Marketing Automation Tool: A Checklist to assess before you buy one.
Sign up to get FREE CRM Trial
Automation is the key to stay ahead of today’s increasingly competitive B2B marketing landscape. Marketing automation software allows companies to automate various marketing tasks, such as emailing specific contacts or posting on social media.
Well, automation not only cancels out the boring tasks such as repetitive emailing jobs that leave you blurry-eyed but also creates a very dynamic environment and helps create a multi-channel marketing strategy. Through automated tracking and data collection, companies gain better insight into prospects, enabling them to modify their offerings as needed in order to reach valuable leads.
The main key to get your marketing system automated is organized processes, efficient outreach and time-cost saving.
Marketing automation is a digital extension of your team, performing tasks that once had to be done manually with more ease and accuracy. To reap all these benefits, you need to find a platform that your team members can embrace and that works well within your company’s process.
Explore your options for all the appropriate Marketing Automation Tools you can implement and then decide.
To help you out, let us explore a checklist of factors that should influence your decision and choice of marketing automation tool and you’ll have the smarts that you’ll need to select the right marketing automation platform for your B2B business.
Ease of Use:
A marketing automation tool/platform is something that your marketing team will be using all day, every day. Make their lives easier by familiarizing yourself with the user interface of the platforms you’re considering. You need to make sure whether they are easy and intuitive to use. Or whether your team will need special training to get familiarized with the working of the system. Or do they offer simple drag and drop interfaces to build important marketing elements like email newsletters, lead forms and so on?
HubSpot being one such marketing tool provides a very simple and easy to use user-interface that your marketing team can easily access and take full advantage of to reach your marketing goals.
Social Marketing:
Social marketing essentially involves the use of social media platforms to promote a product or service. Social media provides a broad scope for companies to interact and engage with current and potential customer and the general public. This enables them to draw data and leads. The Automation software you choose should have in-built social media marketing and management tools that lets users to share content directly across social networks to build engagement and generate new leads from time to time.
Deep and wide Integrations:
A marketing automation system is essentially linked to nearly your entire marketing team. Check if your marketing automation platform integrates well with your key marketing tools. A suitable marketing automation system connects with the best-in-class in order to integrate multiple functions such as customer relationship management systems (CRM) like HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM, etc., data intelligence and social media marketing.
Related Reads-
Hubspot CRM: The Ideal CRM for your Company
Build, Maintain and Improve your customer relationships with Zoho CRM
Personalization:
A marketing automation tool must have the ability to manage multiple customer lists and segment them based on criteria that matter to your business. Good platforms offer the ability to serve real-time messaging to website visitors as they interact with different elements of your website.
Customization:
Nobody needs a one-size-fits-all automation platform. You should check the level of customization your automation tool provides you with. Can you build custom reports that give metrics mattering your business? Does it allow you to pick and choose modules that you’ll use, instead of paying for a lot of crap you’ll never touch? Choose a marketing automation tool that is in sync with all your marketing wants and needs.
Metrics and Analytics:
Check if your marketing automation system can track, measure and analyze the interactions your users have with your marketing communication. A good platform not only has its own reports but also offers integrations with analytics. And an excellent platform will reveal critical hidden data that change your perception of customers while making it easy to visualize these insights and act on them quickly.
Mobile Access:
Having a mobile app is a sign of a platform that is mature and forward-thinking. Especially with today’s all-time connected consumer, you need the option of getting into your marketing automation platform even when you’re not at your desk to respond to queries.
Customer reviews and feed backs:
Reviews provide extensive insight into the product you will be buying. In this scenario, websites like Capterra offer reviews from verified users of various software solutions, allowing you to get an unbiased idea of what to expect from the platform you’re considering.
Customer Support:
Understand in advance how helpful their on boarding team will be to help you set up your systems in the early stages. If your setup is difficult, does the vendor offer a dedicated account manager who’s available whenever you face an issue?
Customer Life Cycle Management:
Forgetting about your customers after they have bought your product is a very good way of losing your customer base and their loyalty. Find an automation tool that will follow a user from the time they’re a lead to a prospect, a sales-qualified lead, a customer and finally, a loyal, repeat customer. It should continue to engage with your users long after they bought your products.
Pricing/Cost:
Cost isn’t as simple as just referring to the list price on a website. Here, Capterra can help you compare your options in this post. A knowledgeable buyer will consider more than just the cost of the software license and set-up fees, there is also staff training, costs for using an outside company to do your implementation, maintenance and migration costs and the hidden costs of implementing add-on services.
HubSpot has historically serviced the small and medium sized business market and has been the friendliest on the wallet. Similarly Zoho has also been a boon to marketers from all the niches.
Get automation and give a boost to your marketing campaigns right now. Keep this checklist in mind when selecting a marketing automation system and you’ll already be one step ahead. Not sure what tools you should be focusing on for your company’s needs or just having trouble getting started? Reach out to our experts today. We’re more than happy to answer any questions you may have. Contact Us or Email Us today.
Subscribe to our Newsletter!
Get the Latest Global Vision Technology Updates.
