Remember the story about the shoemaker that has no shoes? It applies to a lot of industries, tech included. It’s amazing how so many tech companies fall back on implementing a cutting-edge tech stack for themselves.
Of course, they are too busy implementing it for their clients. So oftentimes they rely on obsolete solutions that add more to their plate than they clear up. Marketing automation is one such example.
After working in this field for more than a decade, we are still surprised at how companies that have staff with much less tech knowledge are faster to adopt automation for themselves than companies that sell IT or tech services.
Yes, it’s the shoeless shoemaker story par excellence.
And it’s quite a shame. Because marketing automation is no longer the cool new kid on the block. It’s an established technology that’s obviously here to stay.
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the numbers.
Marketing automation is increasingly becoming a staple for tens of millions of businesses today with over 68 percent of using automation in one way or another, according to a HubSpot report.
To show you just why marketing automation is considered a key growth driver for businesses, over 90 percent of marketing automation users agree that the technology is extremely important, not to mention a huge contributor to the organization’s overall success in their online marketing activities.
Image Source: Invesp
Marketing automation has also been attributed to an over 14 percent increase in sales productivity and a more than 12 percent reduction in the overall marketing costs for businesses that have adopted this digital trend.
Marketing leaders across all sectors, upon realizing how marketing automation can speed up their growth, are now mainstreaming its uptake by significantly increasing its budgetary allocation year on year.
According to a Salesforce survey, over 67 percent of market leaders polled plan to use marketing automation platforms over the next two years.
Image Source: Salesforce
The surge in the interest and deployment of marketing automation over the last couple of years can largely be attributed to the rate of the return on investment on marketing activities such as email marketing campaigns.
You see, triggered emails have a 70.5 percent higher open rate and 152 percent higher click-through rate than generic email newsletters that are not automated.
Image Source: Epsilon
Both B2C and B2B entities are reaping massive benefits for adopting marketing automation as part of their digital marketing strategy with 47 percent of marketers today admitting that the investment is worth the price.
It’s obvious that marketing automation is rapidly gaining ground, which is why tech companies need to adopt this results-driven technology and to do it sooner rather than later if they want to be taken seriously.
But before we go any further,
Marketing automation is a software system that helps to streamline, automate, measure marketing metrics and workflows, which in turn, enhances your productivity, efficiency, and most importantly, significantly boosts your digital marketing efforts.
In a nutshell, marketing automation allows you to create email marketing and cross-channel campaigns that have an impact, enhance your lead generation and nurturing efforts, segment your audiences accordingly, cross-sell and upsell and also boost customer retention.
All these might seem easily achievable but the truth of the matter is, without proper marketing automation tools and strategy, achieving them will be an uphill task, not to mention super expensive.
Now that we have crunched some cold hard numbers to back the importance of marketing automation to your tech business, let’s take a look at some compelling benefits of why you need to start using it today.
Time is money and the more time you can save, the better for your business. Saving precious time is probably the biggest benefit you will get from adopting marketing automation for your tech business. Most of your business operations are either repetitive or too time-consuming if done manually. This is where automation comes in handy.
Tasks such as responding to common email queries like pricing, location, general feedback comments that should always be acknowledged, and so on… you get the idea, can and should be automated to save your team valuable time.
Time saved is obviously money saved. Running a successful business is all about finding ways to cut down your overall expenditure as much as you possibly can. Tasks such as responding to email queries, posting messages on social media, sending thank you email notes would normally require a full-time employee, maybe even a team.
But with automation, everything is handled efficiently and fast and with zero room for error and your team can be assigned other equally important duties. This kind of cost-saving is phenomenal to your tech business in the long run not to mention the impact on your customer experience.
Accurate data is important to your marketing strategy. Without it, your digital campaigns will fail spectacularly. Modern consumers’ shopping habits are changing constantly. This is why you need accurate data to know exactly what your target audience needs at any one point. Your customers are also spending a huge chunk of their time online doing all manner of things. From browsing social platforms to reading or writing product reviews.
