Time to move away from disparate marketing tech?

Welcome to a brand-new year. Undoubtedly, you'll be thinking of ways to boost your sales and marketing activities, including how to achieve efficiencies in your digital marketing through automation.

But what is marketing automation? And what can it do for your business?

At its most basic level, marketing automation is about using software to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up your sales and marketing teams to focus on customer relationships and business growth. Social media, email marketing, ad campaigns - they can all be automated. That doesn't lose personal touch - quite the opposite. Automation software is highly innovative, meaning you can create an even more personalised experience for your customers than you did before. It's all about having the right tech on board.

How can marketing automation benefit your tech business?

The most significant way you'll benefit is to become more efficient. You'll save on both time and money, and not only will your team get to concentrate on more important work, but you'll be making their working life much easier.

And speaking of your sales and marketing teams, automation is a key element in helping them become more aligned, which is crucial to business success. If they're using the same tech and working from the same data, making decisions and creating campaigns, they're going to become much more collaborative. You'll turn marketing qualified leads into sales qualified leads faster and easier. There's a ton of research to support this; in fact, marketing automation can lead to a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead and a 14.5% increase in sales productivity.

What this means, of course, is you'll generate more leads and boost your conversion rate. When you've got the right automation tech helping your team to become more productive and effective, you can manage and nurture those leads with greater success - and by that we mean the holy grail of increased sales. Marketing automation tracks leads and provides you with the data you need to boost your conversion rate optimisation.

Make room in your 2023 budget for marketing automation

The next question you're probably asking is: how much does it cost? Well, there are many options to choose from, but as a HubSpot Elite Partner and proven experts with the platform, we'll take a look at what you can expect to fork out for it.

HubSpot has several free services and solutions, and they have a number of pricing plans to suit different budgets when it comes to marketing software. You can get all the details here, but in a nutshell, you'll pay anywhere from $AUD475 per month depending on what package suits you best. Marketing Hub has everything you need to generate leads and convert them, but we do recommend having a chat to decide which is the best bang for your buck.

Sales and marketing tech stack

Of course, HubSpot isn't the only marketing tech available. In fact, there's a growing number to choose from, and deciding which is the best fit for your business can be complex. We've developed an eGuide, in which we highlight what can be used versus what we use here at Concentrate.

We contrast and compare different tech options for:

  • Marketing Automation - automating all the repetitive and tedious tasks such as email marketing, reporting, workflows, SEO audits and more
  • Website - You need tools such as a CMS, and for creating landing pages and lead capture forms
  • Content delivery - Everything from  webinars to blogs to eBooks to video to social media needs the right tech
  • Sales enablement - There are so many different sales enablement tools available, starting with your CRM

What you're looking to do is create a simplified, integrated tech stack so that your sales and marketing teams aren't spending precious time switching between tools or on manual, repetitive tasks. The more streamlined your tech stack is, the more time and money you'll save.

Not only that, but it's how you'll meet changing customer expectations. Your B2B customers want their interactions with you to be seamless, engaging and customised. If you're going to build meaningful and profitable relationships at each stage of the customer journey, you need a tech stack with tools that boost personalised engagement.

source: Concentrate