It feels like, no sooner did we start our walk through the ‘Close’ aspect of inbound marketing methodology, than we’ve already come to the end of it. The final part of the puzzle looking at how you go about closing the loop, and turning those visitors into customers, means we need to look at marketing automation in more detail.
This modern world has brought us many things. Some of them we’ve welcomed with open arms, others, not so much. Technology, and in particular automation, is one aspect that has impacted our lives in all sorts of ways. Being able to surrender tasks to machines and computer software to automate jobs on our behalf has been a boon for everything from manufacturing to social media. Inbound marketing hasn’t escaped it’s impact either. Inbound marketing agencies have played a big part.
automation, the focus is squarely on automation provided by the software you use to manage your campaigns. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of marketing will understand the sheer number of tasks that go into any successful marketing campaign. From sending emails, posting to social media, maintaining website interactions and tracking leads the process can be a painfully complicated and often thankless job, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Before we get too far down the automation path, I think it’s important to stress what automation can’t do for you. It would be lovely to think it takes everything you want to do, from attracting visitors and converting them into big sales, and just does it. Sadly, or should that be obvious, that’s not how it works. To get the most out if it, you still have to give it some thought and effort.
Since we started this series of blog posts looking at inbound marketing, we’ve worked hard to show you how you can incorporate this into your own sales and marketing ethos. Marketing automation doesn’t do away with any of what we’ve talked about so far, it is there to help you with many of the tasks inbound marketing will present you with. Many of which will be completely new to you.
Marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. People will increasingly find out about your message in a multitude of ways. Whether that’s from internet searches, social media, direct emails or physical trade shows, your message to them still needs to be buyer-centric, consistent and relevant. They need to feel like you’re helping them to solve their problems, not solely interested in selling to them.
Before inbound marketing took hold, marketing automation looked similar but achieved very different goals. It would end up with the same people, receiving different information from different campaigns, none of which really reflected their position in your sales funnel. It provided a confusing environment when what you and your leads really needed was clarity. That is exactly where the team at WhiteHat and our inbound partner HubSpot come into play. We have revolutionised marketing automation that brings everything together in one place.
The HubSpot platform allows us to combine everything we know about your lead automatically. By utilising behaviour-based workflows and lead nurturing conversions, we have a set of analytics and associated tools that have revolutionised marketing automation. This knowledge and flexibility allow us to understand their needs and their wants, to give them all the information they need to solve the problems that they have, just when they need it most.
By automating and personalising the tasks that used to be segmented, we can bring together the pages on your website they visit most, the social interactions you have with them, the emails they open or which ebooks or white papers they download to give you a much more relevant and precise image of the type of lead they are.
By tracking them effectively and automating tasks that would have required a team of people to track correctly, we can better understand what they want, so we can give them what they want. This allows you to market to them in a way that enhances, rather than detracts or confuses, your message.
The power the HubSpot platforms hold when it comes to marketing automation is truly incredible. Never before have we been able to manage leads and personalise messages, not just through emails, but on webpages and calls-to-action buttons. They would think your site and marketing team existed just to serve them. If you want to experience a whole new world of marketing automation and see how it can change your view, just give the team at WhiteHat a call today.
Other blogs you might like...
- Inbound Marketing: CLOSE - Closed -Email
- Inbound Marketing: CLOSE - Closed-Loop Reporting
- Inbound Marketing: CLOSE- CRM
- Inbound Marketing: CONVERT - Landing Pages
