How to leverage marketing automation for business benefit

In this blog, we discuss how leveraging marketing automation to its fullest potential is a game-changer for scaling your marketing efforts and your business.

Marketing automation can be a powerful tool that helps your team work smarter, not harder, and generates lasting returns. From automating team collaborations to enabling email sequences for follow-ups, programming automatic list segmentation and more — leveraging marketing automation to its fullest sets you up to save time, and boost productivity and profits in one fell swoop. However, badly planned or implemented automation can damage your efforts, just as much as well-executed automation can help you scale. 

Here’s how to ensure you’re getting the most out of your marketing automation investment. 

Take a holistic approach to marketing automation

Your marketing automation efforts shouldn’t focus on making it easier for your marketing team, or your business — it should improve your prospects’, leads’ and customers’ experience with your brand. 

For your marketing automation to work at its best, it needs to be customer-centric rather than focus on one section of the marketing funnel. A fantastic pay-off is that it does make your team’s job easier and boost your bottom line, but unless you’re powering your marketing automation strategy and implementation with a holistic eye on the customer experience, you’ll be setting yourself up for failure as tactics become unsustainable or your lose out on precious, revenue-driving opportunities along the customer journey. 

Leveraging your marketing automation in relation to holistic customer experience

Buying behaviour has changed, and how we envision and work with, the buyer’s journey has adapted. These days, we work with an expanded view of the buyer's journey — shifting from the linear funnel to the dynamic flywheel. 

Marketing automation comes into its own when thought of in the context of a flywheel, instead of the traditional Marketing and Sales Funnel. Using the flywheel analogy, you build your marketing automation around a contextual, efficient experience based on each individual’s needs — rather than blindly pushing them through a funnel that assumes each person’s needs, and the pace is uniform. This lays strong foundations for your marketing automation’s success and efficiency. Read more about the HubSpot Flywheel Model and how it drives business growth and customer delight, here. 

Power A Well-Crafted Strategy With The Right Software

With the flywheel underpinning your automation strategy and guaranteeing it’s customer-centric, you’re well on your way to leveraging your marketing automation efforts to their fullest potential. However, even the best-crafted strategies break down unless they’re implemented with the right software. Let’s take a look into additional key contributing factors to a successful strategy, and which marketing automation tools can help you realise one to the best effect. 

Creating an effective marketing automation strategy

Ensure your strategy takes the following into consideration: your buyer personas, and customer journey maps. 

• Buyer personas. Your buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer. They’re based on market research, actual data about existing customers and a few educated guesses. These help you relate to the correct audience and identify who it is you want to market your products and services to. Dive into the details with our very own Client Services Director, Jess Gamble, in What Is A Buyer Persona, And Why Is It Important?

• Customer journey maps. These visually represent your customer’s journey with your company — from prospect, to lead, to a customer, and (hopefully) brand ambassador. Knowing the process your customers follow to interact with your company to achieve their goal — solving their pain point, obtaining a product or securing a service —  ensures you can plan appropriate marketing automation around each touchpoint. 

Drawing on insights from these sources, you’ll have a clear idea of which kind of marketing automation is most appropriate, and when  — effectively your strategy. To ensure your strategy remains relevant, review both your personas and customer journey maps regularly, and update these based on fresh data insights.   

Finding the right software 

Arming your marketing team with a data-driven strategy is half the battle won. Equipping them with the right software to implement that strategy forms the second half. There are too many tools to count, but if you’re serious about your business choosing reputable software can be one of the most important decisions you’ll make. 

Your marketing automation software streamlines marketing workflows, automates marketing tasks and helps you measure the outcomes of your campaigns. At Huble Digital, we’re proud to specialise in what G2 rates as the best, based on more than 7,000 reviews: HubSpot Marketing Hub. Check out the unbiased user reviews that put them in the lead, or get a detailed breakdown of how it helps you attract the right audience, convert more visitors into customers and run complete inbound marketing campaigns at scale on one platform, on the HubSpot Marketing Hub product page.

How Huble Digital Can Help

We’ve built our Marketing and Growth services around the HubSpot platform because we absolutely love how it lets you provide personalised marketing automation and contextual outreach, at scale — all from one, easy-to-use platform. 

Contact us and set up a meeting with one of our consultants to discuss your marketing automation needs, and answer any questions you may have. It’s a surefire way to ensure you’re leveraging your marketing automation to its full potential and building scalable foundations.