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Marketing Automation Software: Why it’s Important for Your Business Success

By Shashank kaushik
July 4, 2017

Whenever you have flocked to Google to search for latest marketing trends, you must have come across the term ‘Marketing Automation’. Or, you must have heard your friends and colleagues talking about it. But, what is Marketing Automation? How effective is it? And, why a business must use it or even spend their time and money to read about it? If you are a founder, director, or just a marketing professional, then you would know how hectic work can get. Continuous meetings, double checking your campaigns status, tracking the marketing and sales objective, and so on, the list seems never ending. The task is much more arduous for SME’s who can't ramify the work because of their limited resource strength. This is where marketing automation steps in. Although there is no such definition for marketing automation, we could broadly see it as the use of software to automate marketing processes like customer segmentation, customer data integration, and campaign management. The use of marketing automation makes processes, which are otherwise performed manually, much more efficient. Marketing automation has also become an integral component of customer relationship management. Turning manual processes into digitally automated form, comes with its series of benefits. We’ve summed up the main pain-points that businesses face and explained the respective benefits as follows: [caption id="attachment_5625" align="aligncenter" width="719"]

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1. Automated Reporting

The hardest and most time-consuming part of any marketing campaign is reporting. Marketing automation tools like Marketo and HubSpot make campaign reporting component easy and effortless. To measure the effectiveness of your campaigns by tracking key metrics like content engagement and new leads generated are vital for tracking the ROI from such campaigns.

2. Personalization and customer retention

Customer retention is equally important as going out and generating new leads is. Using these automation tools, helps you get a relevant insight into customer intent and desires. With this information in hand, companies are able to deduce the customers’ needs and decisions and accommodate their behaviour to make relevant actions. Also, by using these tools companies can trigger messages and personalised content according to their audience. Recommended for You: Top 10 Tips to Retain Customers

3. Optimizing Workflows

Any inbound marketing campaign needs forms, CTAs, conversion pages and many other assets to monitor and measure the reach of their campaign. And, tracking all this manually is a tiring and lengthy task with possibilities of human errors. Automation tools automate these activities and also document them in a consumable format, making the process smoother and error free.

4. Revenue Growth

The ultimate goal of any business is to produce sustainable revenue streams and maintaining the streams as well. Though, these automation tools are not cheap, but the benefits and the monetary value they generate easily surpass the investment costs incurred by the company. According to stats, 78% of marketers have stated that automation tools have increased sales and boosted revenues for them. Further insights on the stats can be taken from here

5. Error Elimination

No matter how efficient one is, human beings can still make mistakes and errors in their business documentation. And, there is no room for error in today’s competitive world. Automation tools eliminate the need for human efforts by performing certain tasks thereby bringing efficiency to the system and negating chances of error. Depending on the budget and choice of the software, one can also manage daily tasks like budgeting and planning.

6. Building Awareness

Having an online presence is a necessity for an organisation to build an audience and no brand today wants to take chances with their reputation in the digital world. The amount of effort and time required to recognise, connect and convert the potential audience into leads is too high when done manually. Automation tools come in as a saviour as these tools allow marketers to automate such tasks and to reduce the human efforts, saving up on the time and efforts of the organisations. All these benefits are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the advantages of such marketing tools. With so many automation tools around, choosing one can be a daunting task. So, we have listed the key process for you to choose the right tool for your business.

7. Define your goals

Choosing the right tools entirely depends on what you want to achieve from your business and the growth forecast of your organisation. A company must figure out what exactly their requirements are these tools and how they want to use them.

8. Research about the tools available in the market

Choosing a software just because someone recommended it to you, is the worst business decision you can make. One must do their research before investing their hard-earned money in some tool. The need of a Technology startup may vary from the need of an independent marketer - there are options available in the market to cater different needs for automation by different classes of users. Spend time to understand your need for automation and your business goals and choose wisely accordingly.

9. Go for the free trial

The best thing about these online tools is that most of them come with a free trial. By opting for a free trial, a business manager can test the tool on its productivity and benefits it brings to the business. Usually, these trials are offered for anywhere between 10-14 days, which is a decent time to gauge the capabilities of a tool. Again, it is imperative to analyse the business need and how the automation tool will streamline/add value to the existing processes. >> Know more about Hubspot and Hubspot India Partners. Need help figuring out where to start or have any questions? Comment below!