Why do start-ups fail to scale? – The essentials of Marketing Automation

According to Bloomberg, “8 out of 10 entrepreneurs who start businesses fail within the first 18 months.” A whopping 80% crash and burn.

Why?

That’s because when a company is first launched, it is typically run by developers and marketers. Developers develop the product and marketers sell the product by forging 1:1 relations with potential customers. As the company grows, it needs an efficient marketing team to handle the sales and other marketing activities. But soon managing the tasks manually like emailing new customers, setting up social media-to-email programs, and more, becomes difficult.

That’s where marketing automation comes in.

What is marketing automation?

According to Forrester, marketing automation is defined as: “tooling and process that helps generate new business opportunities, improve potential buyers’ propensity to purchase, manage customer loyalty, and increase alignment between marketing activity and revenue.”

If you are a marketer, you’ll definitely fall in love with marketing automation, as it makes your life a lot easier.

“Companies using marketing automation see 53% higher conversion rates from initial response-to-MQL and a revenue growth rate that is 3.1% higher than non-users” – Aberdeen Group “Marketing Lead Management Report” (2012)

As per Hubspot, you’re ready to invest in marketing automation if your organization fulfills the following criteria-

• You’re engendering inbound marketing content that’s highly effective
• You have a sturdy influx of organic and new leads
• You’re ready to maximize your reach and scope

How marketing automation can help start-ups to grow into big brands?

Every company has multiple touch points, and a customer can come across several of these touch points in his/her journey with your company. For instance, your recent content fascinating and convincing him to become an email subscriber, or follow you on twitter or other social media channels.

Conversion paths are unique and it is completely impossible to chase hundreds of these paths. That’s where marketing automation can be your savior.

Let’s have a look how?

1. Marketing automation connects multiple marketing channels and touch points including social media, content marketing, and email marketing.
2. Marketing automation enhances the quality of your campaigns and messages with personalization letting you custom-design more relevant future offers.
3. Marketing automation avoids lambasting your potential customers with irksome advertising messages, nurturing your leads and prospects through the sales conversion funnel.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

1. Increased Efficiency – Marketing automation simplifies marketing processes, eliminating the repetitive manual processes, which in turn, increases productivity.
2. Workflow automation – For a successful inbound marketing campaign, you need multiple assets including conversion pages, CTAs and more. Manually working on these workflows can lead to errors. Marketing automation streamlines these processes, allowing a smoother functioning.
3. Increased Revenue – Investing in marketing automation may not be cheap, but when utilized properly, its benefits surely justify the upfront investment.
4. Retention Marketing – It is important to have a balance between customer acquisition and customer retention for a company to grow. It is noteworthy that the cost of acquiring a new customer is 6 to 7 times more than keeping existing customers. Marketing automation provides insight into customer (existing and prospective) intent, enabling companies to predict customer needs and thereby taking the right decisions.
5. Relationship Marketing – Relationship marketing focuses on achieving high customer satisfaction scores, hence better retention scores. Customers’ lasting relationships with a company begets repeat sales, and consequently new sales with a word-of-mouth promotion. Automation tools help businesses personalize their relationships with new leads, customers and prospects through nurturing, lead scoring models, trigger campaigns and more.
6. Tracking the marketing campaigns – Success of any marketing campaign is based on data garnered through accurate tracking and monitoring. Marketing Automation helps in tracking expenses as well monitoring responses to marketing campaigns based on specific and custom parameters.

Marketing automation is here to stay, so it’s the right time when you start building a plan for how your startup can be benefited from it. Lay the foundation for marketing that will scale with your business, and experience a smooth transition from a startup to a growth stage company.

To get started with marketing automation, get in touch with our experts at [email protected]