Full Sail Partners Blog

2016 seems to be the year of the buzzword. Everywhere you look you see a new trendy term: Contextual marketing, growth hacking, marketing automation... the list continues! This blog is here to clear up the confusion and help your SMB get started with marketing automation.

  1. What are Marketing Automation Tools?

Marketing automation tools streamline tedious procedures, eliminate manual processes and give the entire organization insight into results of marketing efforts. Marketing automation tools allow us to find out more about our audience and enable marketing teams to create more impactful campaigns. Additionally, automation tools enable SMBs to do more with less resources.

  2. What is the Value of Marketing Automation Tools?

One thing to note is that marketing automation by no means replaces your marketing staff. These tools simply allow them to do more for your organization; providing your team intelligence and time saving mechanisms to make a greater impact on your organization.

Marketing can often be a love-hate relationship for many SMBs. Many firms view marketing as a hit-or-miss type of function. Either marketing positioned the firm to win the job, or they failed – there is often very little grey area. Marketing automation tools introduce a level of analytics and metrics associated to the cost of marketing efforts… bringing everything back to the almighty dollar!

  3. Won’t Automation Remove the Personal Touch?

Understand that there are varying degrees of marketing automation that can be established, and It’s important to take things one step at a time. 

Some people fear that marketing automation tools are going to remove the personal touch from marketing campaigns. Marketing automation tools often add MORE personalization to marketing efforts. These tools simply remove the time intensive processes out of the way, allowing you to spend more time creating a dynamic experience for each customer.

  4. What are Some Examples of Marketing Automation Tools?

These days there are dozens of marketing automation tools. HubSpot, Act-On, TweetDeck, Hootsuite… the list goes on and on.  These tools can help you manage tasks ranging from social media publishing to inbound lead scoring. But to get the most out of these tools you need to make sure that they connect and talk to your CRM system. Doing so will give you one centralized location to manage all of your marketing tools.

As you can see, it is important to invest the proper time and planning to think through your marketing and sales process and develop an automation plan that fits your organizational goals.

We would like to learn more about what your firm is using for marketing automation. In exchange, we will provide you a free download of the Vision Mail Management Info Center. Also, be sure on the lookout for our next marketing automation blog.