With the constantly evolving language of digital marketing, business owners and marketing teams must be able to adapt quickly. But the danger of speed is that a fast-paced timeline can lead to miscommunication, overspending, and even the duplication of tasks. To avoid frustrating complications and unnecessary delays, it’s wise to incorporate marketing automation into your company’s workflow. This means bringing an affordable and effective marketing automation agency onboard.
While there are many different marketing automation providers out there, finding the best marketing automation software for your company may not be as simple as it sounds. Having the right agency powering your marketing automation can set up a lead generation machine for your business.
Learning why you need to invest in a marketing automation agency and how to choose the most suitable agency will reveal maximum profitability while more leads are formed. According to Invespcro, 8 out of 10 users of marketing automation saw an increase in leads, while 77% saw an increase in conversions. In all, marketing automation is considered “very important” to 9 of 10 such users. Maybe it’s time for your company to get on board? Here are some important things to keep in mind as you consider your options.
Choosing a Marketing Automation Agency
Before diving headfirst into getting an agency’s assistance, you must ask yourself some questions. Establishing your budget, goals, and desired outcomes from this exchange will make picking the right agency easier. The ideal marketing automation agency should possess software that touches on elements of your business, such as:
- Company Size
- Company Database Size
- CRM(s)
- Sophistication of marketing automation benefits needed
The problems you are choosing to solve should yield solutions that will be forward-thinking and grow with the company.
Now that you know why you need a marketing automation agency, it’s time to cover some key factors to look for when trying to decide which one is tailored to your company.
Although a web design with all the bells and whistles can go a long way in attracting attention, it doesn’t move leads through a sales funnel. What helps drive conversions is a collection of the viable automated marketing features known as a marketing stack.
A marketing automation stack will include everything you need to automate your digital marketing efforts. This is what you need to be looking at when you are comparing marketing automation agencies.
Solid marketing stacks will have many or all of the most popular features which you can use to achieve ROI:
- Email marketing campaigns
- Web form builder
- Landing page builder
- Blog builder
- Social media management
- CRM
- Customer behavior tracking
- Analytics
- Reporting
Email marketing campaigns can be some of the most time-consuming methods of digital marketing. It is difficult to manually keep track of thousands of emails and where those recipients are in your sales funnel. Not everyone needs a welcome email. Not everyone needs an abandoned cart email. With marketing automation, all of this information will be perfectly organized. Email messages will only go out when they are triggered by a certain action from a lead. You will also be able to track data such as delivery, open, click-through, and bounce rates to see how well your email campaigns are performing.
Web forms, landing pages, and blogs can be easily built with the help of marketing automation. You can use pre-designed templates and customize them to suit your brand’s theme. Track how well each section of your site is performing by using customer behavior tracking.
Social media management is another time-consuming part of digital marketing. With the help of a marketing automation agency, you can schedule posts with a content calendar, answer frequently asked questions with a chatbot, and even cross-post between multiple social media platforms.
Analytics and reporting tracks all of your customer data. Then, the collected data is transformed into a handy report sent to you and your marketing team periodically. It’s a great way to see how well your marketing efforts are paying off and to keep everyone in your company on the same page.
Sticking to a Budget
Studies have shown that companies that use the services of a marketing automation agency end up saving money in the long run (and often even in the short run). Although there’s an initial investment required, spending well-planned funds on the right marketing automation agency will more than pay for itself over time.
Another preliminary note to consider regarding how to choose a marketing automation agency revolves around the overarching goals of your budget. For instance, marketing agencies choose SharpSpring because of our software benefits. The marketing automation software offered is diversified and relevant to expected business needs while being cost efficient. Being that SharpSpring has a flexible architecture, the software molds to you and your company’s growth curve. If your company utilizes an in-house marketing team to manually handle tasks associated with digital marketing strategies, then you’re spending time, effort, and workforce hours on redundant, unnecessary tasks. Often, marketers have to spend time tending to repetitive tasks such as sending out emails, answering customer questions on social media, following up with potential leads, and posting new content. All of these tasks can be completed by a marketing automation program.
By allowing automation to handle these types of ongoing daily tasks, you will free up time for your creative team to do what they do best — create dynamic content that sells your products and services.
