Traffic, Leads and Sales: Why Your Marketing Software Needs to Do It All

The days of using Constant Contact for email marketing, Google Analytics for reporting insights, and Wordpress for your blog are over. Trying to extract meaningful marketing data from these siloed systems is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

Take my advice because I have been there, disparate marketing software causes headaches, lost time and lost productivity.

You spend more time studying a spreadsheet trying to understand the data interactions than you do launching campaigns. Some of the issues you will experience with multiple marketing applications are:

• Segmented Database: With multiple applications your contacts are segmented. Your blog subscribers are separate from your email contacts, and prospects downloading premium content are probably in a separate spreadsheet.
• Inaccurate Lead Scoring: You can’t prioritize sales reps on the hottest leads in the pipeline because you have no idea who they are.
• No Lead Nurturing: You can’t build out automated email nurturing tracks based on user behavior or buyer persona.
• Limited visibility: With different applications for website tracking, social listening, blogging, and email marketing you can’t properly gauge prospect engagement with your brand.

As marketers we must demand better, and great news there is something better out there. A fully integrated solution that allows marketers to attract new leads, engage prospects, and close customers all in one application. Yay! Lets look at why this integrated software solution is imperative for your business and your sanity.  

1) Generating Traffic

The first task for any marketer is generating traffic for the companies website and landing pages. This attraction is done through a variety of ways like, blogging, social media promotion, and search engine optimization.

This can be very challenging if marketers are forced to use separate applications. If you did find yourself in this situation you would probably start your day off looking into Google Analytics to see which keywords are generating the most traffic, and which ones need work. Once you had figured that out you would probably jump over to Wordpress to write your blog around those poor performing keywords. Finally, after you finished your blog you would need to login to Hootsuite to schedule your tweets and Facebook posts for the week. Yikes! Additionally, this is before you make any changes to your website or landing pages.

However, there is a better way, by using an integrated marketing software solution you centralize and integrate all these functions, because frankly they are all very intertwined. You can generate keywords for your business and immediately see how you are ranking for these keywords. You get insight into the poor performing keywords and you can work to develop content around these terms.  Additionally, you can create blog content and publish it immediately to your website, social media platforms, or have it sent out via email to your subscriber base.

Finally, you can run detailed reports on your traffic to see where your visitors are coming from. Whether it be through search engines, referring websites, social media platforms or from email campaigns. This detailed reporting gives marketers a holistic view of which mediums are working most effectively to drive traffic and prospect engagement. This information is very hard to extract if you are using siloed applications that do not communicate with each other.

2) Nurturing Leads  

Once you are driving traffic to the website and generating leads you need to nurture these leads with relevant content. Studies have shown that only 20% of leads that come to your site are ready to purchase. So this means that marketers need a way to stay in constant communication with the other 80% of leads that are just evaluating. Additionally, marketers need to be simultaneously delivering information that is highly relevant and valuable to these individuals.

If you were trying to do this with disparate marketing applications you would be pulling your hair out. Imagine trying to use Crazy Egg to measure prospect engagement. Then trying to take those insights and create relevant email communication for  a prospect database of over 50,000 contacts. It would be almost impossible!

The only way to accomplish highly relevant lead nurturing is through implementing marketing automation software. These applications allow you to build out communication “tracks” where individuals are then communicated with via email on topics that they care about. These marketing tracks can be built based on a certain user profile, or they can be triggered by a prospect’s action. Either way, once a prospect has been placed in the track the marketing messages are on “auto-pilot” until the person is ready to make a purchase decision, the marketing track ends, or the prospect opts out of the communication.

It’s this frequent communication and highly targeted content that helps marketers move thousands of prospects through a complex sales funnel in a timely and efficient manner. This is only possible with marketing automation software and can not be completed manually, especially as your prospect database starts to grow.

3) Closing Sales

The final reason that you need marketing software is because its not just about us. As marketers a big part of our job is assisting sales and helping them close deals and grow revenue for the organization.

What does that mean practically? Well, we need to be prioritizing salesmen and women on the hottest leads in the pipeline. Additionally, we need to provide information to the salesrep about what the prospect is interested in. Finally we need ways to alert them in the software applications that they are accustom to using.

Trying to accomplish this without the help of marketing automation software would be incredibly time consuming and difficult. To extract prospect engagement data in real time you would need to constantly be monitoring your analytics software, email marketing software, your social media networks and your content downloads from your website and landing pages. This is unrealistic for a marketer with even a very small database to manage.

Again, the only ways reasonably do this are through implementing marketing automation software. By utilizing these applications you can set up lead scoring based on things like: the leads title, what pages the leads are viewing, and what content they are downloading. Then you can send automated emails to sales once a lead has crossed a certain “point” threshold. This assures that sales isn’t wasting time on unqualified or “cold” leads.

As a follow on point to lead scoring marketing automation software allows sales reps full visibility into the topics and content that are of interest to the prospect. This allows sales reps to speak educatedly about information that is highly relevant to the prospect on a real time basis.

Finally, marketing automation software allows for integration into popular CRM applications like Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM and Microsoft Dynamics. This is very important as it delivers information to sales in an application where they are already comfortable and familiar with the user interface.

Conclusion

In conclusion marketing automation software is an incredibly powerful tool to drive traffic, nurture leads and close customers. It allows marketers to scale their communications efforts up for thousands of leads while not diluting down the quality or relevance of the message. Additionally, it focuses sales reps on the hottest leads, helps them elevate their conversation quality, and allows them access to information within their native CRM applications.

So stop trying to cobble together actionable marketing information with disparate email, landing page and analytics software. Find yourself a great marketing software application today!

This post originally appeared on the Creatrix Marketing blog. Creatrix Marketing is a HubSpot Partner Agency located in Exton, PA.