Supercharge Your CRM with Marketing Automation in 7 Steps Posted on September 9, 2015July 10, 2019 by Jessica Lunk Every small business should have a plan for customer relationship management (CRM). Sometimes CRM is managed through spreadsheets, notes, datebooks and page mark. Many small businesses seem to struggle with CRM while others are sailing along. As technology has advanced, so has CRM. Today, it is possible to automate tasks and updates to data in your CRM. By supercharging your CRM with marketing automation, you can lower overhead cost and receive better metrics to track your CRM activities. Learn the system. If you don’t use all the features of your new cellphone, it’s no big deal. But not learning about and using the features of your CRM and marketing automation system can cost you money in lost prospects and customers. Take the time to learn as much about your CRM and marketing automation as possible. And steer clear of CRM and marketing automation systems that are overly complex for your business needs. Enter data consistently. Your CRM and marketing automation will function only as well as the quality of the data that you enter. Reduce human error by automating as much data entry as you can. When importing bulk data from spreadsheets, make sure data is formatted correctly and that fields are correctly matched. Use drop-down fields instead of text boxes to reduce data inconsistency. Make it a part of your daily routine. Once you get your customer data entered, it is important to use this valuable tool daily. Start with simple tasks like setting automation to absorb data from your online lead forms and respond with automated messages. Monitor your system. Make sure data from forms are being properly absorbed into the system and segmented the way you want it to be. Consistently monitoring your data systems will save you from catastrophic mistakes when it comes to nurturing your leads. Set up a drip campaign. Drip campaigns are automated emails that help with sales efforts by trickling messages to prospects, with the goal of funneling them into becoming customers. Choose a system that comes with a wide choice of attractive and professional looking templates to help you easily create effective drip and email campaigns. Monitor reports. Each campaign you set up with marketing automation can be monitored with easy to read reports. It is here where you can fine-tune your campaigns and conduct A-B testing to improve your results. Like human salespeople, efforts should be tracked, monitored, and improved to make the most of your assets. Using data from reports can contribute to improving CRM. Commit to your CRM. Once you begin to see results from your marketing automation,you will better understand the full value the system brings to your organization and CRM. The longer you use marketing automation to improve CRM, the better you will be at using its full range of abilities. The better you become at using marketing automation, the more valuable the tool will become. Contact us to get your questions answered or try a free live online demo. Take your CRM to the next level with Hatchbuck.
3 Unique Trends to Watch in Marketing Automation Posted on September 2, 2015June 18, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Small business owners consistently have competing priorities. Your time is limited, and often that time gets consumed with solving crises. It can be tough to continually find new leads, nurture them and convert them to new customers. If leads are neglected, your revenue will dry up. Luckily, there’s a solution for small business owners. Marketing automation has been developed to help businesses work with their leads more efficiently, alleviating the strain on resources and time allocation. Marketing automation also helps prioritize leads and alert you when they are ready to buy so that you don’t let them slip away by inaction. In today’s digital landscape, marketing automation is a necessity for businesses that want to grow. The technology is becoming more sophisticated as developers respond to marketers’ feedback. Here’s where we see marketing automation going in the future: 1. More Streamlined Software As the buying experience becomes more fragmented, marketers will want to work with increasingly streamlined software. Streamlined marketing automation means giving marketers all of the sales and marketing data they need in the same place, prioritizing leads and offering up holistic reports for marketing campaigns. By putting sales and marketing data together, each team has a better idea of what the other is doing, so that they can work together to increase revenue. Sales teams can offer feedback to marketers to help make campaigns more targeted, while marketers can prepare the sales team when a new marketing campaign is launching. As the marketing automation industry becomes more complex, streamlining will have to become inclusive and categorize even more data, so that a diverse list of companies can use it. 2. Mobile Optimization With mobile marketing growing and mobile sales on the rise for both B2B and B2C companies, marketing automation software will have to focus on reaching customers via mobile platforms. Indicators show that by 2017, 30 percent of retail purchases will come from mobile devices. Marketing efforts will have to ensure campaigns work across mobile devices, such as creating mobile-optimized email campaigns. 3. Predicting Behavior Marketing automation systems already analyze current leads for their sales potential at every point of contact. This analysis comes from how the prospect interacts with designated triggers such as webpages, forms, emails and links. However, marketers need a peek into the future, and this comes with better predictive behavior analysis. Instead of understanding where a customer is now, wouldn’t you like to know where they will be in the future on your scale of lead-to-repeat customer? Features like contact scoring will continue to improve to help marketers predict future behavior. Are ready to embrace the future of marketing for your business, or still trying to wrap your head around marketing automation? Check out our 2 minute overview to see how marketing automation can help your business prioritize leads and close more deals.
