Introduction to Marketing Automation
Oftentimes, growth is the most complicated challenge that most small businesses have to face nowadays. It happens not because the business lacks the necessary capability and talents to reach their full potential, but because of their limited resources and restricted budgets. While most small business owners think that achieving exponential growth in business is a reserve for big organizations, marketing automation helps to level the field for all. Marketing automation is easily accessible to all businesses regardless of their size.
Essentially, marketing automation is a marketing technology that takes the entire marketing burden off the marketers` shoulders. The marketing automation software equips organizations to efficiently and effectively run numerous marketing campaigns on various digital platforms such as emails, social media, and websites, concurrently and via a single medium. Fundamentally, marketing automation allows organizations to automate all the redundant and repetitive marketing processes and tasks.
How Marketing Automation Helps in Business
Marketing automation ensures that the right marketing message is broadcasted to the right audience in the right situations and the most opportune time. Automating marketing enables organizations to nurture prospective clients with both meaningful and hyper-personalized marketing information which helps in converting prospective clients into purchasing customers and turning customers into happy and loyal clients.
Moreover, automating marketing processes allows organizations to set rules based on actions which are specific to a particular contact or generalized to apply to a group of contacts with specified characteristics. For instance, a marketer can easily broadcast a marketing message to all unique visitors to their website in the past few days.
Performing all marketing processes manually is both tedious and time-consuming. This is where marketing automation comes in. Automating marketing processes enables driving the unending marketing processes for every contact in an organization’s contact list. Idyllically, automation of marketing tasks allows companies to communicate with every single contact digitally without necessarily having to communicate to the contacts singly. This process enables the creation of marketing content for various contacts to be viewed at different time periods and on multiple channels. Automating marketing processes generates considerable revenue for organizations, and offers an exceptional return on investment.
8 Best Tools for Your Marketing Automation
The marketing automation industry has exponentially grown from a $500 million industry to a projected $5.5 billion in 2024. Currently, a sizable 67 percent of leading marketing organizations are using at least one platform for automating their marketing processes; a further 21 percent are speculated to begin using marketing automation platforms in 2024.
As a result of the growing prevalence in the use of marketing automation platforms, the list of these platforms has also continued to grow with the industry experiencing the addition of new tools each year. The increase in the number of marketing automation has subsequently led to the increased complexity in finding the aptest platform for business.
In regards to the difficulty associated with choosing the best marketing automation platform for one’s business, this article delves into the pros and cons of some of the best automation platforms in the market.
1.) Aritic PinPoint
Aritic PinPoint is a totally integrated marketing automation platform that is permission-based. This marketing automation platform is all the rage because of its sophisticated customer involvement and automation features. Aritic PinPoint also allows businesses to nurture more unique visitors solely based on their online activities.
Additionally, more features such as the ability to track users’ behavior and ad targeting aid in filling the sales-marketing pipeline. In spite of fierce competition from other marketing automation tools in the market, features such as dynamically-configured segmentation, advanced tags, and filters, progressive profiling, analytics and SEO in addition to a huge list of other integrations have given Aritic PinPoint a competitive advantage over other marketing automation platforms.
2.) HubSpot
HubSpot is also a considerably crucial marketing automation platform for businesses seeking to convert their marketing endeavors from outbound such as email spam, cold calls, TV advertisements, and trade shows generation of leads to the inbound lead generation and thus enabling easier discovery by potential clients.
3.) Pardot
Pardot is a user-friendly business to business marketing automation suite that aids the marketing and sales departments to maximize efficiency and thus boosting their revenue.
The Pardot marketing automation platform’s lead management software has capabilities to carry out email marketing, CRM integration, nurturing of leads, scoring of leads and reporting on return on investments. These features aid the sales and marketing departments to work as a team in generating and qualifying leads on sales, shortening the sales cycles, and demonstrating the accountability existent in their marketing endeavors.
4.) Marketo
Marketo is a user-friendly and powerful marketing automation software that helps sales and marketing professionals to increase organizations’ revenue and improve organizations’ accountability in marketing. This platform offers the best cloud-based software for marketing to all organizations regardless of their sizes. With Marketo, companies can easily develop and maintain strong relationships with customers.
5.) Oracle Eloqua
Oracle Eloqua is Oracle’s business to business marketing platform with cross-channel marketing capabilities. Oracle Eloqua enables marketing professionals to plan, schedule and perform marketing campaigns that are automated. At the same time, Oracle Eloqua allows organizations to deliver personalized marketing experiences to their prospective customers.
6.) Act-On
Essentially, Act-On is a cloud-based integrated platform for automated marketing that allows marketing professionals to tie various programs for outbound, inbound, and lead nurturing marketing together so as to maximize the organizations’ return on investments on their marketing endeavors.
7.) LeadSquared
LeadSquared is an automation marketing platform that aids small and medium-sized businesses to drive more revenue by aligning the businesses’ sales and marketing processes. LeadSquared allows the capturing of leads from all possible sources such as cold calling, inbound email, online campaigns, website newsletter subscriptions, and other websites for lead- generation.
8.) Infusionsoft
Infusionsoft is, arguably, the leading company that offers an e-mail marketing and sales platform for small businesses. Infusionsoft helps small businesses to organize their marketing processes, grow their sales volume and save considerable time in doing all the sales and marketing activities. This platform is also used by bloggers in the creation of marketing campaigns and funnels for marketing through emails.
Infusionsoft makes the creation and execution of marketing and sales strategies less complicated. Moreover, this platform allows for easy centralization of interactions with clients, capturing of new leads, closing sales much faster and automating repetitive marketing processes.
Conclusion
With easy access to sophisticated tools for marketing automation, automating marketing processes has never been more inexpensive and beneficial for both small and big businesses. To make the automation of marketing processes even much more affordable and accessible, learning how to use these marketing automation tools is easy.
