As HubSpot experts, the Denamico team often meets with sales and marketing teams who express interest in marketing automation but don't know how it it can be harnessed to benefit their business.
Beyond the usual questions surrounding tools, tactics, and strategies, most of our conversations include a discussion about timing. How do you know that it's the right time for your business to invest in marketing automation? If your business faces challenges in your day-to-day operations, lead flow, and nurturing efforts, marketing automation may be the solution.
When is the right time to invest in marketing automation?
It's a good question, because if you are not producing effective inbound marketing content that results in a steady flow of new leads, chances are you're not ready to scale your efforts. In that case, your best bet may be to focus on generating more (and maybe, better) content based on the questions your ideal customer is researching online.
Marketing automation is a great way to scale your successful business model. If your team is struggling to keep up with the volume of incoming leads, marketing automation is a great way to efficiently increase your existing team's capacity without investing capital that you don't have yet to expand your team size.
HubSpot (our tool of choice) suggests asking yourself the following questions when deciding if marketing automation is the right move for your business:
-
Are you generating a steady flow of new and qualified leads?
-
Is your sales team overwhelmed with the number of quality leads you’re passing along to them?
-
Have your marketing and sales departments agreed on when leads should be handed off?
-
Do you have an efficient content strategy mapped to your buyer’s journey?
-
Do you have a proven lead nurturing strategy that you want to scale?
These are all signs that it may be time to invest in marketing automation to make the most of the leads you are generating.
What can marketing automation do for my business?
Marketing automation won't do the work of marketing to prospects and closing sales for you, but it can help. Marketing automation is designed to make your processes more efficient and reduce friction along the path to purchase in both outgoing messaging and internal communication.
If your team has quality content and an effective strategy to nurture prospects but not enough hours in the day to keep up with the influx of leads, marketing automation can be deployed to send nurturing messages to prospects automatically. You can use your best practices to establish the email messaging and timing of sends, but once you flip the switch, automation does the time consuming work for you. You can continue to test and adjust your email flow over time, but you'll never have to wonder if you missed a step in your messaging or if a lead slipped through the cracks.
Marketing automation is also extremely helpful in streamlining the handoff of leads between departments. In an ideal world, marketing and sales would work together seamlessly to nurture and convert leads. If you can identify which leads are likely to convert, you can use marketing automation to notify your sales team that a prospect is ready for some personal attention.
When you streamline and simplify processes for your employees, your leads will receive a more consistent and responsive brand experience, and when you delight your prospects with great service, you'll convert more of them into customers, generating more revenue for your business. We can all use a little more of that!
Let's explore the possibilities together!
Interested in discovering how marketing automation can benefit your business? Contact us and we'll explore how marketing automation can help your business grow.