Marketing Automation Platforms
Marketing automation platforms, like HubSpot, SharpSpring, and Pardot, provide an automated method of delivering content to association members and a means of capturing important business intelligence for association staff. Website visitors are no longer simply a number on a monthly traffic report. As people engage with your content you will know the name of the person, what content they read, how long they watched your video, etc. Marketing automation platforms allow your website to be a 24/7 employee.
Automated Workflow
Another feature of marketing automation platforms is that they handle the work of many a la carte systems that one must cobble together to achieve even a portion of the same results. And they provide the true ROI of a marketing time or cost investment by providing closed loop reporting.
Marketing automation platforms allow you to segment visitors by their interests. That means you can customize the information they see rather than provide ineffective generic content. The real value of marketing automation platforms is that they automate the process of nurturing your prospects through their buyer’s journey; through the marketing funnel and into the sales funnel. Once you collect the name and email of the prospect the system stores that information and when a prospect revisits the website the system knows it doesn’t need to ask for that information. This allows you to ask for new information in exchange for providing valuable content.
Over time the automation system will create a profile of the visitor, and their interactions with your website. This information is valuable to you and your team.
Inbound marketing is an effective way to acquire and retain clients, and marketing automation platforms are a tool that helps to deliver marketing tactics as efficiently as possible.
Marketing automation platforms are available via a subscription, typically with a minimum term.
Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.
Inbound marketing aims to create a connection with the target audience and solve the prospects’ problems. However, outbound marketing doesn’t have a specific target. Instead, it pushes content the audience may not be interested in, with the primary goal of making sales.
Below are the other differences between inbound marketing and outbound marketing:
Below is how inbound marketing can be aligned with the buyer’s journey to turn the targeted audience into loyal and long term customers.
With the three steps above, you can turn strangers into prospects and prospects into customers, then customers into brand loyalists and promoters.