Overwhelmed by marketing automation choices? You’re not alone. With so many options available to today’s marketers, it’s tough to know which technology is the best choice for your company.
When it comes to determining which platform is best, there’s simply no one-size-fits-all option. The features and capabilities that may delight one marketing team could overwhelm another. Much like how your team has unique functions, responsibilities, and operational needs, marketing automation technologies offer a range of capabilities to accommodate a plethora of demands.
That’s why choosing the right one is imperative—but also intimidating.
Where do you begin? At OBO, we take great pride in making sure our clients integrate technologies that are right for their specific needs. We’re after a Cinderella fit: to get there, we ask lots and lots of questions during our intensive consulting process.
What kinds of questions do you need to ask to identify the perfect marketing automation software for your business?
Before we dive in, let’s take a look at the definition of marketing automation and explore what it does best. After that, we’ll be in great shape to start asking the tough questions that guide our clients toward the best technology for their businesses.
What Is Marketing Automation?
If you think that marketing automation is just a buzzword for email marketing, think again. Today’s software is all-encompassing, allowing users to level up their marketing efforts across multiple channels of communication through convenient tools, workflow automations, and reporting capabilities.
In short, marketing automation refers to software solutions that allow you to automate manual, repetitive marketing and sales processes to build better relationships with customers.
The right platform can help marketers attract prospects, convert leads, and acquire customers by building and managing data-driven campaigns.
Great marketing automation software both automates and integrates with each digital presence that a company has, including their website, social media, lead conversion tools, and customer tracking tools. Integrations allow users to collect precise data that can be analyzed to help grow various marketing channels and guide future campaigns for optimized ROI.
The Benefits of Marketing Automation
In the war for talent and time, marketing automations are a business’s best friend. Manual tasks that monopolize your teams’ attention can be delegated to workflows. Formulas can automatically notify, assign, and move tasks within your CRM. There is no shortage of ways that automations can kickstart your everyday operations.
Marketing automation can provide a breadth of benefits to its users—it all depends on how it’s used. Here are just a few of the advantages you’ll gain by using marketing automation software.
A boost in productivity: Marketing automation tools help streamline your marketing team’s efforts, allowing them to work more effectively. With a well-implemented and integrated marketing automation tool, your team will no longer have to suffer through the repetitive and time-consuming processes of manual list building, email templating, and more.
An increase in qualified leads: Because you can easily manage your website, create conversion paths, and quickly analyze performance, there will be a natural increase in the number of qualified leads you receive. While these tools don’t create leads like a genie, they do have the data components necessary to help marketing teams better distinguish qualified leads.
In-depth tracking tools within many marketing automation platforms will allow marketing teams to better understand how leads interact with their organization’s website, content, and communication. This information can provide great insight into lead behavior and give a wider frame shot than just open and click-through rates.
Aligning sales and marketing teams: Miscommunication between marketing and sales teams can cause costly leaks in an organization’s funnel. Marketing automation tools can help patch those leaks by keeping sales in the loop with new leads, lead scoring to better communicate qualified leads, and reporting features that highlight your growth with real numbers.
Reporting capabilities: Everyone wants to see big returns on their marketing investment, especially C-level executives. The beauty of many marketing automation tools is that they provide built-in reporting that can track the return on each marketing effort, helping you to prove whether certain work is in fact driving revenue for your organization. From tracking first touches to deal closes, these tools can pinpoint your marketing ROI.
Finding Your Dream Marketing Automation Software
Ready to harvest the benefits of marketing automation? Not just any technology will do—it’s critical that you select the one that’s best for your business based on your pre-existing needs and structure.
When we conduct assessments for our clients, we investigate every little detail that could inform our decision. After all, there are more than 5000 marketing technology tools on the market today. We’re looking for that needle in the haystack.
If you work with OBO, we’ll ask you some of the following questions to help guide your decision:
What’s your business process like? This can include the customer journey, what qualifies a lead, prospecting pipelines, and the complexity of your digital marketing campaigns. Understanding what your process looks like helps us determine how sophisticated your marketing automation technology should be.
Do you need to integrate data from other systems? Our motto at OBO is that everything can be integrated—it’s just a matter of how. Identifying which pre-existing technologies are integral to your operations will help narrow down your marketing automation options.
How do your sales and marketing teams communicate? We hear it all the time: sales and marketing departments often suffer misalignment. As a consequence, important data can get lost in translation or forgotten about entirely. Understanding the codependence of your departments can inform the best technology choice for them.
Who needs security permissions? With your sales and marketing data living in the same place, it’s important to distinguish who can access what. Is the sales department allowed to access marketing files? Can the marketing team view sales leads? Implementing multiple layers of security is an important component of your marketing automation platform.
We’re only scratching the surface with these examples—a full-fledged assessment takes a much deeper dive.
Ready for Your Assessment?
Not sure how to select the right marketing automation technology? We’ll do the work for you. Our team of experts can conduct assessments, implement marketing automation platforms, integrate your existing technology stack, and more—just say the word, and OBO is there.
