Increase your marketing ROI with marketing automation tools. But first- make sure you can truly utilize the software you have.
Some companies are failing to use their marketing automation software to its fullest potential. Marketing automation software is more than a scheduling tool for email and social media: when used properly, marketing automation software and tactics will increase your marketing ROI and yield your company a significant return on its investment.
There are a number of free marketing automation tools available, including HootSuite for managing social media ROI, Google Analytics for monitoring website traffic and conversions, and MailChimp for automated email marketing. Comprehensive marketing automation programs like Act-On, Eloqua, HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot may be initially expensive to implement but will save your business money in the long run because they offer a whole host of tools and features that you can use to maximize your marketing ROI. We recommend Hubspot as your best buy if you are a small or medium sized business.
Use Marketing Automation at Every Step of the Sales Funnel to Maximize Your Marketing ROI
Marketing automation solutions like Hubspot’s integrated marketing platform give marketers the tools they need to analyze the effectiveness of their marketing campaign in every step of the sales process. Increase your effectiveness at attracting website visitors, converting those visitors into leads, and nurturing those leads into new and repeat customers by using a comprehensive automated marketing platform to scale your marketing reach.
One of the worst things a company can do is to spend money on marketing automation software but fail to use it correctly. Marketing automation tools are meant to complement a strong inbound marketing campaign and scale its reach but they cannot take the place of third-party search engine optimization firm or in-house search engine optimization consultants. The tools by themselves cannot answer the question, what is SEO, or search engine optimization. What they can do is provide SEO tips to an experienced SEO content writer to refine his or her existing SEO strategy and provide analytics to evaluate the effectiveness of that strategy.
Increase Organic Search Results with Hubspot’s Keyword and SEO Tools
Marketing automation software like Hubspot is most effective for SEO companies that already have created a steady flow of organic leads to your website. The software gives tips and suggestions on which keywords to promote. It also shows what could be improved in regards to on page search engine optimization in the code and content of the website in order to increase the number of organic leads, or leads from customers who are using a search engine to find your site.
Creating good content, sharing this content on social media, and optimizing this content for search engines through link building strategies like blogging is essential to developing a strong inbound marketing campaign. Marketing automation software can maximize the potential of a strong campaign but can do little to promote a poor campaign. For example, companies who buy email lists from third parties are not going to see as good of a return on their investment as a company who generates an email list through the promotion and writing of content that generates conversions from organic search.
The key word here is conversion. Your website may be attracting a large amount of traffic, but is this traffic high-quality traffic? That is, is it traffic that will convert into sales?
Use Marketing Automation Software to Promote Lead Generation and Conversions
Attracting leads is not the same thing as attracting website traffic. In order to obtain a lead, you need to have some sort of interaction on the part of the prospect that demonstrates interest in your company. Utilize lead magnets and calls to action on your website, paid online advertisements, and social media pages to encourage visitors to convert into leads. What is a lead magnet? A leads magnet encourages prospects to give out their contact information in exchange for a valuable freebie, such as a free software trial or access to a webinar. Calls to action encourage prospective leads to contact your company immediately, in order to get a free quote, for example.
Increase the effectiveness of leads magnets and calls to actions (CTAs) in obtaining conversions with marketing automation software
Use marketing automation tools to track conversions and nurture leads through the development of personalized content. Examples of conversions include filling out a contact form, signing up for an email newsletter, downloading an eBook, or social media interaction.
Smart Contact Forms
Marketing automation programs can create dynamic contact forms that recognize previous users and don’t make these users fill out the same information over and over again. Instead, these smart forms only ask questions that cannot be gleaned from the previous information the user provided in an earlier form. Customers are less likely to fill out forms if they are lengthy: using smart forms can drastically reduce the size of forms and increase the likelihood that they will be submitted by customers.
Personalized Email Campaigns
Marketing automation programs can also craft personalized email campaigns based on a user’s click-through history. For example, if an email subscriber clicked on a heading that read Sales Mastermind Events in Your Area, the subscriber would be automatically entered into an email campaign’s smart list that would send out promotions regarding sales and marketing mastermind events. Customers are much more likely to respond to email campaigns if they are personalized to fit those customers’ interests.
Smart CTAs and Leads Magnets
Marketing automation software gives marketers the opportunity to alter website content, such as CTAs (call to actions) and lead magnets depending on the customer’s user history and preferences. Dynamic websites will not show users who already downloaded an eBook on How to become a Sales & Marketing mastermind the same content for a second time, for example. Instead, it will recognize that the user already clicked and downloaded this item and will show another promotion instead, such as a mastermind marketing event in Las Vegas. Using dynamic content will maximize the effectiveness of CTAs and lead magnets because they will be designed based on the history and preferences of the individual customer.
Drive More Traffic to Your Website by Measuring Your Social Media Interaction with Social Media Marketing ROI
You can also use marketing automation software to keep track of what works and what doesn’t in regards to attracting website traffic from social media that leads to conversions. Be sure to measure social media networks both together and separately to gauge which social media pages are generating the most visit to lead conversions. Also track lead to customer conversions: some social media pages might result in fewer leads but those leads may be of a higher quality.
Hubspot’s Social Inbox is a great tool for nurturing social media leads because it keeps track of the behaviors of your social media followers and offers tips and suggestions on how and when to promote products to these followers.
In every step of the marketing process, marketing automation makes the sales process easier and more cost effective. Streamline your marketing campaign by taking advantage of all of the features your marketing automation software has to offer, such as:
- SEO and keyword tips and tools
- Analytics to track website traffic and conversion rates
- A/B Testing to gauge the quality of lead magnets and CTAs against one another
- Lead nurturing tools to help customers go through the sales cycle faster
- Dynamic, personalized content for websites and email campaigns
