If you want your marketing automation goals, it's crucial to choose a platform that offers the necessary tools for your business. This includes marketing automation tools, the best marketing automation software, and an effective email marketing tool. While cost is a consideration, it shouldn't be the primary factor in your decision-making. Instead, focus on the return on investment (ROI) that the platform can generate.
How to choose a Marketing Automation Platform
For a high ROI, the marketing automation solution must enable the collection and analysis of data and give your marketers the ability to execute and update campaigns based on the insights that the data reveal right from inside the platform.
- Complete automation throughout the entire customer journey – which begins with driving website traffic, and then moves on to lead generation, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and marketing and sales alignment.
- Testing and optimisation capabilities – A/B and multivariate testing across campaigns, enabling refinement strategies for everything from emails to landing pages.
- Personalised, real-time messaging – such features need to be configurable so that they are triggered when leads or customers interact, perform a specific action, or behave in a particular kind of way.
Now You Just Need the Buy-in
Convinced by the powers of marketing automation?
You should be, for they are real. But getting the buy-in from the executive suite for any new piece of technology – marketing automation software or otherwise – is not always a guarantee.
And so, you need to prepare a pitch.
Check out the following blogs for more information:
- 5 Steps To Successful Marketing Automation For Startups
- What are the key benefits of Marketing Automation?
- 8 Top Tips and Tricks to improve Marketing Automation
- How to improve Lead Nurturing using Marketing Automation
Building Your Business Case
What’s the business case for implementing marketing automation?
To answer this question, you need to think about what the overall business objectives of your company are and how a marketing automation solution will help achieve them.
For instance, if growing your customer base is high on the agenda, then marketing automation will help generate better-qualified leads, improve the hand-off process between marketing and sales, and so generate more revenue.
If your goal is to improve customer lifetime value, utilizing marketing automation tools and social media marketing can enhance your strategy. By delivering better-targeted content to existing customers, you can persuade them to continue using your service. Incorporating automation features enables you to efficiently implement these tactics and ensure that sticking with your service is perceived as the smartest decision.
Whatever your goals are, it’s important that you can demonstrate that marketing automation will enable you to achieve them.
Support Your Case with Research and Data
A business case, of course, is only ever as good as the evidence that supports it.
There’s plenty of research and data out there that highlight the benefits that marketing automation will unleash.
Your job will be to find the right research that backs up your business case.
Here are some key stats to get you started:
- Aberdeen Group reports that companies who use marketing automation convert 53% more leads to marketing qualified leads and report revenue growth 3.1% higher than non-users.
- A VentureBeat Insight report reveals that 80% of companies that use marketing automation see their number of leads increase and 77% also see their number of conversions increase.
- 74% of marketers say that one of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is found in how it enables a company to save time. 68% also cited increased customer engagement as a key benefit, 58% said they were impressed with the ability to send more timely communications, and 58% said that increased opportunities (such as up-selling and cross-selling) were a major benefit.
- A separate survey found that lead nurturing (57%), analytics and reporting (52%) and list segmentation (39%) were the most valuable benefits of marketing automation (so take your pick as you build your business case).
Marketing automation is highly regarded as a cost-effective solution by the majority of users. Approximately 57% find it to be fairly priced or inexpensive, while 22% perceive it as a bit pricey, but still worthwhile. This value for money is particularly beneficial for optimising marketing efforts and empowering sales teams.
Only 11% consider it to be too expensive.
Over to You
Now it's your turn. If you conduct solid research into your chosen platform, specifically focusing on CRM and marketing automation, and demonstrate how it will help your company achieve its specific business goals, you'll certainly have a strong case to present. Incorporating a b2b marketing automation tool can provide significant benefits, so make sure to provide decent data to back up your claims and showcase the potential advantages of this integrated approach.
Incisive Edge is a HubSpot Platinum Partner, although we work with all the major marketing automation platforms. Our specialism is marketing automation optimisation – basically, making your platform work harder to drive conversions and ROI.
If you’re interested in implementing a marketing automation platform or want to get more out of your existing system, just contact us.
