If you just don’t have time to do marketing, or would rather be talking with customers, or designing products, you might need a bit of marketing automation in your company. If you run a small high-tech company, maybe in broadcast media, or a broadcast television equipment or software manufacturing company, and find yourself wondering why the marketing you’ve been doing for the past 5, 10 or 15 years is not working anymore, read on… Sales and marketing automation can fix large and small business problems. Here are a few big issues that lots of companies struggle with; see if any of these resonate with you:
- Are you waiting for a re
port or the phone to ring to tell you who’s interested in your product – marketing automation gives you a system that automatically tells you when someone wants a quote, demo or sales call. - Find out which emails really work by looking at link clicks, scoring and engagement.
- Know what stage of the sales pipeline every prospect is in and what actions happen next.
- Put all of your contacts from spreadsheets, business cards and notes into a central CRM database. Get organized.
- Automatically segment people based on their interests. When they click on an email link or fill in a form, the CRM automatically updates with their product interest, saving you time.
- Use a system to nurture prospects into sales-readiness. Send a series of relevant information that your prospects crave. They’ll love you for it!
What is marketing automation and why should I use it? How does it work?
Lots of us like getting emails from Amazon that reminding us of books we might like. Amazon’s automated system sends relevant information that people are truly interested in. You, too, can use marketing automation technology to your advantage by sending specific and compelling information to your customers, automatically.
Here’s a sample of how it can work for you:
Your existing contacts are loaded into a database, or CRM, where they are tagged with their particular interests, for example new HD technology or cool design services. New prospects are added to the database automatically and tagged by their specific interests. Then, relevant emails, videos and white papers, specific to your prospect’s needs, can be sent out in pre-set intervals. You can see which emails and content your prospect has opened, which helps you to know what they are interested in. Leads can even be scored based on this information. By segmenting your prospects into groups based on their specific interests, you can deliver better information. Prospects will turn to you as the industry expert and will happily talk with your sales people when they are ready to take the next steps toward purchasing.
