Imagine a world where your marketing campaigns will be carried out on their own and adapted to each client automatically. Would not that be wonderful? Imagine all the time and stress that you would save if you did not have to worry about presenting the right message to the right customer at the right time.
What if you could delegate all that to a machine that knows how to do it and simply keep you informed of the results so you can rest assured that everything is working great?
In case you never fantasized about such a world? Well, let me tell you that today this is possible …
Author: Ricardo Díez – Chief Analytics Officer de Analytics Town
Starting a new business or being at the head of one already established requires very particular ways of thinking. Marketing campaigns for different types of customers at different times in their life cycle can be very stressful, stressful at the same time as consuming a huge amount of time and effort. How we wish these activities could be carried out on their own and be effective without much effort!
This premise has taken away the dream of more than one in recent years, but the good news is that it is now possible to create marketing campaigns that are managed and executed in an automated way, to the degree that they themselves decide What kind of content they should show to a potential customer, which product is most likely to be bought, and what time is the most appropriate to track each person according to their specific life cycle.
This process is what is known as “Marketing Automation”, osea marketing automation. With this technique it is possible to use software and technology platforms that are measuring and learning the user’s behavior in order to understand their tastes and motivations and thus, depending on what each person does, presents a stimulus or a communication according to it Which can improve the response rates and thus the effectiveness of the campaign itself.
Fortunately, marketing automation does not come alone. There is a whole combo of Inbound Marketing actions that fit perfectly and perfectly complement the criteria that these automation platforms must execute, since they allow defining different types of consumer profiles, different communications or marketing pieces for each Time of the life cycle and follow-up actions to be taken according to the criterion that best suits each industry or specific case.
Now it is likely that at some point it seems that what I am telling you sounds like science fiction, but what I can guarantee is that I will only tell you what I have already done in real life, what I have already experienced, Wrong and resolvable. At the moment I am founder of the consultant Analytics Town and in my last 10 years of race, I have seen this situation hundreds of times. Every time decisions were made with these principles the results were extraordinary.
This is what gives value to knowledge: its application in real life! Therefore, if you are interested in knowing how to do so that you can also automate your own marketing processes here you will find the step by step that you must follow to get to execute it successfully.
Moreover, it is possible that companies that do not incorporate inbound marketing automation systems in the near future will find themselves in competitive and disadvantageous problems against their competition within a maximum of 3 to 5 years.
10 Steps to Implement a Marketing Automation Process:
Below is the process of adopting a marketing automation tool in 10 simple steps:
- The Beginning: Keep in mind that starting an inbound marketing automation process is not exactly easy. It requires a major effort and planning that is conscientious and well aligned with the overall objectives of the company.
- Be aware: If it is sought to undertake such projects internally, it is necessary to consider that it will be necessary to allocate a significant amount of resources and possibly also a certain budget. The good thing is that by consistently improving effectiveness and return on investment, the project always becomes more than viable.
- Learning Curve: If you opt for the option of hiring a specialized company to carry out the implementation and planning of your automation and inbound marketing processes, the initial learning curve can be reduced consistently.
- Defining Objectives: Defining the above points, it is important to start defining clear objectives, life cycle stages and expected interactions in each to generate macro and micro conversions.
- Knowledge of Hearings: It is necessary to pass on this point to the generation of relevant web traffic and to know as much as possible to the users that is being captured to understand the best way to make the best efforts.
- Market Segmentation: From knowing the audiences, an appropriate hyperstarting policy can be defined that generates scalability in the search for conversions and objectives fulfilled.
- Demand Generation: Initiate lead nurturing processes by having users identify themselves. From having their data, multichannel tracking can be achieved and managed to involve them across all stages of the life cycle.
- Marketing Efforts: Marketing efforts should be focused on generating new leads. Once users are identified, it is important to focus on bringing them to the next stage of the conversion funnel.
- Evaluation of Success: The evaluation of the success of an automated inbound marketing strategy must go through the ability to generate audience movement, causing each segment to pass from one stage previous to the next in the conversion funnel.
- Start Selling: Aligning sales and marketing efforts is necessary for the inbound strategy to generate an appropriate return on investment. For that reason, the difference between the competences of one area and the other will be more subtle thanks to smarketing and its mixture between commercial efforts, since generating synergy between them achieves an integrated and consistent process over time.
To achieve these steps, it is important to have an automation tool that allows you to automate all these processes. Among the main tools are some such as Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua or Pardot, which have proven to be very complete options to perform these tasks.
Now, what criteria should I apply to choose the tool that best suits my marketing needs?
