How to Choose the Right Marketing Automation Solution for Your Business

The right marketing automation solution could prove to be one key deciding factor in the growth of your business. In this way, automating the simple stuff will free up your team for more strategic work in developing compulsive content and building relationships with customers. With so many different marketing automation solutions out there, it can be very hard to sort through and figure out which one is right for you.

In this article, we’ll go over the main factors to consider when choosing a marketing automation solution. Briefly, we will review three of the most popular solutions: HubSpot, SharpSpring, and Zapier, discussing the pros and cons for each.

What is Marketing Automation?

But before we dive into the selection criteria, let’s define what marketing automation is. At its core, marketing automation consists of software that automatically carries out every mundane and repeatable marketing task.

This liberates your team to focus on higher-order initiatives that must have a human touch, such as writing a compelling blog post or nurturing one-on-one relationships with customers. In other words, think of marketing automation as having an untiring digital assistant working in the background, automating your efforts.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is probably one of the most popular uses of marketing automation. Just imagine being able to nurture leads and customers with personalized email sequences instead of having to write and send each email by hand.

With marketing automation, it’s possible to set up automated workflows that deliver targeted messages based on specific triggers such as website visits, form submissions, or purchase history. This will ensure that the proper message reaches the appropriate person at the right time, thereby enhancing their engagement and conversions.

Lead Generation

Capturing leads is prime and critical for any growing business. Marketing automation software will help you automate this activity through automatic capturing of lead information from a variety of sources, such as your website, landing pages, social media, and online forms. This goes into a centralized database that allows segmenting your audience and personalizing marketing messages to the needs and interests of your audience.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a strong tool for marketing, though it tends to be very time-consuming. Automation of your marketing will grant you some time and efficiency by enabling you to schedule and publish social media posts upfront. You can also automate tracking on social media mentions and engage your audience.

Content Marketing

Creation and publication of premium content are very important in attracting and engaging your target audience. Marketing automation will go a long way in making your content marketing efficient, right from creation to curation and distribution. You can automate your latest blog post to appear simultaneously on your social media platforms, or you may schedule an email newsletter carrying your latest content to your audiences. Analytics and Reporting

To understand what works and what doesn’t, you need to measure the performance of your marketing campaigns. Marketing automation software provides the powerful analytics and reporting features necessary to keep track of major metrics such as website traffic, lead generation, and conversion rates. You can then take that data to optimize your campaigns for better overall marketing return on investment.

Why is Marketing Automation Important?

Marketing automation can be a strong tool that empowers firms of all sizes-from small startups to large enterprises. Following are just some of the many benefits of using marketing automation in your business:

Now that you have learned about the advantages of marketing automation, let’s consider some basic points to be mindful of when choosing a solution for your business. Choosing the right platform is very important for a successful ROI and to ease the pain often associated with implementation.

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Marketing Automation Solution

1. Your Budget

Marketing automation solutions come in all shapes and sizes, from the very basic no-cost platforms to the full enterprise-level options, which can reach into the thousands of dollars per month. You will need to set a realistic budget for your search.

Consider your current spend on marketing, the growth you anticipate, and what return on investment you might achieve through automation when deciding on how much you’re prepared to invest. It means: Do not overinvest in features you might not need, yet equally do not underinvest in a solution that will not support your long-term needs.

2. Your Needs

Not all marketing automation platforms are created equal. Each solution offers a different set of features and capabilities. Before you begin to evaluate different platforms, take the time to determine your specific needs.

What marketing tasks do you want to automate? Are there more high-value services that you need, such as lead scoring and predictive analytics, or do you focus directly on email marketing and scheduling of social networks? Clearly outline your expectations to then go ahead and select a solution that will be in the best interests of your marketing goals.

3. Your Level of Technical Expertise

The difficulty level with which marketing automation platforms come in greatly differs. Some of them are extremely user-friendly, while others require a more technical approach. You need to consider the technical skills of your team in choosing a given solution.

Having in-house technical resources means you should ensure to choose a platform that provides an extremely intuitive user interface and comprehensive documentation. Or, if you have a pretty tech-savvy team of marketers, you may want to go with a more robust option that offers a lot of ways to customize. 

4. Integrations 

Your marketing automation platform can’t live on an island. It must integrate well with the rest of your software, including your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, email marketing platform, and analytics tools. Integration ensures data from various platforms flows through seamlessly with an integrated solution and provides a macro-level view of the customer journey.

It lets you provide much more personal marketing touch. Ensure, before investing in any platform, it supports integrations with the tools that are most crucial for your business.

5. Customer Support

Even on the friendliest of platforms, there will be times when you’ll have questions or encounter some challenges with implementation and ongoing use. Customer support is really important to make it all non-disruptive and successful.

You need to find a vendor that can provide you with multilines of support: phone, email, and chat. Also, consider their response times, hours of availability, and overall quality of support documentation. A responsive and knowledgeable support team may go a long way in helping you maximize the value of your marketing automation investment.

Popular Marketing Automation Solutions

Now let’s take a look at three of the most popular marketing automation solutions on the market:

HubSpot

HubSpot is the most popular marketing automation platform and is widely recognized for a comprehensive suite of features coupled with ease of use. From small startups to giant enterprise companies, this software finds its place in many organizations.

