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.
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.
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.
