Indicators That You Should Start Investing in Marketing Automation Technology
August 30, 2017
Are you able to generate, nurture, and convert leads on a website without marketing automation software? Of course, you can. But should you do it? It’s a choice you have to make. Here are 8 indicators that it is time to integrate marketing automation technology to your efforts for Inbound Marketing.
Indicators Why Start Investing Marketing Automation Technology For Your Business
1. Your site is not getting any leads
You try to make a contact form and you are just waiting for your leads to come rushing in? Prospects only talk to your company when they have decided to avail your services. Often times the contact form you set up is used a lot more by spammers than actual customers.
Collect information for people who are still investigating your product by offering premium content that’s valuable in return for an email address or other contact information.
2. Your leads are not purchasing
If you are making use of a squeeze page creation tool in your marketing automation software and you create calls to action, yet monitoring lead activity is tedious. This can be solved by creating automated email sequences in your marketing automation software. Here is an example of how it may work:
- Leads are generated when website visitors fill out forms to download a free content offer.
- New leads receive thank you emails with a download link to the content which was offered.
- Leads receive a strategically scheduled email sequence (three to five days apart depending on the message), this is made in such a way to provide useful details or other offers related to the original content offer.
- The lead then gets a free consultation or trial/demo offer.
- You then receive an email alert that the lead has completed an email sequence or has accomplished a specific goal. This alert may contain details about the lead’s activities on your site and their interest level. Using this information, you will be able to know when is the most appropriate moment to follow up or to make the sales pitch.
Your marketing automation software does all of this in a single convenient place.
3. You have no idea about your site’s landing page conversion rate
You could be creating excellent offers with content and you could be adding more squeeze pages, and that’s great! Hubspot claims that a site with 30 or more squeeze pages gets more 7x more customers than those sites with lesser than 10.
Yet, do you even know how good they are converting? Knowing your landing page conversion rates is absolutely crucial as this can help you make the necessary adjustments. These adjustments can come in the form of replacing your product’s hero shot or changing your bullet points. These tweaks here and wherever can boost your conversion rates, and in one experiment we had, we had one squeeze pages of ours go up by 10% by just replacing the bullet points and hero shot. A great marketing automation tool has a dashboard wherein you can easily view your analytics data.
4. Your Lead information is not organized
You might have generated a ton of leads yet you do not know about what they are interested in. But how would you ever know what offers to send them?
Create a smart email list using your marketing automation tool. This should allow you to categorize or use filters you want to use for segmentation. And then if you will have a brand new email offer, or a webinar announcement, or a new blog post then you will be easily able to select the mailing list of prospects/customers who want to hear from you.
A social media monitoring tool, if you have one of those, will allow you to monitor social media streams based on the contact lists you have.
5. You cannot effectively regulate leads that are incoming
You are getting a ton of alerts about the new leads that are pouring in all day, that’s great! However, if you stop to examine each lead you get then it will cost you a lot of time and it will distract you all day. Lead scoring, a marketing automation feature gives you the ability to sets a value for each action your leads do. In Infusionsoft CRM, this is in a form of flames, the more flames your contact has, the more likely that contact is going to make a purchase.
For example, downloading a free Ebook is worth a flame, visiting your sales page, 2. Reading an email from you sent is worth 1 or 2 flames depending on how you set your lead scoring.
Do you need real-time alerts from the actions of your prospects or other contacts? You can assign alerts to ping you or the sales team if someone that’s in a given list visits your website.
6. You do not know the origin of your leads
Do you spend big money on Google Adwords, a ton of hours each week on LinkedIn, Facebook or on guest posting? Which campaigns work best for getting leads, contacts, and visitors? Marketing automation can track which leads come which sources so you know what is working and what is not.
7. You are not sure about what topic to write about on your blog
The most difficult part of making blogs is trying to come up with a great topic! Using a keyword research software will aid you in identifying opportunities for ranking which you may have overlooked, and tell you where are you ranking well.
Look at your competitor blogs, do they seem to have the really great topics? You can use tools such as buzzsumo.com to find out which blogs get shared the most.
You should keep tabs on what they are doing right with a report of your competitors. This report should show your success vs. their success over time. Knowing things such as what are they doing right, where they get backlinks from, and points, where you can make certain improvements, is important so that you can upgrade your blog and help with your own marketing efforts.
8. You are putting together too much marketing tools
Nobody has the time to deal with that! Most marketing automation tools combine all those functions so that all you need to implement a strategy for inbound marketing all in single place. If the time comes to generate reports, all you need is in a single spot. Disseminating important data to other members of your team require just a single login.
So now, what are you thinking? Do you think it’s high time for you to acquire marketing automation technology? If you are currently making use and benefiting from it, what caused you to make that decision? We would like to know your answers, please do put them in the comment section below.
