Picking the Right Marketing Automation Software for Your Organization: Part 2

Marketing automation software (like HubSpot) can help you attract new prospects and engage people in a relevant manner until they are ready to buy via channels like e-mail, social, mobile and web.

A marketing automation tool should deliver on the following:

Goal 1: Increase Inbound Traffic to Your Website.

Top of the funnel. The big question many of us ask at this stage is: How can I generate demand in a scalable way (that uses your budget efficiently) and creates leads that convert? Your website is one of the first areas you want to spend time on and make sure it is optimized for lead generation – starting with SEO. Search engine optimization is really just making sure you are found. It is a methodology of strategies, techniques, and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to your website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) – including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines.

But, keeping tabs on your website's search rankings and social media effectiveness is a full-time job. There are a few ways marketing automation can help you do this more efficiently. The SEO capabilities are helpful for suggesting new keywords you may not have considered. You can also get recommendations for web and landing page optimizations. Lastly, you can identify inbound link opportunities. If you need more tips, we also have a great free resource on our website in our resources centre.

Goal 2: Personalize the Experience for Known and Anonymous Visitors.

Another aspect of driving top of the funnel success is marketing to the anonymous visitors that come to your website.

  • You have 0-8 seconds to persuade your audience with your headline and landing page – so you want to be as personal and relevant as possible.
  • With real-time personalization, you can segment your anonymous visitors through information gathered by looking up their IP address.
  • Based on this you can determine their geographic location and company information such as their industry, company size, and company name.
  • You can also gather behavioral data such as their return frequency to your website, what pages they visit, if they are on a mobile device, and what browser they are using.

Goal 3: Add Contacts to Your CRM/Database “Automatically”

We are going to focus on a few key areas because of time, but we want to highlight the importance of engaging and nurturing prospects across multiple channels. Using solutions like marketing automation makes this more scalable, and you can really understand which combination of channels and key programs are most effective.

Now for most of us, email is a critical component of nurturing, and one thing you want to make sure of is that you are sending the right email to the right person at the right time. To do that we need to test.

By using HubSpot marketing automation – and specifically HubSpot, you can easily run tests to ensure you are sending the email that your audience will be the most interested in. Below we will show the impact a simple subject line test can make.

If you can achieve a 5% greater open rate and are sending to 100,000 people – that’s 5,000 more opened emails. So, if you are running 100 email campaigns over the year that results in 500,000 additional opened emails.

A large part of being engaged with your prospect or buyer is communicating with them on their terms – which means being relevant, and also listening. For example, you may love eating at taco bell every day – but that doesn’t mean you really want a personal relationship with them or want to get an email every day. You may just really want a coupon once per month. You can also listen for behaviors and other key information, and based on these inputs, send relevant information at the right time.

Goal 4: Help Close or Win Deals

Using marketing automation makes sales a lot easier and more scalable – here’s how:

  1. By prioritizing leads based on quality and urgency.
  2. Letting sales send leads back to marketing for further nurturing.
  3. By providing comprehensive lead activity history for sales.

Goal 5: Assist With Dashboard and Reporting

This is so that you can show a Full ROI to your CMO/VP of Sales and Marketing. Reports need to be demonstrating meaningful business numbers and showing the executive the full cycle and a proof that the system was able to scan a prospect from the begging till the end.

Goal 6: Integrate With Your Existing IT/Marketing Tools

This can be a customer service software tool, chat tools, CRM tools (if it does not already come with one built-in) video streaming tools, webinar tools and survey tools. You need to check the echo system for any marketing automation software to make sure that they have easy API that can integrate with your existing Assets.

Goal 7: Have a CMS Component (Not a Must)

Not all Marketing automation platforms have a full CMS, but for example, HubSpot has a full CMS platform, and they also have a full hosting capability with redundancy and load balancing features. They also have the SSL certificate enabled on any website they host. Again, this is not a must when you are choosing marketing automation software, but you at least need to weigh it as a key strategy feature, especially now that Google is rating secured websites (HTTPS) better than traditional websites.

Related: 5 Ways to Improve the Relationship Between Sales and Marketing and Inbound Marketing Is Changing and So Are The Tactics

In Summary

The Correct Marketing automation software should be able to do the following:

  1. Grow the top of your funnel and increase conversion through personalization.
  2. Engage potential buyers by listening to their behaviors – and responding with multi-channel relevant – conversations.
  3. Test and scale your programs – don’t kill your team!
  4. Deliver the purchase-ready leads to sales through nurturing and scoring.
  5. Measure channels and programs – so you know what works and can correct course in real-time.