This is the kind of data that your tech business needs to grow. Automation is your gateway to gathering timely and accurate data that you can use to develop your digital marketing campaign strategy. The right marketing automation solution will help you collect, categorize and organize it in a way that’s easy for you and your team to access.
Teams that can’t communicate whenever they need to will always find it hard to reach their goals. Different departments need to share key data from time to time. This way they are able to improve individual marketing channels as well as the overall business performance.
This is why collaboration tools such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and Slack, among others, are an integral part of marketing automation today.
Image Source: Finance Online
So, if you want to boost your team’s communication process and make things easier and faster for everyone, you must adopt marketing automation software as part of your marketing strategy.
Finding the right target audience for your tech services can be tricky, expensive, and sometimes outright impossible if you rely on traditional, and quite frankly, obsolete tactics. As competition becomes stiffer, you need to be able to identify, with near military precision, the right prospects, track their online buying habits, and constantly engage them with relevant information that’s in line with their lifestyle.
If you seriously want your tech business to shine on this front, then you need to delegate these important tasks to marketing automation tools right away. Such tools will ensure that your marketing team collects, tracks, and nurtures the right leads and eventually convert them to loyal, buying customers.
The right customer is one who is more likely to buy from you. But how do you ensure that your communication is reaching the right prospects? Simple. Marketing automation. Most marketing automation solutions are designed to ensure that you attract and, most importantly, retain customers that can relate to your product or service offering.
Using a combination of cleverly crafted social media posts, blog articles, thought-leadership pieces, among others, marketing automation ensures that this information gets to the right prospects and at the right time.
Based on the above-mentioned benefits, and of course many others, marketing automation adoption can be what your tech business is missing to take it to the next level. If you look closely at why other tech businesses are seemingly growing their revenue year-on-year you will clearly see that marketing automation has played and continues to play a leading role.
But guess what! Marketing automation on its own will only take you so far. To push this growth even further and experience fast-tracked success, you need to throw integration into the mix.
Having different automation solutions for different functions at the same time is okay. In fact, this is a good starting point for your tech business. What you now need is to make sure that there’s seamless and secure communication and sharing is crucial between them.
Stand-alone marketing automation solutions, when integrated, can transform your tech business, enabling it to compete favorably without spending a fortune on advertising.
With a tried-and-tested integration partner like SyncApps, you can confidently and securely bring together all your marketing automation solutions to work in perfect harmony. Since marketing data is crucial for your tech business, a SyncApps integration will save you from manually inputting data for your CRM, eCommerce, support, financials, and marketing Automation by seamlessly integrating your disparate systems.
SyncApps integration has been instrumental in the success of many tech businesses like JCurve Solutions – an Australian-based cloud solutions provider & #1 NetSuite partner globally by customer count, that needed an integration solution that worked seamlessly without any glitches.
Since they use marketing automation to reach out to their customers using NetSuite they needed their support teams to seamlessly feed data back and forth between Zendesk, their support software and NetSuite.
JCurve Solutions now wanted a solid integration partner who would offer them a solution that will help them improve their sales and to support data flow and streamline their support operations.
The SyncApps Zendesk for Netsuite integration was a perfect fit for JCurve Solutions since it could accommodate their requirements faster and also offer greater flexibility that they needed to streamline their support process.
With SyncApps Zendesk for Netsuite integration, JCurve Solutions was able to strengthen and streamline their support operations, experience improved sales to support data flow, and also ensure that their customers are now getting better, faster, and more personalized support.
JCurve Solutions are now able to stay more up-to-date on your customers than ever using Zendesk for NetSuite and also effortlessly keep track of their data!
Marketing automation is not just considered a growth driver for businesses across all sectors. It’s now become a game-changer.
The current business environment and the ever-evolving consumer dynamics have forced businesses to up their marketing game and seek new growth-oriented technology to safeguard their competitiveness. In that respect, marketing automation coupled with integration is not the go-to solution for businesses that are looking to scale up without necessarily breaking the bank.
