Marketing automation is a valuable tool that every company should consider adding to their arsenal, especially now when competition for customers is more fierce than ever before. Increasing traffic, targeting the right customers and automating all of your tasks, including email marketing and social media posts, can give you a competitive edge if you choose the right marketing partnership.

In a nutshell, marketing automation uses technology to consolidate, simplify and streamline all of your digital marketing automatically, using tools to automate everything from lead qualification to campaign creation. 

The best marketing automation systems are designed to be scalable, growing with your business while providing automation tools to help you identify your audience, design the right content, and automatically trigger actions based on schedules and customer behavior. Messages are then sent automatically, to the marketing channels you specify, according to sets of instructions called “workflows”. 

The right automated marketing strategy paired with the proper automation tools will save your company time and free up resources allowing you to focus on growing your business. Working together, they can help you design impactful content for your target customers, deliver that content based on schedules you create and measure the ROI of your digital marketing. 

Which marketing automation solution is right for my company? 

Choosing your marketing automation platform really depends on your current business needs. Most of the current solutions offer the same basic functionality: customizable marketing campaign builders that automate the sales and marketing campaigns you design and the ability to create automatic processes for sending emails to customers with templates that you can customize and schedule based on client actions. 

Infusionsoft and SharpSpring both provide those features. SharpSpring also includes analytics so you can track customer interactions as well as marketing reports that provide customer metrics and track campaign performance. Its encrypted, secure platform also conveniently integrates with your existing third-party CRM software.

In contrast, Hubspot primarily focuses on content marketing and offers a Free option that may benefit small start-ups. This version includes email marketing, contact management and insights, live chat, social media ads, and conversion analytics. Upgrading to one of the Premium options provides additional features such as landing pages, blogging, social media management, campaign reporting, revenue attribution, and account specific marketing. 

Our Choice: Zoho MarketingHub

Our agency has been through most of the above tools, both for internal use and with clients. There’s one we’ve landed on as the marketing automation tool to rule them all. Zoho MarketingHub includes all of the above features and can be easily integrated with nearly every application your business already uses including GSuite, YouTube and social media channels. The key difference between MarketingHub and the other automation tools is that MarketingHub allows you to track the ROI of every single campaign down to the last dollar and tie that ROI to your lead generation showing you exactly what your return on spend is.

The easy-to-read Marketing Planner gives you the ability to analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns across all channels, providing a level of visibility that other marketing automation tools lack. Along with comprehensive reporting, this can make all of the difference when deciding where to focus your marketing efforts, whether it’s SMS and email campaigns or social media ads.

In addition to MarketingHub, Zoho also offers a full suite of online web applications geared towards increasing your productivity and offering easy collaboration. Zoho’s online office tools include a word processor, spreadsheet application, presentation tool, hosted wiki, notebook and CRM. Since everything is integrated seamlessly with your social media, messaging, imaging hosting, and cloud storage apps, Zoho is the perfect partner for taking your marketing to the next level.

ion8 is a Zoho Advanced Partner and a full-stack marketing and technology consulting agency that gives you access to professional copywriters and SEO specialists to help you execute your marketing campaigns. We have a full complement of experienced developers that can integrate Zoho into everything you need it to reach into which Zoho MarketingHub can then report on. For more information on why you want to choose ion8 over other Zoho resellers and how we can automate your marketing, contact us today.