The future of marketing is inbound

Social media, emails, PPC, don’t forget content marketing, oh and remember, follow up on that lead that just downloaded your lead magnet…

When you’re a marketer or business owner, life is busy. Your brain is constantly swirling with new ideas for inbound marketing, more tasks for that never-ending to-do list, and of course, everything you need to do daily or weekly.

Thankfully, there are lots of tools and new technology that can help to simplify a lot of these tasks. Intrigued? Read on because we will tell you how marketing automation can make your inbound marketing easier.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is essentially making systems or actions happen automatically using software. It can help you streamline your marketing efforts, helping your marketing department run more efficiently and smoothly.

How can marketing automation help?

From our experience working with businesses and marketing teams, we know that lead generation and keeping customers engaged throughout their journey stays at the front of their minds. In addition, businesses also struggle with analysing their data and making it work for them.

However, marketing automation can help businesses overcome these challenges by making their data work harder by streamlining workflows and processes.

Implementing and integrating marketing automation thoughtfully creates the perfect foundation and framework for healthy, long-term customer relationships. So, when executed well, marketing automation offers three main benefits to your business:

• Personalised workflows – Each of your prospect’s actions is an extra data point for your marketing strategy, giving you more information and insight into your customers and what they’re looking for. You can then use these data points to create workflows that drive prospects to helpful content, resulting in warm leads that can be nurtured to customers. Then, you can continue to engage your customers with a personalised workflow which results in repeat, loyal customers who tell their friends and family about you.
• Streamlined processes – Connect the dots of your company with streamlined processes that put your customers at the heart of every journey. By working together across departments, you can create a unified customer experience right from the beginning.
• Integrated data – Every action taken by a prospect customer is an extra data point for your marketing strategy, showing you what your customers want and are looking for. Manually tracking this information would be difficult to near impossible, but you can combine these different inputs and actions with marketing automation software.

Although these are the top three, there are tons more benefits, including efficiency, marketing and sales alignment, increased conversion rate, accurate reporting, personalised marketing strategy, lead scoring and nurturing, and data management.

How to get the most from your marketing automation

When done well, marketing automation combines software, strategy, and customer insight, allowing you to nurture prospects, delight customers, and convert customers into loyal brand ambassadors. To get the most from your marketing automation, you should weave automation throughout your business, break down departments that work in silos and join up the dots with a human touch. Your customers’ needs and journey should always be the centre of creating processes.

A great place to start is with a CRM system that integrates with your marketing software; this allows you to track every action that your customers and prospects take and then connect customers with the next step in the customer journey.

Here at Carswell Gould, we use HubSpot to automate monotonous or repetitive marketing tasks, such as email marketing, social media scheduling and even paid ads campaigns. We’re able to use HubSpot’s CRM and marketing automation features to automate a vast variety of tasks.

For example, we can set up email sequences, build complex networks of rules to ensure we’re providing our customers with what they need from us, such as tailored emails, live chats, and more. The fantastic thing about marketing automation isn’t just efficiency and saving time, but it allows us to create a more personalised experience for our customers.

How to implement a marketing automation strategy

Depending on what tools you use and your goals, your marketing automation strategy will vary. For example, if you have a free eBook and you use HubSpot to nurture the leads that download your eBook, your approach will most likely focus on converting those leads based on how your product or service could help their needs.

No matter your goals, there are a few best practices for a marketing automation strategy:

• Understand your audience – you can’t create personalised marketing (automated or not) without really knowing and understanding your audience. You need to know their challenges, pain points, and how you can solve them. You should know your buyer personas inside out before building any automated processes.
• You need to know your customer journey – you need to meet your prospect, lead, or customer where they are, not where you want to create marketing. Map out your customer journey and match your marketing automation to those stages.
• Test, review, tweak – although marketing automation is meant to be hands-off and automated, it’s not a one-and-done strategy. You need to regularly test, review, and tweak your marketing automation processes.

The future of inbound marketing

There’s no doubt about it, inbound marketing is the future of attracting new customers. It reflects the world we live in today and how people make purchases in a world of online, 24/7 information and social media. Rather than finding new prospects and leads, they come to you via great content that you’ve created that they can’t ignore. A successful inbound marketing strategy requires interesting, informative, and engaging content, drawing people into your website and services.