Alchemise Consulting would like to acknowledge and thank our guest
independent reviewer, Jamie Strachan, for writing this article.
One of the key technology trends of 2016 in small-to-medium enterprises (SME) is the increasing adoption of sales and marketing automation tools to help businesses retain and grow their customer base and increase sales revenues.
A recent SME Directions survey suggests that more than 60% of businesses plan to use automation technology in the next financial year to help cut costs and streamline existing processes.
A benefit of this technology is enabling businesses to better understand their growing volumes of customer data with the use of customer relationship management technology (CRM), SEO and online and social analytics. This in turn helps to identify buying trends, devise targeted campaigns and revise and improve inbound sales and marketing strategies over time.
Marketing automation tools allow both marketing and sales teams to work together more seamlessly. A lot of manual processes around content creation, management and personalisation are removed, while creating more qualified and targeted leads for sales reps to engage with. Lead and customer data is updated and shared by both teams and stored in the CRM.
According to Forrester Research, companies that implement marketing automation experience a 10% increase in their sales pipeline contribution.
HubSpot, a US-based company, is looking to lead the way in this market with a cloud-based platform offered to SMEs.
5 Benefits of the HubSpot offering:
- For small businesses needing an “all-in-one” online strategy, HubSpot will host your site, publish landing pages and blog content, while optimising it for search engines with keyword research relevant to your content and market.
- Manage your social media presence (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) with scheduled posts, and report on brand mentions and social engagement with your content and services.
- Grow your inbound audience by creating simple search and social media advertising all from within the HubSpot dashboard. Track and optimise your ads as you go to increase your traffic and conversions.
- Create targeted email campaigns to new and existing customers with strong call-to-action (CTAs) offers.
- Use HubSpot's native CRM or integrate with Salesforce to track engagement with your campaigns, CTAs, and record all customer interactions with plug-ins for common email clients. Integration to your existing CRM via the HubSpot API is also available.
HubSpot in the Cloud
Taking advantage of the today’s growing Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings, HubSpot has built a robust, secure and highly-available service for its 18,000 plus customer base.
Basic HubSpot CRM subscriptions are free for up to 100 contacts. As extra functionality is added for content creation, analytics, optimisation, CRM integration and more, subscriptions can range from AUD $300 - $3000 per month.
With digital strategy becoming evermore critical to business success and revenue growth, HubSpot offers a compelling turnkey solution for traditional small business content management and hosting. Added to this sophisticated inbound strategies, marketing and analytics provide the secret sauce that can add real business value, grow the bottom line and makes sales teams and marketers more productive.
Please contact us if you would like to continue the conversation about marketing automation and inbound marketing, and how it can help to grow your business.
Thank you once again to our guest reviewer Jamie Strachan for writing this article.
