The Benefits of Marketing Automation and Why You Need It

MSPs need good websites that make it easy for potential buyers to research their service offerings and contact the company if they are interested in finding out more.

You have the website, but what happens once a lead lands there or clicks submit on that contact form? If you answered with “we follow up” that can mean a lot of things (or not enough), and you could be missing out on a large portion of business if following up isn’t quite what it needs to be.

Why Marketing Automation? Because Following Up Isn’t Good Enough

Simply following up with a single email or phone call to a potential buyer generally isn’t good enough. In today’s market, it takes an average of between 7 and 13 touches (points of communication) before a sale is made. So if your lead follow up process looks something like

1. Lead submits contact form.
2. Salesperson sends an email back.

Then you’ve got some work to do. We get it, 7 to 13 touches requires a salesperson to be very organized and diligent in following up with leads. But what if we told you that your sales team barely needs to be involved (if at all) in this process and that marketing automation can do it for them?

Marketing automation is such an easy concept because it’s exactly what it sounds like. Once a campaign has been planned and set into motion you leave it to run and rake in the new customers. Sounds too good to be true, right? But it isn’t.

In fact, companies who use marketing automation claim to see a 451 percent increase in qualified leads. That’s a pretty big number. If you’re wondering why marketing automation is so powerful, I’ll break it down for you.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation

The market for MSPs is a competitive one, with the majority of potential buyers scouring the web for information from a multitude of different companies. Potential buyers won’t really see what’s different about you until they’ve gotten to know you a bit better, and they won’t be able to do that unless you’re nurturing an ongoing relationship with them.

The benefits of marketing automation help you attract, nurture and close more leads because marketing automation allows you to:

1. Determine a lead’s content preferences and automatically provide them with content that will guide them further down the funnel.
2. Send relevant and timely messaging that can be delivered via email, messaging or social platforms.
3. Retarget leads around the internet with content that is relevant to what they have already consumed.
4. Tailor email content to their stage in the buyer journey.
5. Keep in touch with potential buyers who have reached out, without needing to contact each individually, so you’re never “dropping the ball”.
6. Amplify created content that may otherwise sit on your blog or downloads page, barely touched.
7. Give each lead a score so you know how close they are to a purchase and how much personal attention they should be given, making your sales team’s efforts more effective.

But I Already Have an Email Newsletter

If you have never been introduced to the benefits of marketing automation, it’s understandable that you might think your scheduled email newsletter is good enough. Truth is, organizations that use marketing automation generate twice as many leads as those simply sending email blasts. That’s because an email blast does not tailor content and timing of delivery to the needs of each lead.

Email is still a large part of marketing automation for many organizations, but it doesn’t stop there. Marketing automation often takes advantage of:

1. Blog posts
2. Social platforms
3. Landing pages
4. Forms
5. Calls to action
6. CRM
7. Retargeting
8. Direct mail
9. And more

Combine these elements with personalized touches (phone calls, webinars, etc.) and you have a compelling marketing campaign that blows your little email newsletter out of the water.

This Sounds Like a Lot of Work

It may seem like a daunting task when you are first getting started with marketing automation, largely because content needs to be created before it can be delivered, but once you’ve set up a campaign you can reap the benefits of marketing automation for weeks or months to come.

If you want to close more leads, you can’t afford to have a weak inbound marketing strategy. In Hubspot’s 2017 State of Inbound report, 70 percent of organizations said that their top marketing priority was to convert more leads into sales and 63 percent said that their biggest marketing challenge was generating more traffic and leads.

Take a huge step towards solving these challenges with marketing automation. Contact Total Product Marketing today to discuss a tailored marketing automation strategy for your business.