As part of a business, you must market your goods and services in a variety of ways in order to compete within your market. Whether your marketing strategy includes social media posts, email outreach, paid ads, shipped materials, or perhaps all of the above; automating your marketing process using HubSpot has many benefits that undoubtedly affect your bottom line.
Marketing automation is not a new concept and is helpful for businesses of all shapes, sizes, and in all stages.
Whether you are just beginning, or have a solid audience, funnel, and sales strategy, HubSpot can help you automate your marketing and sales tactics. In doing so you benefit in three distinct ways, which we will discuss below:
1. You save time (and therefore, money)
As the old saying goes, “Work smarter, not harder”. Marketing automation software allows you to do exactly that by enabling you to market your services to more people with less work and fewer inputs.
We have all sorted through a list of leads by hand, tried to remember how to best deal with those prospects, tried to gauge which were qualified to buy, and perhaps invented our own organizational masterpiece (or car crash) of an Excel sheet to keep track of our touchpoints.
Now, add social media posts, newsletters, paid ads, downloadable content, and other marketing tools into the mix; you have quite the task list to keep track of.
You could always hire a person, right? Yet, would that really save you any time at all? You must train that person, and pay close attention to every action they take for at least a few months. So maybe, before you hire somebody, look to automate!
When you employ a marketing automation program like HubSpot, you can schedule and control exactly what is being posted to social media while also managing and keeping track of every email, blog, and piece content.
A real bonus is that HubSpot "learns" and teaches you more effective marketing skills.
Marketing automation software will save you significant amounts of time, and thus, significant amounts of money.
2. Personalize all touchpoints with your prospects
I know what you’re thinking… “If I automate my marketing strategy, I will deter my potential customers with annoying, impersonal emails or social media posts.”
This thought is entirely valid. Yet, marketing automation software has improved significantly in recent history. You no longer have to resort to impersonal, irrelevant, and irritating email blasts in order to turn leads into sales. Enter, HubSpot "snippets".
By using Snippets you can enter generic fields, such as "Customer Name" or "Contact HubSpot Owner" and that triggers the software to pull that information from its Contact Management System. Pretty impressive, huh?
This way, you can write seemingly generic emails that, when sent, personalize themselves for each individual person that you are emailing. Here are some helpful email workflows you should be using in your marketing automation.
By communicating specific, relevant ideas to prospects at specific points in their Buyer’s Journey, your prospects are more likely to be enthused by your act of communication rather than irritated.
Take, for example, HubSpot’s Smart Content feature, which sorts and targets lists of potential customers based on personalized characteristics such as lifecycle stage, geographic location, referral site, device type or custom criteria and then displays personalized information geared toward each specific lead as they visit your site.
HubSpot’s software keeps track of the information that you want it to, and enables you as the business owner to cater your advertising to the specific needs of the individual customer. All you have to do is tell HubSpot what to do, and it will do that for you, regurgitating helpful data and tips to improve your process along the way.
3. Align marketing and sales teams
Your Marketing team does everything they can to generate leads. Your Sales team does everything they can to convert leads into revenue generating relationships. More often than not, leads are lost in the communicative void that often develops between Marketing and Sales.
Marketing automation software, like HubSpot, helps to bridge that gap by tracking each potential customer as their needs transform throughout their Buyer's Journey. This streamlines your sales process by making every prospect's move on your website visible to all parties. That way your marketing team can guide only the most promising leads all the way to your sales team.
You can use marketing automation software to keep track of who your leads are, how you have marketed to each individual, rank them by interest and behavior, and ultimately decide whether or not your potential customer is worth spending additional time and effort on in order to convert.
HubSpot, or any marketing automation tool, can be VERY helpful to all sorts of businesses. It can save you time, align your marketing and sales efforts, and more by simply offering a hub for prospect information and interactions.
When your teams know more about a prospect, it increases the possibility of conversion and thus makes your business a more effective, revenue-generating machine.
September 13, 2018