Why Are 98% of Buyers Seeking Marketing Automation? Posted on April 29, 2015June 18, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Even though small businesses have less capital to invest in marketing technology, marketing automation is a resource that can move the needle in a big way. Why small business can’t ignore marketing automation any longer… According to a recent Software Advice survey of small business owners looking for marketing technology products, 98% of buyers are looking for dedicated marketing automation software for the first time. Half of these buyers are still using manual methods to manage and email contacts. If you are still using these manual methods (pen and paper, spreadsheets, and one off emails), it’s time to learn how marketing technology can help you grow your business without growing your business footprint. Marketing Automation optimizes your sales and marketing process. Lead management is the number one reason small business owners are looking for marketing automation according to the Software Advice research. Marketing automation allows you to automatically and dynamically organize contacts and score sales leads. That’s a huge time saver for small businesses who have relied on manual methods to update their database in the past. Marketing automation places contacts in the right bucket automatically so that you can send more meaningful content to different segments of your audience. This tailored approach builds brand awareness and trust to move contacts down the sales funnel from prospect to customer. Core functionality is at the top of the marketing automation buyer’s list. 74% of buyers say that contact management is an important marketing automation feature. On the contrary, only 4% mentioned social media marketing features as important. When it comes to marketing automation, buyers are really looking for that core functionality that is central to their business. While social media marketing gets a lot of airtime, more traditional marketing methods like email marketing really drive results for small businesses. In fact, every $1 invested in email marketing yields a $44.25 return, according to Exact Target. Marketing automation makes running your business simpler and easier. Small businesses have shied away from marketing automation in the past – partly because the solutions were too robust, and partly because they were reluctant to automate and give up control of the very personal interactions they have with their audience. But as marketing automation adoption increases among small businesses, they’re realizing the benefit of maintaining their personal touch, while leveraging the ability to scale.
4 Resolutions You Can Stick to with Marketing Automation Posted on January 9, 2015June 18, 2018 by Jessica Lunk We’re just over a week into the new year…have you broken your new year’s resolutions yet? Each year, small business owners strive to get more organized, build better relationships with their customers and prospects, create a sales and marketing process and drive sustainable growth. Marketing automation tools built for small businesses can help you achieve and stick to these four resolutions in 2015. Get More Organized Fresh year, fresh start. If you’re like a lot of small businesses, you probably have one homogenous bucket of contacts that you would love to clean up and organized. Maybe you have two lists – one of customers, and one of prospects – but you can’t get much more detailed than that. Marketing automation helps you automatically and dynamically segment your contacts by their unique interests, their stage in the buying journey and their readiness to buy. It’s a bit like going from grayscale to a rainbow of contacts that each fit in their own ribbon of color. Contacts fit nicely into their own compartments. With an easier way of keeping your contacts organized, you can deliver more strategic, organized communication, increasing engagement. Build Better Relationships with Customers and Prospects This new year, many of us are striving to put away distractions – like our smart phones and tablets – and put more time into building better relationships with the people who really matter. While you may think that marketing automation is just one more technology that separates us from the people we should get to know better, it actually helps to cultivate more meaningful conversations. Marketing automation automatically tracks the online history of each contact automatically, so you can see what pages on your site they’ve visited, what emails they’ve received, and what types of content they read. With more information, you come to conversations with your customers and prospects prepared to have a productive, meaningful dialogue. In addition, marketing automation takes those ho-hum administrative tasks off of your plate, and triggers notifications to let you know which contacts are highly interested in your product or service. This makes it simple to connect with prospects that are really interested in learning more about your business. With marketing automation, you can focus more time on building strong relationships with ripe opportunities and loyal customers, rather than chasing cold leads. Create a Sales and Marketing Process You’d like to see your business grow this year, and you know you can’t do it without building better processes. When your database is more organized and everyday tasks can be automated, you can put a much smoother sales and marketing process in place. Without marketing automation, many