This is the blog transcript of our video “What is Marketing Automation and How Can You Use It?”. If you’d like to see more of our videos, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
By now, you’ve probably at least heard the term marketing automation. If you haven’t…just where have you been?
Whether you’ve heard of marketing automation or not, keep watching this video to get an idea of what it is and how you can really use it to grow your business…without having to spend a ton of time and money to do it.
Hey everyone, I’m Ian Campbell, CEO of Mission Suite. Before we jump into today’s video, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos.
For the past 10 years, I’ve been working with clients to help them implement marketing automation software and figure out how they can use it to grow their businesses. It can certainly be overwhelming at first but if you break it down it becomes a lot easier to understand.
So let’s start from the beginning – just what is marketing automation?
People might use a bunch of different names to identify marketing automation – drip campaigns, workflows, auto-responders, journeys, etc. And those are all key pieces of the tools you’ll use for marketing automation but they don’t really define marketing automation.
Simply put, marketing automation is the ability to use your CRM and your email tools to automate a lot of the task based work that goes along with marketing and sales.
If you’ve been in marketing or sales for a while, you know exactly the kind of task based work I’m talking about.
It’s the follow up email that you have to send to everyone you just prospected. It’s really the same email every time but you still have to send it out…and it can be tedious (which is why you end up with a stack of business cards sitting next to your computer).
It’s the follow up call reminder you have to schedule so that you don’t forget to reconnect with a prospect and lose out on an opportunity.
It’s the marketing review you have to pour over to find the leads that have shown enough interest to do a more aggressive follow up with.
Obviously there’s a lot more than just these three tasks that you have to keep doing regularly but this gives us a good starting point. And the point here is that all of this task based work is challenging. It’s boring, it’s tedious, and it’s not why we got into sales, it’s not why we enjoy marketing, and it’s not why we got into business. But it has to get done to make sure you’re not losing business and to see any real growth.
Marketing automation allows you to set up trigger based rules that will do all of that for you. Marketing automation allows you to add a prospect to your CRM and automatically send out a follow up email to them asking for a meeting (or whatever your next step is).
Marketing automation will automatically schedule follow up tasks for you so you don’t have to think about it.
Marketing automation (or more specifically, your marketing automation software) will monitor the way that your marketing leads are interacting with you, your content, and your emails and automatically elevate the “hot” leads to the top of the pile to let you know that they might be ready for a conversation.
And best of all…it does it all automatically. You don’t have to worry about remembering to do it yourself.
Before we keep going, I have two questions for you:
Are these the types of things that would be helpful for you to automate? If so, let me know by hitting the like button on this video.
Second, are you in sales, marketing or a business owner? Let me know in the comments what side of this equation you’re coming from so that we can make sure that our future videos on this topic are focused!
So let’s talk a little bit about the tools that you’re going to be using to automate all of this.
There are quite a few tools that you’ve probably heard of for sales and marketing automation. Of course Mission Suite is my favorite (you can register for a demo using the link in the description), but there are plenty of others as well.
A lot of them tend to be fairly expensive but if you poke around, you’ll find some that can be relatively price competitive. I can only speak to Mission Suite’s pricing, but I’m fairly confident that we have one of the better pricing options in the business.
Whichever way makes sense for you to go, these all in one systems are phenomenal to pull everything you need for marketing automation into one system (namely your CRM, signup forms and email tools) and they tend to just make the work that you need to do to get things set up really smooth.
If you’re not in a position to use an all in one system, then I highly recommend you get familiar with a tool called Zapier. There’s a link to it in the description of this video and it’s one of my favorite tools out there. We use Zapier all the time here at Mission Suite and it’s really impressive in its effectiveness.
Basically it allows you to create triggers for some of the things you do and combine them with corresponding actions that will happen as a result.
So, for example, if you add a new contact to your Google Contacts, Zapier will look at that as the “trigger event” that triggers the action of sending a pre-defined email to that contact.
Or maybe you want your Facebook content posted to Twitter as well – you can set up a new Facebook post as a trigger event, which will trigger the action of posting that content to Twitter as well.
There are endless possibilities that you can explore with this type of tool and the automation that it can provide so, again, I encourage you to get familiar with it to see what it can do for you!
And lastly, let’s talk a bit about what you can use marketing automation for.
Over the course of the next few videos, we’re going to do a deep dive into this question and I’ll get really specific about what you can do with marketing automation but for now, I’ll leave you with two key ideas:
Marketing and Sales.
Think about all of the things that go along with your marketing efforts. Sending email newsletters, following up on content requests and website form fills, segmenting your marketing database based on what people show interest in.
All those things can be made a lot easier by using marketing automation.
Now think about all of the things that go along with selling. Follow up emails, task reminders, all of the different things that you need to do that don’t involve a direct conversation.
All can be a lot easier using marketing automation.
If you want to check out how Mission Suite can help you automate your sales and marketing tasks, there’s a link to sign up for one of our demo webinars in the description below.
Hey I hope you got something out of this video. And if you did, go ahead and give it a thumbs up and maybe a share so that others can see it too. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos and while you’re at it, check out these videos too!
We’ll see you next time around!