media junction® company blog

How to Get Started with Marketing Automation

Written by Media Junction | 8/7/19 3:25 PM

As your business grows, so should your marketing practices.

Business growth often comes with growing pains. The amount of time you’ll spend personalizing and optimizing emails, blogs, social media posts, campaigns—not to mention, the time it takes to track the results of all of these activities—can feel daunting and quite overwhelming. But it doesn't have to be that way—marketing automation can help. Automating your marketing efforts can minimize the growing pains of a small business and create efficiencies in your marketing campaigns.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to the tools and technology used to complete repetitive marketing processes and tasks, saving your team time. By utilizing marketing automation software, your team can work more efficiently and produce better content for visitors, leads, and customers.

Getting Started with Marketing Automation

Looking at marketing automation as a whole can be a bit overwhelming, so we recommend starting small. For example, if you’re not already utilizing forms, we would highly suggest creating and adding them to key areas of your website. Forms allow visitors to receive educational pieces of content in exchange for providing you with contact information, such as their name and email. Because of this mutually understood exchange of contact information for valuable content, forms are a great way to gather leads while learning more about what content visitors are engaging with on your website.

As you continue to receive more information from your forms, you can start to segment your leads into lists. By segmenting contacts, you can create content that is more focused and relevant to your buyer personas. As you probably know, not every lead is ready to buy, so segmentation allows you to better gauge where they are in the buying process and provide them with more personalized content.

Using Workflows for Lead Nurturing

Once your visitors have been segmented and content has been created, you can then create workflows for each list to nurture your leads according to their interests and pain points. These workflows should contain emails that move your visitor through the flywheel by including relevant and useful information, blogs, and calls to action that guide your contact through their buyer’s journey to eventually purchase your goods or services.

While list segmentation and workflows are only a small facet of marketing automation, you are laying the foundation necessary to improve your marketing efforts in the long run.  Inbound marketing helps provide a more personalized experience for customers to reduce friction in the flywheel. Adding in technology and software platforms (marketing automation) makes it easier for marketers, allowing you to help get the right content, to the right person at the right time.

Marketing Automation Made Easier with HubSpot’s Marketing Hub

If you are already creating great content that is generating new leads but spending too much time creating emails and newsletters, then it may be time to look at the Marketing Hub from HubSpot.

By utilizing marketing automation platforms like HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, you give yourself more time to focus on other aspects of your business—whether that's a new product launch, a company event, or just getting caught up with your overflowing inbox.

With HubSpot’s Marketing Hub you are able to easily:

  • Segment your contacts to different lists based on contact properties, email activities, and form submissions to allow better lead nurturing while optimizing click-through and open rates. 

  • Create customizable emails along with personalization tokens to really make your email stand out.

  • Customize lead flows to trigger specific content to targeted leads based on local time zones or whether or not the lead has completed a designated action.

Work smarter, not harder. Whether sending out targeted emails, getting a newsletter out on time, or starting that new social campaign—the HubSpot Marketing Hub is here to help.

Benefits of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub

One of the biggest benefits of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is the fact that everything is at your fingertips in one location. By utilizing Hubspot’s Marketing Hub, you no longer need to worry about managing various programs, apps, and accounts. You can now focus your time on creating better content and marketing assets.

Marketing teams love how the Hub gives them the ability to easily view the results of various marketing campaigns and easily personalize content to nurture leads and increase overall ROI.

Aside from creating beautiful marketing content and being able to easily analyze the results, you will also gain access to training resources from HubSpot Academy as well as 24/7 HubSpot support, which will help you get the most value for your investment in the Hub.

No matter which marketing automation platform you choose, make sure it fulfills your needs and can scale right along with your business growth.Your business is unique, so what you may need from a marketing automation tool could be drastically different from others. Contact us to discuss your marketing automation needs and to explore the tools available to you.