Ever since software-as-a-service (SaaS) entered the picture several years ago, huge leaps have been made in how businesses leverage technology. Not just from an IT perspective, but from an operational and strategic perspective as well.
With this trend came a surge of acronyms like CRM, CMS, ERP, and others that are now familiar terms in marketing, sales, and IT departments around the globe. Now, businesses looking to use marketing automation technology face a challenge that is less about finding a solution and more about evaluating the many options available.
In this article, we’ll focus on one segment of these SaaS solutions: marketing automation.
We’ll briefly cover what it is, how it fits into an organization’s process improvement and strategic execution initiatives, and some resources to help you learn more. Let’s get to it.
First, What is Marketing Automation?
In its simplest terms, marketing automation is software that allows organizations to become better at managing their online marketing. Wikipedia offers a more in-depth definition:
“…software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online and automate repetitive tasks.“
Some tools you’ll find within the leading marketing automation tools are:
Email Design and Publishing- Social Media Integration and Publishing
- Content Management System (for managing/editing web pages)
- Contact Database Management
- Metrics and Reporting Capabilities
- CRM Integration (SalesForce, SugarCRM, etc.)
- Automation (list segmentation, email scheduling, preset workflows, etc.)
Email Design and Publishing* Please note the word “managing” above. Marketing automation software will not magically take over all of your online marketing. Rather, it allows marketers and business owners to gain leverage through the use of its native features.
Example: Marketing Automation in Action
A manufacturer uses a marketing automation solution. They create their website with this tool, launch their blog, link their social media accounts, upload their contact database, and set up their metrics dashboards to track the success of their online marketing efforts. After this setup, they can produce content that draws visitors to their site, run automated campaigns that nurture new leads by sending preset emails and social media updates, and segment them based on qualification criteria (like budget, location, size, etc.). This ultimately helps them capture, nurture, and convert more online leads while also lightening the workload of their sales and marketing teams.
Marketing Automation’s Role in Process Improvement
The same features that streamline the management of sales and marketing innately offer the ability to streamline internal processes as well. While it won’t replace the need for any of your industry specific SaaS tools (like ERP or MRP), it can play a key role within your organization’s overall set of processes. More specifically, it has the capacity to assist in managing your HR team, your operations team or other internal departments as they relate to sales and marketing.
An Example of this Expanded Role of Marketing Automation in Action:
A manufacturer of plastic casings has implemented a marketing automation solution to help grow their business online. While they’ve been using the tool to attract, nurture and close more customers, they soon realized a need to streamline their fulfillment process alongside these new orders. So, within the same automation workflow they use to send customer facing content and notifications, they turn the focus inward towards their fulfillment team. Now, as each order is purchased and automated “thank you” or upsell messages are sent to the new customer, automated messages and notifications are also sent to specific members of the fulfillment team at set times – updating them as to the new customer’s contact info, purchase info, and anything else that might be pertinent to their job.
A Few Final Notes
For the sake of time, we’ve merely scratched the surface of marketing automation’s capabilities in this article. Still, you can begin to see how marketing automation can have an impact on not just sales and marketing processes, but overall business processes and execution as well. It’s a solution that yields dual benefits of improving efficiency/productivity while also working to increase your revenue.
As always, if you want to be sure you’re selecting the right solutions and implementing them properly among your other sets of tech tools; I highly recommended you contact 2 types of organizations, 1) a marketing automation agency/consultant and 2) your IT department or consultant. This will ensure your money isn’t wasted unnecessarily as these tools aren’t cheap. It’s definitely best to do things right the first time around.
Where You can Research Marketing Automation Solutions…
While you can always Google reviews for marketing automation, there are two websites that deliver the most objective reviews with the biggest sample sizes.
About the Marketing Automation Industry…
The marketing automation industry has experienced massive 50% growth over the last several years, evidenced by HubSpot’s IPO and the insurgence of new automation products. Yet, while adoption of these tools has been high for tech companies, the adoption by other industries currently sits around 3%.
Why is that?
For starters, it’s common for the tech industry to lead the way for new business solutions given their large investments and access to talent. Secondly, in my personal experience, I’ve found that these types of companies often have more progressive cultures that lend themselves to innovation and swift adoption of new tech.