Is marketing automation a good investment?

Creating the partnership

To build a successful digital marketing toolbox, there needs to first be a genuine partnership between the strategic, the tactical and the technical business functions. By working collaboratively, they can plan, design, implement and use the powerful systems needed for marketing to support the business.

Marketing automation

The biggest piece of technology used by marketers – aside from the CRM system – is the marketing automation system. This generally uses email as the main communication method, although most modern marketing automation tools now integrate web and social media channels.

The key reasons you need marketing automation

Regardless of your industry, there are a number of major benefits to working with the marketing automation systems. Including:

• Better customer management

  • A good marketing platform gives you the ability to measure user behaviour and responses, helping you to understand what your customers are truly interested in. This knowledge enables you to shape your products and services to target your audience better.

• Nurture leads until they are ready to buy

  • The majority of the people visiting your website or downloading your content are just finding out more about your offerings and are not yet ready to buy anything. However, with the help of marketing automation system you are able to nurture those leads with tailored messages over time, to keep them engaged with suitable content.

• Integration of various channels and platforms

  • The modern marketing team uses a wide range of digital systems for speaking to different audiences and managing various types of data across websites, social media, etc etc. This can cause issues when more and more systems are being used, the complexity can become too much.

• Helps marketing track attribution

  • One major challenge for marketers is tracking their return on investment – and getting credit for the leads generated using marketing budgets. With the help of software that allows leads to be tracked across multiple channels over time, the attribution can become easier, and marketing can get more transparent reporting on their results.

Web Alliance provides dedicated Marketing Automation Consultant for a project to smoothly condust any analysis required for marketing automation strategy for development of custom software for your organisation. 

Custom made or shelf CRM?

When it comes to choosing the right system for marketing, there is often a temptation to go directly to a ready-made packaged product. While this can be more than sufficient and much less time restrictive, there are many benefits for choosing to go custom made.

• Paying for functionality you don’t need

  • One of the biggest issues with off the shelf solutions is that they are designed for the average user. This means you will inevitably be paying for features you don’t need, or on the flipside, not have access to features that you do need that are specific to your business. The price will still be the same.

• Avoid being locked into long-term subscriptions

  • Most marketing automation systems on the market are available on a subscription basis. While this does give the business a predictable monthly or annual cost, it also means that you continue paying – as long as you use the software. Owning software, not only means you won’t have to pay monthly and additionally you own the software as an asset.

• Adapt the software to your process, not the other way around.

  • Your business is unique – and you have processes that may not look the same as those in another business. Rather than changing the way you operate it may be worthwhile designing your own marketing systems that are completely tailored to your organisation.

We all want good, dependable marketing efforts that show tangible results. The better tools your IT team can give your marketing teams, the better the performace would be.