businesses build up a large sales team that chases after cold leads. However, with a scalable marketing automation system in place, marketing nurtures prospects with personalized content, heating them up for the sales team. Then, the sales team is automatically alerted when hot prospects are ready to buy. The result is, individual sales and marketing leaders can be much more productive and process-driven because they are actively pulling in the right prospects to have meaningful conversations with. Drive Sustainable Growth We could all be a little less wasteful, whether we’re trying to recycle more or striving to get the most out of the talents of our small business team. With marketing automation in place, you can build high-quality relationships with many more prospects and customers – without adding supplementary team members. In addition, since marketing automation provides insights into which marketing channels are performing the best, and which sales leaders are closing the most business, you can make smart, sustainable investments in growth. Finally, marketing automation continually nurtures new leads you acquire. So if a new contact is not ready to make a purchase today, they aren’t tossed away. Instead, marketing automation continues to educate and nurture them, recycling them into a hot prospect. Get more organized, build better relationships, be more process-driven, and drive sustainable growth – imagine if you could stick to each of these resolutions in the new year. With the right tools for your small business, you can make 2015 the year of marketing automation, and the year of growth.
The White Paper – A Cornerstone of Marketing Automation Posted on October 3, 2014June 18, 2018 by Jessica Lunk When it comes to marketing automation, content is key to attracting new prospects and nurturing them through the sales process. A white paper is one of the primary building blocks of your marketing automation strategy. Here’s how white papers fit into marketing automation, and how to build one: Attract New Prospects Marketing automation uses online forms to capture information about the leads that are visiting your website via search engines, online ads, and social media properties. However, most people don’t just offer up their name and email address online without getting something in return. Offering a white paper on your website creates a give/get scenario. You can give your audience a great white paper that will educate them on an challenge and it’s solution. In return, they’ll give up their credentials, like name, email address, title, company size and other information. You get a new lead. Nurture Prospects Leads generated through inbound marketing are extremely valuable. By downloading your resource, they’ve raised their hand and said, “Hey, I’ve got a problem you can help me with!” Once you’ve collected information about a contact through an online form submission for a white paper you’ve offered on your site, you have a fresh new lead. The worst thing to do would be to let that lead sit on the sidelines, waiting for them to come back to your site on their own, or putting them on your generic email blast list. Instead, marketing automation nurtures these leads with relevant content until they are ready to make a purchasing decision. With a white paper as a resource, you have a foundation of content for fueling marketing automation’s nurturing process. You’ve already put a significant amount of content in your white paper, and have it well organized. To get more milage out of it for the nurturing process you can extrapolate on the main ideas to create blog posts, infographics, guides, checklists, slideshares, and other types of content to fuel a hyper-relevant email campaign to follow the download. How to Build a Whitepaper So what does a good white paper look like? GOAL: The goal of a white paper is to be informative, educational and solution-oriented. It’s not meant to be a hard sell. Providing long-form information in an easily digested format is a doorway to building brand awareness among your audience and building trust in your brand. In addition, while you want to educate and provide value to your audience, you don’t need to write a text-book or dissertation. Make it simple for your reader to understand the problem and the solution. BRANDING: A white paper can demonstrate your thought leadership on a topic, and is a great opportunity to showcase your brand. The tone, look, and feel should match your branding and value proposition. For instance, at Hatchbuck, we provide simple marketing automation software to small businesses. It wouldn’t make sense for us to publish a complex white paper using overly-technical jargon. We keep our resources in line with our brand, not only following our visual brand guidelines, but also echoing our value proposition of simplicity by using simple language and organization to help small business owners be more effective at marketing. ORGANIZATION: Topic: choose a pain-point your audience has that you can address. Problem: empathize with your audience by outlining the problem. Solution: add value to your audience by outlining a course of action they can take to solve their problem. Awareness: reinforce your authority on the topic and introduce your audience to your business. A white paper is a cornerstone to your marketing automation strategy. Hit on an obstacle your audience is facing, and serve up a solution to drive new leads, and nurture them with relevant follow-up content until they convert.
