You’ve probably read a lot about the challenge and opportunity of marketing today: competing noise in the marketplace has reached an all-time high, and it is more difficult for your brand audience than ever before. Note: marketing in 2015 is not for the faint of heart.
The Opportunity?
Marketing and sales professionals have never been more empowered. This is especially true when you consider the evolution of marketing and sales automation. Technologies have identified their limitations, and have continuously adapted to help users to work past them.
Marketing and Sales Automation: All-in-One?
Let’s take a second to acknowledge the elephant in the room: there are a lot of complex problems you need marketing and sales technology to solve. Consumers have grown more savvy, search engines have grown more sophisticated, and the number of competing messages has become overwhelming. “All-in-one” solutions have become increasingly less “all-in-one,” and they certainly haven’t become “one-for-all.”
Tools that work well for middle-market companies haven’t been great solutions for enterprise brands that require more sophisticated and customizable reporting. Enterprise marketing automation software is not intuitive or user-friendly and makes it difficult for companies to take full advantage of its capabilities. Preconceived notions imply paid advertising is bad and “not inbound,” and no tools have done a great job of helping marketers track the success of their paid digital campaigns alongside the rest of their marketing efforts.
So with all of these concerns, do you believe marketing and sales automation is worth it?
Your answer should be yes.
At INBOUND15, HubSpot announced its new products and features to help address these concerns. Let’s take a look at the trends taking place today that are impacting the future of marketing, and how marketing and sales automation companies like HubSpot are responding.
Trend #1: User-friendly and customizable are no longer competing priorities
Marketers like you have had to choose: do you want more power over data, or do you want to be able to easily analyze your data?
With improvements to HubSpot’s reporting features and the addition of a Predictive Lead Scoring tool, this dilemma is quickly fading. Multiple users can now have their own custom reports. And, marketing teams are no longer required to do as much manual labor to put the data they find into action when scoring leads.
Prediction: Marketing automation will continue to find better ways to give you the data you need – without compromising your ability to analyze this data any way you choose.
Trend #2: Owned, earned, and paid marketing channels is converging
No matter how great the content on your blog, you’re competing against two million blog posts being published daily. As marketers, it’s important to find the most effective ways of utilizing all channels to connect with our audience. This includes paid advertising, as much as it does influencer marketing and other earned media techniques. Paid advertising executed the right way doesn’t sell widgets to uninterested consumers and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to properly execute.
Paid advertising has been taboo in inbound marketing. On the surface, paying to have your messages seen seems decidedly non-inbound, which is why tools like HubSpot haven’t included ways to track the performance of these campaigns. But as digital advertising has evolved into a targeted means of content and brand promotion, and inbound marketers have continued to leverage digital advertising promises, an interest has developed within our space for the ability to track and analyze paid digital advertising campaigns. Enter HubSpot, which has just added its HubSpot Ads tool, enabling its customers to measure conversions from paid LinkedIN and AdWords campaigns as part their overall inbound marketing efforts.
Prediction: Marketing automation will continue to grow in its ability to capture interactions across new paid mediums, beginning with desktop, tablet, and mobile advertising and progressing to include other channels in the Internet of Things.
Trend #3: Integration is driving technology innovation without breaking it
Because all-in-one can never be all-in-one, marketing and sales strategists are constantly having to add more-and-more tools to their toolbelt. Additionally – integration between tools has often been impossible or incredibly inefficient, analyzing and acting on the insights has been a manual process.
Your first assumption might be that marketing and sales automation platforms are fighting against integration in an attempt to become the best platform available. The opposite is true. Competitors like Salesforce and HubSpot are working together to improve the experience for marketing and sales professionals choosing to use both platforms. The ability to use HubSpot’s Sidekick and Salesforce CRM will change the face of marketing and sales. These platforms are also adding new ways for niche tools to plug-in. Salesforce has done this with it’s app-exchange and Platform-as-a-Service model. HubSpot is further developing its integration portfolio, with recent additions like ZenDesk, Wistia, SurveyMonkey, and a personal favorite of Element Three’s – EventBrite.
Prediction: Marketing and sales automation will stop touting itself as all-in-one and mature. Marketing and sales professionals will develop the combination of tools best suited to them.
Finding the One-for-All Solution
From stacked roles at startups to middle management at publicly traded companies – these technologies have helped marketers understand and communicate with their audiences more efficiently. While the space is becoming more complex, marketing and sales automation tools are adapting to meet the needs of the transformative marketplace. Investigate the best solution for you, and if you don’t feel like you’re up to the task, you can always bring in assistance.
Remember: no technology is going to solve all your marketing and sales communities’ problems. There is no substitution for great storytelling and savvy strategy, only complementary solutions. The greatest investment you can make for your brand is to hire the right team to help you build it – and perhaps unsurprisingly, we don’t predict this changing any time soon.
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