assists making data-driven decisions.

2. Do you need to turn subscribers or followers into customers?

You might have numerous followers on social media and tons of subscribers to your newsletter, but somehow this is not translating into sales. Marketing automation software is geared toward understanding your users’ behaviour in order to turn them into customers.

As discussed, one of the biggest advantages of marketing automation is that it can collect vast amounts of data. According to Forbes, companies who adopt a data-driven approach are six times more likely to be profitable year-on-year, and 23 times more likely to acquire customers.

Marketing automation software tracks user behaviour, scoring your leads automatically to help you understand where they are in the sales funnel. On top of this, the software measures the engagement of your leads across your channel palette to provide a 360-degree view of your customers and potential customers.

3. Do you wish you could use advanced segmentation to personalise your messaging to customers?

Once we have a birds-eye-view of our where our leads are in the sales funnel, we need to deliver them personalised messaging that takes this into account. Marketing automation not only provides this vantage point but is also able to conduct A/B testing to determine the most effective messages to be sending leads, so that we can refine our marketing communications.

But it’s not just the what that matters in terms of messaging, it’s also the when as we know that the timing of communication to leads is vitally important. Marketing automation software removes the guesswork delivering messages when customers are most receptive.

4. Are you concerned that your customer data is old or inaccurate?

Over time your customers undergo lifestyle changes – like marriage or relocation - that renders the data you have on them obsolete. Finding ways to manually obtain and update your data can be tedious, especially when you consider that data is likely to become inaccurate after just two years.

Fortunately, marketing automation software can be implemented to constantly refresh your data by collating and updating customer data 24/7.

Marketing automation dissects your customer data to produce in-depth reports.

5. Would a closer connection between your sales and marketing teams be beneficial?

In an ideal world sales and marketing teams would dovetail their efforts seamlessly. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, and many leads and potential sales are lost due to human error, miscommunication or the disconnect between siloed departments.

Marketing automation bridges the gap by automatically pushing critical information from one department to the other. When a lead takes certain actions in relation to your marketing materials, like opening a newsletter for example, marketing automation software can trigger an alert to your sales team to follow up with the lead who has shown high intent.

6. Would it increase your efficiencies if certain tasks could be automated?

Save time and labour by automating your content delivery. When a lead fills out a specific form, for example, marketing automation software is triggered to ensure that the right communication reaches this potential customer at the perfect time. SharpSpring’s dynamic forms are built for exactly this purpose, significantly increasing conversion rates.

7. Do you use a host of tools that you’d like to integrate?

Marketing requires us to use numerous tools from CRM packages, to social media management tools and campaign tracking software. Bringing together our analytics from across these tools can be a cumbersome, messy process that makes generating valuable insights an overly time-consuming process.

Marketing automation software is able to integrate these tools, enabling you to efficiently glean insights. SharpSpring, for example, has its own built-in CRM software or it can integrate third-party products, allowing you the flexibility to keep working with your existing tools and get more out of them.

Still wondering if marketing automation is for you?

It’s likely that your business or marketing team is experiencing more than one of these pain points. You might be eager to implement marketing automation but are tentative to invest in the software. As one of the leading digital marketing agencies in Windhoek, Namibia, V5 Digital can help you determine whether marketing automation would benefit you and advise you on the best software solutions for your needs. To discover how you can harness the power of marketing automation, contact V5 Digital for a free assessment.

V5 Digital Launches Namibia’s First Enterprise-Grade Facebook Messenger Bot

Namibia’s second largest bank by assets set out to conduct a survey to glean valuable insights about their consumers, but wanted to ensure that participants would enjoy the experience. 

Chat Bot developed by V5 Digital

Leading Namibian Digital Marketing Agency V5 Digital came up with the innovative concept of using a Facebook Messenger Bot to craft a survey that is packed with a variety of fun ways for participants to chat and engage with the Bot. The experience feels personal and relevant, made enjoyable through the use of entertaining copy and friendly emojis. 

While the survey is predominantly multiple choice, it keeps participants engrossed by encouraging them to respond in multiple ways, including voice-noting, snapping a photo from their phone, and recording a short selfie video. This is valuable for Client as it enables in-the-moment research, made possible by the Messenger Bot being a channel of immediate feedback. 

The Smart Survey utilizes the capabilities of contributors’ phones, using GPS to speed up the process of submitting your location, for instance.

Graphs pop up to show participants how their responses feature relative to the overall results. Progress charts depict how far the participant is through the survey, motivating them to complete. 

Another feature in use is the use of jump and send logic as well as answer piping – ensuring survey participants are not bothered with questions that are not applicable to them.

