ALL ARTICLES

Why Marketing Automation is a Startup Marketer’s Most Valuable Tool

For a startup marketer, the most valuable asset is time. Every tool, channel and campaign that needs active management consumes that valuable resource, leaving little for important, but less urgent, tasks. Enter marketing automation.

Businesses have been managing their email marketing and content management with software for years. However, the variety of different systems available resulted in difficulties. What if your landing page software didn’t integrate with your email system? Was there a way to trigger personalized email responses based on blog posts read on your website?

Modern marketing automation allows marketers to manage all of these different automations under a single program. This allows marketers to put their time into more valuable pursuits, without worrying about whether their systems are integrated and automated.

Not convinced? Let’s explore how marketing automation can save you time, and make your startup’s marketing more scalable.

Work Smarter, Not Harder

Scenario 1. You need to send an email to a subset of your existing customers. Do you need to visit your CRM, sort by a particular field, limit by date range, export that list in CSV, then import into your Email Service Provider (ESP)?

Scenario 2. You just pushed a new blog post. You want to share it on several social media networks, and at different times. Do you fire up your Social Media Management (SMM) software, copy-paste the link into a UTM builder, shorten it, then copy-paste into your SMM and schedule?

These are just two examples of the simple, repetitive tasks that marketing automation lends itself to. In fact, good marketing automation software can help you manage:

  •       Content Production
  •       Landing Page Creation and Tracking
  •       Lead Nurturing
  •       Campaign Analytics
  •       Social Media Management
  •       Email Marketing

Marketing automation isn’t built on the promise of helping you manage each of these repetitive tasks – there’s already software that does that. Instead, it delivers huge returns by simplifying, standardizing, and executing these tasks automatically.

startup-photos
Photo Credit: pexels.com

Marketing teams spend too many of their working hours managing the various ins and outs of these initiatives. Marketing automation empowers you to delegate the most mundane aspects of your job to a software program, and focus your attention on more strategic duties.

To Err is Human

Consider every time your social media intern manually logs into Twitter to share your content. Or each time you have to create a new landing page in your CMS, but with a different headline. Think of every deadline you have related to posting or sending or sharing in the next 7 days. Every time a human interacts with your marketing, there’s a chance for error.

Not so with marketing automation.

Automating these “grunt work” touches with software means that tasks are completed with perfect precision. No more sending to a mistyped email address. No more missing a post deadline because you were in a meeting that ran long. No more forgetting to tag that link. Automation eliminates human error or forgetfulness. Every task performed is automatically logged and measured, resulting in a wealth of data and metrics which you can use to make your processes even more efficient.  

A Real World Example: LeanLogistics

LeanLogistics is a provider of online transportation management systems (TMS).

While their campaigns were effective, their productivity was suffering. But after implementing marketing automation, they slashed wasted time across the board, enabling them to scale their successful efforts and grow their brand.

  • Email campaigns were built in hours, not days.
  • Prepping for tradeshows and webinars went from 6 weeks down to 2 days.
  • The amount of campaigns running doubled without needing extra help or time.

You can read all the specifics  here.

Start Future-Proofing

Marketing automation software is now simple enough and affordable enough to be attractive to small businesses.  For startups looking to stretch budgets and improve efficiency, the software can easily become the most valuable tool in their arsenal.

people-at-window
Photo Credit: pexels.com

If you haven’t already integrated marketing automation, it’s worth your time to look at the facts. The days where marketers needed to do everything themselves are long gone.

Marketing automation can be a valuable tool for businesses, especially startups and small businesses. If you are ready to scale your marketing and lead nurturing, or are frustrated with the amount of time spent doing mundane digital tasks, it might be the solution you’re looking for.

Have questions about implementing marketing automation with your current website and other marketing platforms? Our team would be happy to provide expert guidance and implementation – just reach out.

ALL ARTICLES

How to Do Analytics Like Buffer, HubSpot and Growthhackers

We all know that Google Analytics is the dominant force in web analytics. It’s free, easy to setup an account, and records many of the metrics that digital marketers rely on out-of-the-box.

But Google Analytics has limitations.

Because of these limitations, new analytics platforms and solutions launch every day. The hardest part isn’t finding alternatives to Google Analytics – it’s finding time to vet and evaluate the ever-changing landscape of software.

Luckily, Conrad Wadowski of Teachable asked some of the top growth marketers which tools they felt were vital to their marketing stack. You can read all the specifics on his blog post, but suffice to say companies like HubSpot, Buffer, SumoMe, Growthhackers, and Segment participated, to name a few.

So which analytics tools do these high-growth companies use to improve their analytics? We’ve broken them out for you below.

Behavioral Analytics

One of Google Analytics’ biggest limitations is the lack of specific user data. This is a serious problem for companies looking to do advanced cohort or retention analysis. These products aim to fill that gap.

