While some folks may be completely unfamiliar with the term marketing automation, many others equate the phrase with “smarter” spam and/or impersonal email interactions. But marketing automation has matured greatly in just the last few years to something much more than just “drip” email campaigns. Marketing automation tools today are extremely powerful. Following are just a few of the capabilities you can experience with these amazing tools:
Email & Lead Nurturing
- Reporting metrics such as delivery rates, open rate, click-thru rate, bounce rate, and conversion rates
- Trigger emails via workflows or as a follow-up to form submissions
Lead Management
- Collect lead intelligence data about a lead’s interests, behaviors, level of activity, and integrate with your CRM
- Segment leads to send emails, trigger automation, monitor contacts in social media, personalize website content, and build reports
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Keyword research and SEO optimization tools built into the content creation tool
- Perform competitive research to evaluate how other businesses in your field are ranking over time for the keywords you're targeting
Anonymous Prospecting & Targeting
- See anonymous visitors and the companies and locations they're coming from
- See what pages these anonymous visitors are viewing before and after they ultimately enter your database
Social Media
- Provides the ability to create, schedule, and publish social media posts and monitor stream
- Determine which content resonates with your audience through likes, favorites, +1s, and retweets on connected social accounts
Blogging
- Gives tips to help optimize each blog post for SEO
- Integrated analytics to track blog views and subscribers over time and analyze what content is generating the most leads and customers
Landing Pages & Forms
- Optimize landing pages and easily A/B test landing pages or Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
- Provide data on which pages drive the most visits, contacts, and customers
Reporting and Analytics
- Integrated metrics that span the contacts database, marketing content, and website traffic
- Identify the influential pages/content on the website that drive visitors, contacts, or leads
The World Wide Web has dramatically changed our world, and has certainly made an enormous impact on marketing. Marketing automation, especially when combined with content marketing, is technology that gives marketers the tools with which to provide prospects with extraordinarily personal and relevant information, understand what’s working and what’s not, make constant improvements, convert more prospects to customers, and maximize ROI… it’s technology that really delivers!
