There’s been a lot of work going on behind the scenes the last few months with our new marketing automation platform and we’re proud to be the first silver-certified Sharpspring provider in Brighton. So what does marketing automation actually mean and how can it help your business?
We think ‘Marketing Automation’ is a slight misnomer but this is what the industry calls it. As a marketing tool, it allows you to filter information which triggers a workflow. On an industry level, Marketing Automation refers to software platforms which pull together a wide range of marketing tools (of which automation is one). The reason why companies use marketing automation platforms is to efficiently convert leads into sales.
So what are these tools and why are they so clever? The first tool is tracking. Understanding who your customers are and when they engage with your digital channels is absolutely vital for a number of reasons. Knowing which traffic is driving the leads to your site and when they first visited (known as first click attribution) gives you clear campaign ROI from your marketing spend. This helps you optimise your marketing activity and drive down your cost per acquisition. Behaviour tracking gives you information about how customers engage with your business channels over time. It helps you to target ‘hot’ customers but actually, it also helps you nurture and convert colder leads over time.
The second tool is the CRM (customer relationship management). Quite often businesses will manage their contacts separately to their site. If your CRM is hosted within a marketing automation platform, you can automatically update all the data you receive. This dynamically updates your email lists which you can then trigger workflows and automate your communications. This could be data coming from forms, email engagement with your sales teams, page visits and so on. Dynamic segmentation of your data not only saves a lot of time internally, but also helps you to automate sending relevant information at the time people are interested.
Marketing Automation differs from standard sales management tools often within a CRM because all the standard sales tools like pipeline management, opportunity forecasting are included but sit alongside all the marketing activity in a cohesive way. One of the clever ways this happens is leadscoring; giving leads a score when they take a specific action such as visit a pricing page or fill out a form and creating actions as a result. It could be to trigger a sales notifications or to send a follow up email, but this information is vital in giving your sales team the right leads to target. All the information is held at a contact level and includes the life of the lead showing the entire engagement history with your business.
To see how working with Bright Dials and our marketing automation platform can help your business, please register for a no-obligation briefing call
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