There arrives a point in every startup founder’s entrepreneurial journey, when you have to take a crucial marketing decision – whether to invest in a viable marketing automation tool or not. What you need to keep in mind is that you have to first find out if your startup needs marketing automation or not. If you do it too early, it might be a burden on your resources, too late and you have been leaving money on the table for too long.
The following are the signs that you should look for, if your startup is silently demanding for a marketing automation tool.
Business clues to look out for before investing in a marketing automation tool
1.Not Enough Leads: If you have a landing page with a contact form in place on your website and you are not getting leads or if the only responses that you are getting are junk leads rather than actual leads – this should be a pretty clear sign to invest in a marketing automation tool. People will normally reach out to you when they want to buy your product or hire your services. You need a marketing automation tool to craft attractive landing pages and offer content in order to convert anonymous visitors to leads.
2.Leads Nurturing: Maybe you are generating leads, but you’re having a hard time converting them to customers simply because you’re overwhelmed by the quantity of leads generated. With marketing automation, you will be able to place a rock-solid email marketing program to nurture your leads. Many leads fill out your contact form but not all of them are ready to buy immediately. They should be nurtured with follow-up drip emails, educational content and offers so that they can continuously nurtured and they check out what you have to offer. Marketing automation will help you nurture and engage with your leads as you gradually guide them through the buying cycle.
3.Improve Conversion Rate: If your landing pages aren’t converting visitors to leads, then you should consider optimizing your landing pages for conversion. In a research, Search Engine Land found that across industries, the average landing page conversion rate was 2.35%, yet the top 25% are converting at 5.31% or higher. Improved conversion rate is one of the many things you can do on a marketing automation software. You can also integrate your landing page creation tool like Instapage with marketing automation tools to oversee and improve conversion rates. Many marketing automation tools have in built landing page creators and also help you oversee how your CTAs and landing pages are performing. You can A/B test your landing pages to find out which one is more suited for you.
4.Lead Management: Amassed a large number of leads, but have no clue what they want or are interested in? Create smart lists in your marketing software automation so that you can segment different customers, based on their location, demographics, interest and tons of other segments. You can send out personalised offers to different segments and see and improvement in the way your leads are responding to your offers.
5.Lead Scoring: With so many leads coming your way, it is extremely difficult to take a look at every single lead closely. Here’s where lead scoring comes in. Lead scoring helps you assign values to every action that a visitor or lead takes on your website. For example, you may assign a free trial form fill up 20 points, an e-book download 10 points, email open 2 points and clicking a link inside it 5 points. This is how you can prioritize leads and determine who is closer to making a purchase and contact them the moment they are looking at your website.
6.Content: Coming up with good, crisp content is not an easy task. You know it is time to invest in marketing automation when blog content are not ranking well and your competitors are zooming ahead. With the help of inbuilt content management system and SEO tools, you will be able to optimize the content. A word of caution, invest in a marketing automation tool only if you have enough content and a strategy to create content for the long term.
7.Marketing Applications: If you are trying to reduce your marketing woes and signing up for various marketing applications to reduce your woes, trust us, you’re just increasing them. With marketing automation, you have everything on one single tool, all you need is to login and start marketing. Say goodbye to different tools for landing pages, social media, email, lead nurturing, SEO, content management etc. Invest in a robust marketing automation tool which integrates all your online marketing channels on one tool.
8.Sales Response time: Many small businesses rely on small Sales teams; in some cases, the founders take care of every inbound enquiry. You send a wrong signal to leads when your response times are late. You might be travelling, too busy to respond, have a lot of tasks to accomplish. Why let leads wait for you get back? Invest in a robust marketing automation tool to start engaging with your leads from the very moment they fill out your website contact form. Research from InsideSales.com shows that 35–50% of sales go to the vendor that responds first. Take the lead and start engaging with your leads right away.
If you’re now ready to implement Marketing Automation for your startup, then please fill this form and we will be glad to reach out!