Amplitude

amplitude

Like their website says, “Discover what your users are actually doing with behavioral analytics.” In real-life terms? Amplitude let’s you answer the tough questions about how certain user groups perform across devices, identify correlating factors to retention and churn, and make better product decisions. If you have an online portal, web app, or SaaS product, jump on their free starter plan and try it out.

MixPanel

Looking to measure user flow through your website funnels? How about trigger messages to users based on their behavior? While it was built with mobile apps in mind, MixPanel has a lot of practical applications for single-page websites, web apps & portals, and cross-device usage scenarios. And you can test it out for free!

[MixPanel] help[s] us quickly prove out hypotheses about customer engagement.

Morgan Brown, COO at Inman

Heap

Heap is similar to some of the other behavioral analytics tools listed here, but it’s standout feature is retroactive analytics. Heap records everything from the day you install it, so if you don’t remember to set up an event for 3 months, you won’t lose out on that data. That’s huge.

User Experience

Raw metrics like Time on Page, Bounce Rate, and Pages per Session are fine for some companies but these often times don’t tell the complete picture. Modern marketers need more data about how users interact with content and UI elements. Enter these three analytics solutions.

SumoMe

sumome

SumoMe offers video recordings of user sessions, as well as heatmaps, which are a big step up from Google Analytics’ In-Page Analytics. Marketers will also appreciate the additional tools SumoMe provides, like content analytics, email collection lightboxes and tools to increase shares of your content.

UserTesting

This solution focuses on delivering real feedback on your website or mobile app. Feedback takes the form of audio commentary, written feedback, and videos of testers using your site. You can even sign up to do full panel tests with your own user base. No more wondering, “Do users understand this step?”

 

FullStory

Want to watch customers as they navigate your drop-downs, click through forms, and use your checkout process? FullStory records site visitors so you can analyze their behaviors later and implement improvements. Get a bag of popcorn and watch 2 hours of users clicking things that aren’t buttons!

Feels like magic the first time you use it…Fantastic for tracking down hard-to-replicate UI bugs and for spying on user behaviors in the wild.

Jamie Quint, Co-Founder at InterState Analytics

Landing Page Optimization

Despite efforts like Google Experiments, there really isn’t a great solution for split-testing and improving landing pages with Google Analytics. Luckily, marketers don’t have to look far for better conversion optimization tools.

Optimizely

While not limited to just landing pages, Optimizely’s A/B testing and optimization platform is nearly invaluable for improving your conversion rates. They’ve also rolled out additional personalization features in recent months that expands the tool’s usefulness.

An easy application to A/B test and personalize your website and mobile app.

Amber Van Moessner, Director of Content at Livestream

Unbounce

A complete landing page management solution, Unbounce offers templates for building landing pages, or lets you build from scratch. Once pages are built, you can A/B test with real-time data to improve results.

Easy to design new tests quickly. This tool really helped us scale our digital demand gen by increasing conversion 10x.

Nick Christman, VP of Performance Marketing at Namely

Other Great Tools

Several tools surfaced during Conrad’s study that deserved mentioning, because of their importance in specific situations, to certain industries, or because they allow for scaling up analytics efforts. Here they are, in no particular order.

InterState Analytics

Multi-touch attribution reporting is somewhat of a unicorn for marketers working on multi-channel campaigns. Did that lead from retargeting originally come from Twitter? Is AdWords driving all those conversions by itself, or is it getting assistance from our paid content promotion? InterState aims to solve that.

Fantastic tool for attribution reporting, enables B2B-specific attribution models.

Guillaume Cabane, VP of Growth at Segment

Baremetrics

baremetrics

If you’re in SaaS or any other subscription-based recurring revenue, you need to look at Baremetrics. Metrics like Revenue per User, Monthly Recurring Revenue, User Churn, Upgrades/Downgrades and more make this tool vitally important from an analytics and business growth standpoint.

Segment

The challenge with having multiple analytics solutions is that you have to do collection and manage a number of different scripts, ensure that they are all placed correctly and pulling the right data, and it’s very time-consuming. Enter Segment, which tracks data across website and apps, then normalizes it and sends it to various systems like the ones mentioned previously in this article.

The Six Million Dollar Man Analytics

If you’ve been getting by with just Google Analytics up until now, it’s time to rebuild your analytics stack like Steve Austin – better, stronger, faster than before!

Analytics isn’t “one size fits all” – it’s critical to build a set of systems that fit your company’s unique needs. The tools on this list have been vetted and vouched for by some top companies, and they’ll give you a great start towards taking your analytics to the next level.

And of course, if you’d like a partner who has walked this path many times before, our team is happy to help you assess and implement any analytics solutions you need.