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Recently, Inbound legends Hubspot surveyed a bevy of marketers to reveal their biggest marketing challenges. Check out the top three across respondents below:
Traffic and Leads - Quality vs Quantity
More more more leads is the key demand from most sales teams, which isn’t surprising. But they also want quality over quantity — then again, don’t we all? Nobody wants to waste their time chasing limp handshakes and wishy-washy leads, and that’s why this tricky balancing act is the numero uno challenge facing marketers.
Proving the ROI - Proof of Life
As ever, ROI remains a challenge for marketers. Data driven ROI measurement is coming along in leaps and bounds, but robust evidence can still be elusive. However, the benefits, as you’ll see below, are well worth getting right for the long term.
Securing Budget - Keeping up
The key benefit of demonstrable ROI is the understanding it creates and feeds into future budgets and securing those budgets, year-to-year. Marketing evolves as fast as the relentless evolution of the technology that carries it, and marketers are expected to stay ahead of the game and still deliver more with less.
So, the merry-go-round of generating leads, scratching around for evidence of ROI, and securing budgets is the modern marketer’s lot it would seem. If these challenges sound familiar, you’re in luck, because Marketing Automation tackles these top three issues, along with many others, head on. Crunch!
How Marketing Automation Solves Those Issues:
Generating traffic and leads
‘Spray and pray’ no longer cuts it when it comes to an Inbound Marketing strategy. It’s a question of control. The more control you have, the more leads you will generate and the better the quality — which will keep your sales team happy. The key benefit of Marketing Automation is the control you gain from the visibility of your campaigns. And, naturally, because you have a single view of it all, you can watch, learn and fine-tune the programme at any time. One down and we’re just getting started.
Proving ROI
What do we want! Data! When do we want it! Now! With Marketing Automation, you’ll go a long way to creating a robust programme of work that will deliver you tangible results that you can see. With a strong Marketing Automation platform, you’ll have visibility of your campaigns and be able to quickly drill down using tools that demonstrate and prove the ROI of your Inbound Marketing programme. Tick, that’s challenge number two in the bag.
Securing Budget
By getting robust evidence of your marketing activities from your ROI data, and trust me you will have data, you’ll find that you have the evidence needed to secure future marketing budgets. Next time you’re asked to slash your marketing budget, you’ll be able to say precisely and with evidence, what the result of the cut will be on ROI.
But Wait, There’s More...
Time poor? Become... Time Efficient
When you’ve got a to-do list as long as your arm, full of meetings with clients, stakeholders, product owners, and staff, every minute counts. But I don’t need to preach the platitude of ‘time is money’ with you as we’re all time poor — it’s just marketing folk seem more so than others. Quite simply, Marketing Automation increases your productivity by culling your niggly admin tasks and increasing the overall visibility of your sales process and customer journey.
Streamline Marketing Activities
That visibility comes from streamlining all your activities and campaigns. The Hubspot crew put it nicely when they say that marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Like a good story, there’s a beginning, a middle and an end which translates nicely into a buyer’s journey. Each persona has their own preferences and life cycle, a touchpoint you will be able to tailor and access directly along the way — all because of Marketing Automation.
If you’re interested in learning more about the importance of Marketing Automation and how much your business will benefit from automating your marketing activities, check out our eBook, “How to: A Guide to Marketing Automation”. We cover the various challenges that Marketing Automation can solve for your business, which marketing activities you can automate, how you can choose the right platform for your business needs, and much more.
