Marketing automation is terrific for making repetitive tasks go faster, with fewer errors. The concept used to only refer to email marketing automation. While email marketing automation remains important, today tools exist that can do much more. Hubspot Inbound tools are a popular choice for many businesses.
But having the right tools only helps if you know what to do with them. You can buy the best woodworking tools available, but it doesn't mean you'll be able to build an heirloom dining table if you've never done woodworking before.
To successfully use tools like Hubspot Inbound, they need to be within the context of an overall marketing strategy. You can put leads into a pre-set marketing schedule, but if you haven't gone to the effort of making the marketing content useful for their needs, you're wasting everyone's time, and possibly coming across as intrusive to potential customers.
Building a marketing automation strategy requires doing research up front so messages that are triggered for potential customers are relevant to how they interact with your company. Paying attention to your social media interactions can be useful to this end. Your marketing automation strategy should have measurable goals, and you should be willing to test and measure various calls to action, subject lines, and content for response
If you don't provide high quality, fresh content, you're selling yourself short and potentially letting good customers slip away. The marketing process isn't always linear. People make their decisions via any number of paths. Marketing automation tools like Hubspot Inbound trigger communications based on your leads' history with your company, but they can't fulfill expectations unless you're giving leads meaty information they won't find elsewhere through multiple channels. Without relevant, customized experiences, leads that come into your marketing automation system can feel depersonalized, as if they're just one among thousands of other leads.
It can be tempting to buy email lists to jump-start your marketing automation push, but this isn't ideal. Have you ever looked at hothouse flowers in a local garden center at the beginning of warm weather? Often they've been given a lot of fertilizer so they'll grow and bloom and look terrific for customers. But they may not have been nurtured properly, so the roots may be very shallow, and they may not thrive when you set them out.
True inbound lead generation builds stronger relationships with clients.
Likewise, buying email lists can't give your lead database the "roots" it needs to thrive with the rest of the content you plan to provide. Bringing in leads through outstanding content generation in a well-planned inbound marketing strategy is ultimately more productive, though it represents more work up front. But you can still use marketing automation tools to help with repetitive tasks if you nurture leads correctly.
Hubspot Inbound tools are based on the principles of attracting, converting, closing, and delighting customers. They include a content management system and tools for creating calls to action and landing pages. You also get tools for tracking keywords, search engine optimization, scheduling blog posts, and email-based lead nurturing. What's more, you can create workflows that trigger emails relevant to specific user interactions on your site. And to make sure it all gets results, these tools include analytics so you can effectively track return on your marketing automation investment.
Hubspot Inbound tools for marketing automation can work extraordinarily well if they're used in the context of an overall marketing automation and inbound marketing plan. To keep your plan on track, analytics and reports let you learn what people respond to and what problems they're trying to solve. All this information is invaluable in preparing sales team members to contact potential customers.
Tools for marketing automation should also help you and customers take the next right step. Make information available to customers, but guide them to the next step in the process, whether that's subscribing to a mailing list, downloading a white paper, or viewing a video. People make decisions in a non-linear fashion, but you can use marketing automation tools like Hubspot Inbound to guide them at every step, so they can access the information they want without frustration, and without feeling pressured to make a decision they're not ready for.
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