So now you understand that marketing is no longer a luxury but a necessity. After all, there are countless benefits to adding automation software to scale your marketing efforts. You now have the daunting task of selecting the right marketing automation system for your business.
But as soon as you start to research the right automation platform for you, you will come across nearly 7000+ marketing solutions in the market. What seemed to a like simple task, could become overwhelming due to the large ecosystem of great solutions. The systems are also very similar and this is not making your job easier.
Marketing automation refers to marketing efforts and tasks that have been automated using software. They are typically triggered by a consumer action, like subscribing to a blog, filling out a form, or making a purchase.
There is no magic formula for getting the right marketing automation platform for your business, our experience in this industry has taught us a thing or two. Choosing the right automation platform depends on a lot of factors such as assessing business needs, technical compatibility, cross-team integration, platform features and most important your marketing ROI.
Making the right decision can depend on a combination of factors, but you can try to make the best decision with these suggestions for your business.
Hire a marketing consultant
Marketing consultant comes up with a lot of experience with a knowledge of a lot of marketing automation tools, marketing consultant can help you to create perfect alignment between the automation platform with your business needs, overcoming the technical glitches, training and onboarding your team and more importantly they can also develop a kind of culture that fosters growth and productivity for your team to make the most out of automation platform.
Check out this blog to learn about why should you hire a marketing consultant
Going with the Favorites
One of the factors in recent times which we have experienced a lot of business tend to go with market favorites such as Hubspot, Marketo, Salesforce, Eloqua, Mailchimp. There is a lot of buzz with these platforms and a lot of marketers tend to prefer to go with them, they come up with a lot of favorable factors such as excellent customer service, training resources and communities to discuss, positive reviews, a lot of customization features for your business and on top of that they have successfully created a business community around them which drives strong brand affinity and favoritism in the market
Taking instances some of the platforms has top of mind recall i.e for Email automation it's Mailchimp, for inbound marketing it's Hubspot, for sales and CRM automation it's Salesforce, for mapping a strong buyer journey it's Marketo, for strong analytics it's Klaviyo and Eloqua
Also there is a network of solution providers on the ready to help you implement and help you get the most out of these platforms. There is also a good network of good contenders, but going with the favorites means that even if your sales and marketing process is highly customized, chances are someone would have already found a process that works for companies like yours.
Using G2 Crowd
G2 crowd has gained popularity in recent times with a collection of genuine user reviews for a lot of software available in the market. As a marketer once you start to research out the right marketing automation platform for your business you have to lot of tedious tasks by yourself such as comparing features, pricing, taking reviews into consideration.G2 crowd basically helps you to perform these tasks by comparing the various platforms with their Grid system where software are listed as Leaders, High performers, Niche, Contenders with a G2 scoring system.
This report is generated by considering a set of data points which basically makes decision-making easier as there is a lot of validation for choosing the right marketing automation platform for your business.
In addition to that G2 has also come with an additional service known as G2 track which can help your business to keep a track of every software they purchase, they ensure to get the most value out of them, align the cross-functional teams for usage all the challenges faced by a business can be managed through a single dashboard.
You have to start with the right path!!!
Choosing the right marketing automation platform is both tough and challenging but
when you take in consideration the nature of your business, your existing business infrastructure, your budget, social media and additional capabilities, trusted review sites, or work with a trusted consultant you can set yourself to successfully selecting the right system and start racking the benefits. Just as with any other product or service, choosing a marketing automation tool requires careful thought and research.
Choosing the right automation platform is a starting point to move closer to achieving that result, but still there is a long way to go even after that.
If you are still confused with your decisions, you can partner with Enidan Marketing for all solutions related to choosing the right marketing automation for your business.