Eliminate Startup Barriers with Marketing Automation

Entering a highly competitive market space, joining the persistent race to attract prospects, and devising strategies to successfully reach out to them can be enormously challenging- especially as a startup, when you do not have an extensive marketing department with sufficient resources. However, plenty of automation tools and programs are now available in the market, which can help make your marketing efforts more efficient and productive.

In competing with already established businesses and other peers, it is important to design effective marketing strategies and campaigns. Also, generating and maintaining a reliable database of prospect information, and using analytical tools to derive value from them can be time-consuming but not very rewarding. In addition to these, the actual task of generating qualified leads can be quite overwhelming without the right tools. All these challenges reinforce the need for marketing automation for startup companies.

Automated marketing can help startups understand and improve customer experience and this in turn can help them stand out from the crowd. For example collecting, organizing and analyzing prospect behavior on a website is not possible without the help of marketing software. Some sophisticated marketing automation solutions also provide accurate and reliable lead analytics, which can add great value in strategic decision-making. And by offering real-time intelligence on prospect intent, these solutions enable marketing teams to create convincing campaigns that effectively spread the word about a company and its products.

Today, there are advanced marketing automation tools which help start-up companies to identify, capture and convert online leads into sales opportunities. These solutions are specially designed to meet the basic needs of startup companies to create and propagate their brand.

Marketing automation software are usually easy to install and implement, and offer several benefits. They help:

• Retrieve important lead insight information, including the best lead source and how you can grow it
• Determine which marketing campaign is a rich source of leads
• Assess your marketing team’s capabilities
• Network with leading social networking sites including facebook, and Twitter
• Achieve improvement in overall marketing outreach

With these immense benefits, marketing automation offers the most lucrative opportunity for startup companies to successfully establish, and carve a niche for themselves in an extremely competitive business environment. 

Marketing Automation for Demand Generation & Lead Nurturing

The art and science of managing the timing, target and content of outbound marketing messages automatically, is Marketing Automation. And when this is done in response to prospects’ online behavior, it becomes efficient marketing automation. For effective demand generation and lead management/nurturing, it is essential that an organization understands and responds to a prospect’s position in the buying cycle. And given the increasing bargaining power of consumers, this is all the more crucial.

However, truly understanding and responding to each prospect’s needs is something that cannot be achieved manually. And therefore, organizations require a software platform that can help accomplish this by enabling customized content and timely, automated communication. This in turn can help in better demand generation and lead nurturing. Here’s how:

Marketing automation software enables organizations to understand prospects’ position in the buying process by studying and interpreting their digital body language. By doing this it gives a clear idea about the interests of the prospects, their intentions in visiting a website, their readiness to buy a product etc.

Secondly, ‘Lead Scoring’ is a key feature enabled by marketing automation solutions. This allows marketing teams to carefully categorize prospects depending on whether they are ‘ready to buy’, or need to be further ‘nurtured’ with suitable messages until they decide to buy.

Also, when it comes to marketing, the key is to deliver the right message to the right people at the right time. For example, a HR team may respond to different marketing messages than an accounts team. Therefore, marketing messages need to be highly personalized depending on the prospect’s role in the buying process. And this is enabled by today’s advanced marketing automation tools.

Buyers today have the ability to self-educate. They use social media websites, discussion forums and other online means to learn everything about a product. They visit multiple websites, including yours and those of the competitors, and compare products, their features, benefits and prices. Hence, by the time they get in touch with you they have already made their purchase decision. This means that your messages have to be timely, and reach your prospects, and impress them before your competitors’ messages do. Therefore in order to guide buyers to consider your product/service, and motivate them to buy it, you need a marketing automation solution that provides precise information about prospects’ needs and preferences.

So it’s time to shift from bulk outbound messaging to a facilitating approach, wherein you understand and guide your buyers in their decision-making process. Engaging prospects is therefore crucial, and this is made possible by sophisticated automated marketing solution  that deliver the right message to the right target at the right time!