4 Reasons Marketing Automation Helps Businesses Be More (Not Less) Human Posted on September 24, 2014June 18, 2018 by Jessica Lunk Marketing automation doesn’t suck the human element out of your marketing. In fact, it augments it by giving owners and marketers better information about their prospects so that they can get into real, authentic conversations. With marketing automation, you don’t eliminate the human relationship with your prospects and customers – you can actually strengthen it. Here’s how: Turns Handshakes into Conversations When you meet someone for the first time, it’s customary to give them a handshake (or a high-five if you’re on the Hatchbuck team). In our increasingly digital and global economy, your website is often the first interaction someone will have with your business – it’s like a handshake with new prospects. But where does your relationship go from there? In the physical world, you’d introduce yourselves, exchange business cards and have a brief conversation, advancing your relationship. Marketing automation does the same thing. A prospect visits your site. If you’ve caught their attention, they’ll leave their credentials behind by filling out an online form. Then, you can send them an introduction email, and track their visit the next time they come to your site. Without the ability to collect those important contact details, it would be as if you’d never met. Helps You Get to Know One Another So you’ve met your new prospects, and got the conversation rolling. As they continue to interact with your brand, you’ll have a better idea of what types of content they find the most engaging. You’ll learn more about their challenges and the solutions they are looking for as they visit specific pages on your site and click links in your emails. You can then continue the conversation, by delivering personalized emails that address their greatest obstacles, moving the ball down the court. Like a good friend, marketing automation helps you listen to your audience, so you can deliver the information they need, building trust in your brand. Helps You Take Relationships to the Next Level Remember the days when you used to have a landline, and a sales person would call and interrupt you in the middle of dinner? No one likes unsolicited calls out of the blue, and as a salesperson, cold calling prospects can be an unproductive use of your time. Wouldn’t you rather be talking to prospects who are receptive to learning more about your solution? With marketing automation, you track how prospects are engaging with your website, forms and emails. It’s like receiving a friendly wink, letting you know that it’s okay to reach out to them – they are ready to go to take your relationship to the next level. Leaves Robotic Tasks to the Robots Staying organized makes a big difference in the way you run your business. At the same time, tracking, filing, and following-up can get time consuming if you’re doing it manually – that’s a lot of sticky notes! And wouldn’t you rather use that extra time to build relationships with prospects, and make sure your customers are completely satisfied? Marketing automation takes those organizational and administrative tasks off your plate, like: Sending thank you emails to prospects who download a resource or request more information. Sending a follow-up email after your initial point of contact. Creating follow-up tasks when a prospect takes an action, like visiting a certain page, or reaching a specific tag score. Nurturing prospects through step-by-step, personalized email campaigns, building awareness of – and trust in – your brand. Dynamically segmenting contacts by their interests, tagging them based on their online activity. Tracking every activity along the way, like the pages they’ve visited, the emails they’ve opened, the email links they’ve clicked, and the forms they’ve filled out. Marketing automation helps you put the human touch back into your business by giving you insight into what your prospects and customers need. At the same time, automating those no-brainer steps – like sending a thank you, sending a sequence of emails, or creating a follow-up task – saves time for you and your team. With better insights and more time, you can be focused on the human elements of your business, such as speaking with hot prospects and delivering excellent customer service.