Features of HubSpot

• Email Marketing: It allows you to create visually attractive email campaigns and build audience segments. You can also use it to track the results of email performance. You can automate sequences of emails that will be sent to follow up with leads through nurturing them, welcome new customers, or re-engage cold subscribers.
• Lead Generation: HubSpot has everything you might need to capture leads, from forms to landing pages, to pop-ups. You can also track the behavior of leads on your website and score them in relation to the level of their engagement using HubSpot.
• Social Media Marketing: It enables one to schedule and publish posts, monitor the mentions in social media, and engage in them. You will be able to assess your social media performance and further fine-tune the areas needing improvement.
• Content Marketing: HubSpot has a content management system that will enable you to easily create, publish, and manage your blog posts, landing pages, and other on-site contents. You are also able to utilize HubSpot in tracking the performance of your content and the way it influences your goals within your marketing strategy.
• Analytics and Reporting: HubSpot contains numerous analytics and reporting tools that will enable you to comprehend marketing performance. You can track key metrics, including website traffic, lead generation, and conversion rates.

Pros of HubSpot

• Full Suite of Features in One Roof: HubSpot provides you with a vast suite of features that will help make automating your marketing a breeze.
• Easy to Use: The software is very friendly and intuitively designed.
• Good Customer Support: HubSpot avails great customer support through phone, email, and live chat.
• Huge User Community: HubSpot has an active user community-a place you can get answers to your questions with huge help from other users.

Cons of HubSpot

• Can Be Costly: HubSpot is extremely costly, especially if you run a small business.

Some features are only available with higher-priced plans: Some of the more advanced features in HubSpot are only available on its higher-priced plans.

SharpSpring

SharpSpring is one of the most aggressive entrants in the field of marketing automation. SharpSpring positions itself as giving marketers a more affordable alternative to HubSpot, with yet a similar spectrum of functionalities. In this regard, it is highlighted as a very lucrative deal for companies on a budget.

Features of SharpSpring

• Email Marketing: SharpSpring provides powerful email marketing capabilities with automated sequences, dynamic personalization of content, and even A/B testing to optimize your e-mailings.
• Lead Generation: Similar to HubSpot, SharpSpring provides lead capture tools through landing pages, forms, and behavioral tracking to assist in identifying your future customer and in their nurturing.
• Social Media Marketing: With SharpSpring, you can schedule posts to any of your social media sites, monitor mentions of your brand, and even measure social media engagement.
• Content Marketing: SharpSpring lets you create, manage, and track the performance of your content marketing for optimization of your content strategy.
• Analytics and Reporting: SharpSpring present analytics and reporting that will show the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and provide insight into key metrics and ROI.

SharpSpring Pros

• More budget-friendly than HubSpot: SharpSpring provides competitive pricing plans; therefore, it is more budget-friendly compared to HubSpot.
• Features: SharpSpring has, at a more affordable scale than HubSpot, a complete suite of features that mirror HubSpot and should cover most primary marketing automation bases.
• Easy to use: SharpSpring is user-friendly, with a minimum learning curve for any person who may be new to marketing automation.

SharpSpring Cons

• Support isn’t as good as HubSpot: SharpSpring offers customer support, yet this can lag behind in responsiveness and thoroughness in contrast with the support system that HubSpot has become famous for.
• Not as many integrations as HubSpot: SharpSpring may lag behind in the number of integrations with third-party apps, considering the big ecosystem of integrations that HubSpot has.

Zapier

Automation on Zapier is approached from a completely different standpoint. It’s not like a marketing platform at all, where you would do this or that; it’s just sort of a bridge between various applications that can allow you to automate certain things on one with another. 

Key Features and Use Cases of Zapier 

• Application Connection: The core functionality of connecting different apps and automating workflows with the help of Zapier allows you to send an action to some application based on an event in another.
• Adding New Leads into Your CRM: You can use Zapier for automatically adding new leads captured through a form in a Facebook Lead Ad into your CRM system with no need for data entry.
• Email Notifications: Events like new form submission on your website or any new subscribers to your email list can be set to send an email notification using Zapier.
• Automation of Social Media Posting: You can create social media posts automatically through Zapier, using blog content or any other source.

Pros of Using Zapier

• Affordable: Indeed, the pricing of Zapier is flexible enough and has a free tier for basic usage, hence making this option pretty affordable.
• Easy to Use: The interface of Zapier is so user-friendly that to create an automation workflow, you need nothing but drag-and-drop actions of your mouse.
• Works with a lot of applications: The services integrate with an enormous library of thousands of popular applications. This makes it flexible and adaptable in functionality.

Zapier CONS

• Not a comprehensive marketing automation solution: While giving users a good degree of automated marketing tools, Zapier is not a comprehensive marketing automation solution such as HubSpot or SharpSpring. Just like with the other specialized solutions, there does not seem to be built-in functionality for email marketing, lead nurturing, and other core marketing functions.
• Can be limiting in functionality: Although Zapier does fine for basic automation, it may not always meet complex workflow needs in marketing or more advanced automation tasks.

How MBI Does It

My Business Integrated (MBI) takes a customized approach to marketing automation. Every business is different, and their needs are never really alike. We work with our clients in developing tailored solutions that suit their particular needs.

We start by understanding your business goals and objectives. Further, we understand your existing marketing processes and recommend areas where automation can be used to bring more efficiencies and effectiveness.

We build our solutions on various marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot, SharpSpring, and Zapier. We also engage a team of highly skilled and experienced marketing automation specialists who are in a position to help you in implementing and managing your solution. The aim is to help you achieve your marketing goals and grow your business.

Conclusion

Choosing the right marketing automation solution can be a daunting task. But by considering the factors discussed in this article, you can narrow down your options and find the best solution for your business.

If you need help choosing a marketing automation solution, or if you want to learn more about how MBI can help you automate your marketing processes, please contact us today.