Example of a MasterCard Chat Bot

Survey contributors stand to win one of five N$1000 prizes.

To earn additional competition entries, participants can simply connect with their Facebook profile, helping grow the Client’s social media community and keeping consumers up-to-date with the latest news from the bank. 

As one of the leading Digital Marketing Agencies in Windhoek, Namibia, V5 Digital can help you find the right innovative solution for your business needs.

Connect to Facebook Messenger and experience the fun and engaging Bot.

Why SEO is Essential for Your Digital Marketing Strategy

It is, without a doubt, impossible for businesses to stay relevant in the information age without an effective digital marketing strategy. Seeing as Namibians will soon enjoy nationwide Wi-Fi at affordable rates, your business’ potential online reach will be even greater if you have the right strategies in place.

Say you have just taken your business online. You may have invested in designing the most aesthetically pleasing, most user-friendly, UX considered website for your business, but has your digital marketing strategy considered this fact - if Google produces over 40,000 searches per second (some of them are bound to relate to what you offer), how can you make sure that users find your site among the billions of daily searches? It is, as the age old saying goes, like finding a needle in a haystack.

However, with a firm, ongoing SEO strategy, you can beat Google’s algorithm, to make sure your business gets displayed as a top search result. This is why SEO is essential for your business’ online survival.

An SEO digital marketing strategy leads to higher conversions.

SEO In a Nutshell SEO or search engine optimization, is a digital marketing tool used to order information for search engines like Google. Businesses should set up their websites and content according to SEO best practice principles if they would like to see their site ranked highly in search results, which ultimately leads to higher traffic and greater conversions.

Think of Google as a matchmaker between your business and a prospective client. Search engines, like Google, use keywords to understand what someone is looking for on the net. They use this information to display websites that will most likely contain content that answers the question, offers the product or resolves the issue that brought the user online.

If your business is considered by search engines to be an authority on a specific topic, they will rank your website higher in search results. If your website ranks higher in search results, people are more likely to click on them. In other words, search engines help prospective clients find your business! In light of the fact that more than 50% of web traffic comes from clicking on website through organic search results, with an SEO optimized website, you can really hike up conversions for your business.

Advantages of SEO The key to an effective SEO strategy is patience. You won’t necessarily see the results you are looking for overnight. Rather, SEO, as a digital marketing tool, builds on itself over time.

Increase traffic to your website. According to a study by Chitika, websites on the first search engine results page (SERP) get 90% of web traffic and the top three pages get 60%. Consumers want results quickly, meaning all of the time and money spent creating the perfect website doesn’t amount to much if people can’t find it on the first SERP.

More cost effective and more effective. The allure of PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising is that you can nearly guarantee your business a top position on the first SERP but the downside is the price that comes with paying for certain keywords. Studies have shown that for every 1 click on a paid search result, organic search results generate 8.5 clicks and this number increases the higher your page ranks in the SERP. These numbers reveal that focusing on an effective SEO strategy will, in the long run, increase the traffic to your site more so than PPC - without the added cost.

Improve the quality of your leads. As an inbound marketing strategy, SEO targets those who have particular intent, in other words, people who want to find you. 59% of marketers firmly believe that inbound marketing produces higher quality leads than traditional outbound marketing strategies like commercials, billboards, or cold calling. If you place more focus on catering your website to users who are looking for information relating to what your business offers, you are more likely to reach your target audience.

Beat out your competitors. It’s likely that your competitors already have an SEO strategy in place. If you really want to best them, you should implement your own SEO strategy to redirect traffic from their site to your own. Following the correct principles can even allow small businesses to outrank their competitors.

A more user-friendly website. As you make your website easier for search engines to navigate, you will also improve the user experience of your website. SEO is no longer just about optimizing for search engines, now you need improve the user experience too. SEO strategies involve rearranging your website’s structure to make it simpler for search engines to find information and pages on your website, this simultaneously makes the process simpler for users.

An effective digital marketing strategy involves SEO optimisation.

SEO in 2019 SEO is always changing but it is certain to remain an essential feature of any successful digital marketing strategy in 2019. 61% of marketers argue that improving businesses’ SEO and online presence is a top priority. Google does not reveal the precise nature of their algorithm, and it’s not likely that they ever will, which is why it’s important for companies to look into hiring SEO experts to keep their website in line with the latest algorithm updates.

V5 Digital is one of the leading digital marketing agencies in Windhoek, Namibia, we help businesses transform to the Power of Digital. If you would like to start benefiting from an effective SEO strategy, contact V5 Digital for a free assessment.