Top Inbound Marketing Automation Tools:
Here I leave a small analysis of the main points for and against the main tools of the market:
Being the visionary of the Gartner quadrant, Hubspot is an automation tool focused on inbound marketing. Position is from which it is mainly used by business models of medium and small companies, B2B (business to business) and B2B2C (business to business to consumer) to nurture leads and chain opportunities and brand representation.
Strengths
Hubspot has a large number of business representatives in a large number of countries around the world, so they become a global company with good local arrival in most regions. The growth that Hubspot has achieved in the last 3 years has provided an exponential increase in the development of its platform. In addition, they have managed to increase the level of satisfaction of their customers through a good content strategy.
One of the main attributes of Hubspot is that it has been able to integrate a wide variety of online marketing elements to generate a complete cross-funnel ecosystem to handle and track all stages of the conversion process. This also includes a wealth of options for content customization and audience building.
Weaknesses
Hubspot constantly tries to consolidate itself in the market of small and medium companies, but when wanting to attend also to big companies they have developed modules that can be without too much functionality for one or another segment. This also influences the one that, although it starts with plans with smaller user bases, when it takes to a medium or large volume of clients in the database, the price is not so different to options like Marketo or Eloqua.
Also, native CRM integrations or when you connect with Salesforce work very well, but if the company has different CRM software it is necessary to go through a third party to create an appropriate linking of the information.
At the time the Gartner study (2015) was published, Hubspot needed to incorporate a predictive analytics module based on the lead scoring of its users. This is something that your main competitors have solved some time already.
This option has the leadership of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, with deep, well-developed functionalities for managing leads and business prospects, to manage them properly throughout their life cycle stages and to achieve proper growth of the database. Users in a short time. The companies that make up 70% of Marketo’s customer base are technology companies, service companies, banks, media, and science and education associations. Only 30% of Marketo’s business goes through medium and small companies.
Strengths
The functionalities and their ease of use are a clear advantage for Marketo. It also has a wide range of modular options (such as SEO modules, social networks, mobile optimization, dynamic content, etc.) to integrate into a solution that can be configured almost to the specific case of each client, with the Option of contracting the modules separately so as not to acquire what is not needed.
Marketo has a large number of integrations with advertising media, agencies, integrators and other sources of information, which makes it easy to adapt to multiple types of data, which will then be stored in the internal CRM to have better knowledge of audiences.
Weaknesses
80% of Marketo customers are located in the United States, which makes them have a milder presence in the rest of the world. Outside of this country, they may be little known and less taken into account in some integrations.
By having a large-scale approach, it is usually focused on solutions for large companies and transnational companies, so their price is also often high. Since their main focus is on B2B businesses, they have less presence in B2C businesses.
Oracle is also in the leader quadrant of Gartner, along with Marketo, thanks to the acquisition of the Eloqua tool. Typically, it is usually more popular among medium and large companies within the B2C business model, with the support of the large network of Oracle partners in each country.
Strengths
The features are quite comprehensive and easy to use. Eloqua has a great capacity to generate multichannel campaigns, to take an advanced measurement of lead scoring and very complete modules of analytics. Attribution model analysis module is very good and allows to create very friendly dashboards to visualize the progress in the results for each stage of the life cycle.
Oracle offers a wide variety of useful elements for online marketing campaigns, such as integration with CRM (mainly those of Oracle), but also with other homologated vendors. They also allow you to join automatic communication modules to leads through social networks, dynamic content, advanced email marketing options and special optimization for mobile devices.
Advanced inbound marketing campaigns can be integrated by integrating tools such as Responsys (Oracle’s flagship e-mail automation tool) and improving audience awareness and hyder segmentation through Bluekai (Oracle’s multi-channel campaign optimization tool).
Weaknesses
While Eloqua works very well when integrating with native Oracle tools, the same is not true when you need to link non-standardized tools.
Oracle’s licensing model deserves to be read with careful attention, since it is often a multi-year contract and, unless it is a large-scale business negotiation, it usually has little flexible packages.
Given the high level of evolution that Eloqua has achieved, its prices usually reflect this, so if you are looking for an economic option, this will not be the first choice. According to the Gartner study, the price and ease ratio of the sales process scored lower than the average tooling.
In summary: what criteria should I take if I need to choose which tool to choose when creating an automated inbound marketing ecosystem?
- If you are looking for a tool for B2B or for B2B2C, Marketo is usually a very good option given the focus with which your modules are developed.
- If you are looking for a tool for small and medium businesses, Hubspot usually has smaller and more manageable packages.
- If it is intended to implement a highly developed tool for a multinational company, mainly if it is B2C, it is advisable to consider Eloqua as your first choice.
Remember that any question you have can count on us. At Analytics Town we have a team of specialists ready to support you. You can request a diagnosis here.
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