October 28, 2022

5 Ways to Gain a Competitive Edge with Marketing Automation

What marketing challenges are you anticipating as we head into the new year? 

When planning for a year of uncertainty, it's always best to prepare for the challenges ahead. To help you build a more robust strategy, HubSpot asked hundreds of leading marketing executives the same question. Here are a few of their top challenges: 

  • Implementing a data-driven marketing strategy (14%)
  • Facing increased competition (13%)
  • Using their CRM’s full capabilities (12%)
  • Pivoting their marketing strategy due to global events (11%)
  • Generating quality leads (11%)

The trend here is clear: revenue leaders are looking to get the most out of their data and technology to keep up with the competition and adapt to global instability. 

As a solution, marketers are establishing or expanding their marketing automation strategy. Advanced marketing automation can help teams combat expected challenges and maximize growth, profitability, and resilience in uncertain times. 

Here are five key marketing automation strategies you need to implement to gain a competitive edge and promote growth in 2023 and beyond.

Implement an Omni-Channel Personalization Strategy

You need a holistic view of your customers to build a data-driven marketing strategy that impacts revenue growth. This means understanding who they are and how they interact with your brand across different channels and devices.

Forrester's 2023 Planning Report recommends investing in more relevant and reliable customer data to improve your audience targeting strategy. Prioritize investments that centralize data from disparate systems and sources for a complete view of your customers. The goal is to have a full, 360-degree view of every customer in one place, which is made possible by connecting your CRM to all channels, systems, and applications your clients and internal teams use for engagement.

With omnichannel marketing automation platforms like HubSpot, you can see how your customers interact with your brand — whether they're reading an email, browsing your website, or engaging with your social media content. These insights will help you deliver a more personalized experience at scale and improve customer retention rates.

Additionally, you can use marketing automation to orchestrate omnichannel campaigns that deliver a consistent message across all channels. This is important for building a strong brand and maintaining customer loyalty as buyers become increasingly selective with their purchases.

Free RevOps Guide: Deploy an Effective Revenue Strategy for Your Scaling  Business.

Accelerate Lead Generation with Automated Workflows

We don’t have to tell you that generating high-quality leads is essential for marketing success. But with the vast number of marketing touchpoints, it can be difficult to know where to start.

Lead generation can be complex, but the right marketing automation strategy can make it more efficient and effective. By automating repetitive tasks, you can free up your team to focus on more important tasks — like developing relationships with prospects.

HubSpot's workflows tool allows teams to:

Automate repetitive tasks: You can automate tasks like email campaigns, social media postings, and lead nurturing. This will free up your team to focus on more important tasks — like developing relationships with prospects.

Score and prioritize leads: By understanding how engaged a prospect is, you can prioritize follow-ups and increase the likelihood of closing a deal.

Nurture leads with targeted content: You can use workflows to automatically send prospects the personalized information they need at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Stay organized: Automated workflows help you keep track of your leads and avoid losing touch with a potential customer.

You can automate lead nurturing processes to move leads through the sales funnel with marketing automation. Build trust and credibility with leads by delivering timely, personalized content. As a result, you'll close more deals and grow your business.

Make Your Strategy More Adaptable with Automated Campaigns

In today's climate, it's more influential than ever to have an adaptable marketing strategy. Automated campaigns can help you quickly pivot your marketing efforts in response to changes in the market.

With marketing automation, you can create campaigns in advance and launch them with the click of a button. This way, you can quickly adjust your campaigns to take advantage of new opportunities or address changes in the market.

In addition, automated email campaigns can help you scale your marketing efforts to reach more prospects and customers. With the ability to personalize messages at scale, you can improve your conversion rates and grow your business.

For example, HubSpot's email marketing automation tool allows you to:

  • Reach targeted audiences with your message
  • Personalize your message for each new lead
  • Set up triggers to kick off campaign-specific workflows
  • A/B test different messages and visuals
  • Automatically follow up with non-responders

Free RevOps Guide: Deploy an Effective Revenue Strategy for Your Scaling  Business.

Use Full Path Attribution Reporting to Refine Your Strategy

It's not enough to track leads and conversions — you need to understand the entire customer journey. With marketing automation, you get a clear view of your prospects' interactions with your brand while tracking and measuring your results.

Full path attribution reporting shows your customers' complete journey, all the way from their first touchpoint to conversion. With this data, you can see which marketing channels are most effective at generating leads and customers. On top of that, you can use marketing automation to measure the ROI of your marketing campaigns. This data will help you understand which campaigns deliver the most value to your business.

HubSpot's powerful reporting tools give you the ability to track:

  • Top-of-funnel activity, like website visits and form submissions
  • Lead nurturing progress, like email opens and clicks
  • Sales pipeline activity, like deals closed and won
  • Revenue attribution, like first touch, last touch, and assisted conversions

With the help of HubSpot's custom report builder, you can create reports that specifically track your marketing activities, like the number of leads generated, conversion rates for each campaign, cost per lead, ROI for each campaign, and much more.

Full attribution reporting gives you valuable insights into what's working and what isn’t and allows you to make necessary changes to improve your results.

Add Innovative Features to Your Marketing Automation Stack

Marketing automation platforms are constantly evolving. As new features and integrations are released, you need to evaluate whether they're a good fit for your business.

For example, HubSpot recently released a new feature called Conversations, which allows you to have real-time two-way conversations with your website visitors. The Conversations tool lets you quickly answer questions, address concerns, and build relationships with your website visitors.

While the Marketing Hub has been a flagship HubSpot product for years, many new advances further enable teams to drive the essential strategies outlined above. Here are the key advanced features your teams should be leveraging:

  • Workflow Builder: Automate your marketing efforts across all channels to save time and ensure consistency.
  • Campaigns Tool: Easily create and manage campaigns at scale and coordinate your marketing activities in one place.
  • Custom Report Builder: Generate reports that track all of your marketing activities and results.
  • Collaboration Tools: Work with team members to create cohesive campaigns.
  • Ads Optimization Events: Improve your results with insights from HubSpot's ads optimization tool.
  • Web Traffic Analytics: Understand how users interact with your website by analyzing traffic to identify trends and patterns.
  • Dynamic Personalization: Create better experiences for each user by personalizing your marketing messages for each customer.

By keeping your tech stack up-to-date, you can be sure that you're using the best tools to drive results for your business.

Free RevOps Guide: Deploy an Effective Revenue Strategy for Your Scaling  Business.

Invest in Marketing Automation to Stay Ahead of Competition

Marketing automation can help you overcome some of the biggest challenges and create a more flexible and adaptable marketing strategy for the year ahead and beyond. Automating repetitive tasks can save time and resources, and helps your teams focus on more strategic tasks. In addition, marketing automation can help you scale your efforts and reach more prospects and customers.

If advanced marketing automation hasn’t been on your radar until recently, now is the time to invest. Luckily, HubSpot's Marketing Hub has everything you need to get started. With features like automated workflows, campaign management, and dynamic personalization, you can take your marketing game to the next level, even amidst unprecedented change.

leader's guide to revenue technology

Zach West

Zach leads New Breed's demand generation program. His areas of focus include in-depth market research and modeling, customer journey design and optimization, strategic application of data-based insights, technical integrations and data flow design, and technical content support.

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