Cultivating Stronger Relationships
Using a marketing automation agency to handle repetitive tasks will not only improve your customer relations, but it will also help you build high-value relationships with clients to increase brand memory.
- First, ensuring that email campaigns are properly triggered and sent to the appropriate recipients is vital to building a tight-knit online community.
- Answering inquiries from social media posts or private messages is crucial for nurturing leads and building long-lasting customer relations.
- Following up with those leads to gently guide them through the end of the sales funnel can help you improve your customer relations.
In turn, this also helps nurture a better work environment inside your company. This is why SharpSpring enables agencies to manage all their clients from one spot. Clients can utilize the software as well allowing for more cross-collaboration between the agency and client. With all of these redundant tasks being automated, your team members won’t have to worry about duplication of work, and there will be fewer miscommunications between departments.
Boosting Your Revenue
Adding an agency can actually assist with boosting revenue, despite having to pay for those services. The number one thing that the right marketing automation agency will help your company do is boost revenue. A good marketing automation service will keep your customers moving smoothly through your sales funnel by handling CRM, email marketing campaigns, social media posts, and everything in between.
For example, if your website is generating a lot of traffic through your dynamic blog posts or your large social media following, you should see a rise in sales. If you’re not, that means that your leads are making it to your website, but they are getting stuck somewhere within your sales funnel. Something about your website is preventing them from completing the purchase.
One of the biggest culprits to look at when your revenue is down is shopping cart abandonment. This occurs when a hot lead has found your online store, browsed through your products, added items to their cart, and then left the site without completing the purchase. There are many reasons why this happens. To mitigate, an abandoned shopping cart will automatically trigger an email reminder to that particular customer. If no action is taken on the reminder email, a promotional message containing a discount or free shipping code can be automatically sent out. Combined, these steps will greatly improve the chance of that sale being completed.
A marketing automation agency will monitor your website traffic and determine where the hotspots are within your various landing pages and checkout process. With analytics and reporting, you can then see where the problem lies.
Analytics and Reporting from a Marketing Automation Agency
Saving time and money when an agency pulls all the data necessary for the business owner, as well as keeping things on track and ensuring that the efforts being put forth are actually fiscally worth it. When the process is this well streamlined in one place, there’s an ease presented that doesn’t exist in multiple branches of workflows. With a system that increases productivity, it can withstand all the changes from your marketing impressions.
At the end of the day, marketing efforts are in vain if you can’t see the results of your campaigns. Even if the results are not exactly what you wanted, you still need to be able to analyze your marketing campaign data and make changes to future campaigns.
With the help of a marketing automation agency, you can gather valuable customer data through analytics and view this data collectively in an easy-to-read report. These reports can be generated daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and even yearly, to give you a better look at how well your marketing efforts are paying off.
Analytics will constantly track customer behavior on your website. It can determine where the hotspots are on your landing pages, how well your web forms are performing, how long a lead stayed on your site, and even tell you what type of device they used.
These insights can help you optimize your site for a more user-friendly interface. It can also help you adjust your email messaging campaigns. For example, if the majority of your website visitors are coming to your site or checking their emails on their smartphones, then you can optimize your email messages and website for mobile devices. Studies have shown that people want emails and web pages to load quickly on their mobile devices. You can improve your page load speed by simply condensing your graphics and images.
Other areas of the analytics report can show you how your leads got to your site. Did they come from a social media post? Did they find your website through a Google search? The right marketing automation agency can help you answer these questions through analytics and reporting.
Wrapping Up
The best marketing automation software is only as good as what you can do with it. This is why it’s important to coordinate with an agency that can satisfy the services you need. When the agency can deliver your desired results, you know their expertise, services, and other client testimonials align with where you’re trying to go.
Agencies want to partner with SharpSpring because our software functions to fit their clients’ needs where they are and flex with their ongoing progression. Choose an agency that can work across marketing channels, make the entire marketing funnel work together, and speed up the marketing process for your company.
Now that you understand what a marketing automation agency can do and how they can help your business, you are well on your way to finding the perfect match.
To learn more about marketing automation from SharpSpring, contact us or get a demo.