Quick Navigation:
- What Is a Marketing Automation Consultant?
- What Is Marketing Automation?
- What Does a Marketing Automation Consultant Do?
- The Nine Perks of Making Your Marketing Leaner – Working with a Marketing Automation Consultant
- How to Choose a Marketing Automation Consultant
- Should You Hire a Marketing Automation Consultant?
We all feel the impact of recession, and some people are slamming on the brakes. Others see it as an opportunity, and think about making their business more profitable. Hiring a marketing automation consultant to look at your current processes will help you cut your costs, improve your results, and get you a better return on marketing investment. If you have all these on your to-do list for this year, read on to find out more.
What Is a Marketing Automation Consultant?
Simply put, they are professionals who are able to make your marketing work better. Whether you have no results or weak ones, they can look at the whole infrastructure and help you improve it. Simply put, a marketing automation consultant can make you more money and help you take advantage of today’s technology.
A marketing automation expert will have loads of experience in different industries, know the main marketing platforms in and out, so they can advise you which ones are the most suitable for your business. They also have a business background and understand the processes. They have “systems thinking” in their blood.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Automating your marketing means building an infrastructure that saves you time, money, and makes your business more profitable. It can put your business growth on steroids. It can be simple email marketing automation, sales funnel management, or the implementation of a new quote or customer enrollment system. The key is that the infrastructure has to benefit the company, the customer, and employees alike.
A full marketing automation plan can potentially replace a team of 30 salespeople, or allow them to focus on closing qualified leads instead of cold calling. It can improve employee job satisfaction and retention, as well as your profits.
What Does a Marketing Automation Consultant Do?
A marketing automation consultant will look at your current infrastructure, sales processes, customer journey, and business functions and will try to make them more effective. They will do their research and come back with a few solutions. As a Lean marketing agency we have worked on sales automation, lead management, and lead segmentation campaigns that significantly improved our clients’ ROI. So, in one sentence: marketing automation gives you a competitive advantage which is almost unfair!
The Nine Perks of Making Your Marketing Leaner – Working with a Marketing Automation Consultant
Of course, there are many more perks of automating your marketing, and – especially in challenging times like now – you will have to try to work smarter instead of harder. Here is an almost complete list of the benefits of working with a marketing automation consultant. Thankfully, there are plenty of online tools that will help you get started.
Easy to Measure KPIs
Once you automate your marketing, you are likely to be able to look at a snapshot of how the different departments are doing. It will tell you the number of new leads, conversion rates, returning customers, upsells, and more. It gives you an answer on how much profit your marketing campaigns have made, and how much you get back for each advertising pound.
This is a great benefit for the management team when working on strategy and growth plans. You will see what is working and what needs improvement. Instead of just rolling out a campaign each quarter, you can see real time how your marketing is doing. From Google Analytics to CRM systems, a marketing automation consultant can synchronise all the platforms to give you the information you need.
Less Workload for Your Team
One of the reasons why clients hire us as a marketing automation consultant is because they have no room to grow. They have enough enquiries and a large enough market, but the time of the staff is taken up by enrolling new customers, doing admin, invoices, and follow-ups. All this can be automated, so you can take on more clients without having to expand your team. Also, they will be much happier without all the manual work.
Reduced Admin Costs
Of course, admin costs add up in a medium sized company. If you count how many emails each client sends and receives, and how many enquiries one team member deals with, it’s easy to see the benefit of automating your marketing. After all, not many people like a career that only involves replying to emails and filling out excel sheets. Especially not if a cleverly designed sales and marketing system can take care of all that.
Improved Client Relationships
A client you keep will cost you much less than one you have to go out and get. That’s why customer relationship management is extremely important. If you don’t tell people what happens next after they buy, don’t follow up and get reviews, you will never build a reputation as a company that is easy to do business with. There are so many tools you can implement now, you just need a system map that matches your customers’ expectations. And that’s what a marketing automation expert can help you with.
Scalable Lead Generation Systems
If you are one of the many business owners who is relying on recommendations, the sales team, telemarketing, or luck for new leads, you need to know that there’s a better way. Implementing a sales funnel, for example, can give you a reliable source of new customers so you don’t have to deal with feast or famine in your business. Marketing automation and sales funnels can get you customers. (of course, they have to be well designed).
Effective Lead Management
Generating leads using a marketing system will help you follow up with prospects and communicate your messages better. In turn, you will see better conversions, and a better quality of leads than you would without. After all, you want to be in the position to choose who you want to work with, and when to make special offers available.
From upsell opportunities that can potentially multiply your revenue to seamless client enrollment and communication, you can put systems in place that will make your job easier, and give your prospects a better impression of your business. While CRM systems are great, they need to be integrated with other platforms in your organisation so you can take full advantage of their functionality.
Lead Qualification
Qualifying your leads can save you a lot of time and prevent disasters, too. If you don’t check the facts and qualify your leads, you might be doing one of two things:
- Run after leads that are not even slightly interested in buying from you – wasted resources
- Work with clients who don’t match your ideal client persona and end up being a pain in the backside, costing you more than the allocated budget for the project
Believe me when I say both of the scenarios can have a detrimental effect on your business. Having to deal with unqualified leads will make your sales team demotivated. Having to deal with nightmare clients can jeopardise your other projects. Your team’s time will be tied up on one customer, and this means you cannot take on other – easier and better paying – customers.
We have seen both of these scenarios; in our own business and in our clients’. If you add lead qualification to your sales systems and to your customers’ journey, you can avoid being burned by attracting the wrong leads.
The upshot of it is that you have to make sure that your client’s expectations are in line with what you are willing to deliver. Managing expectations in the beginning will save you a lot of headache later.
Improved Conversion
The main benefit of marketing automation, however, is improved conversion rates. We are all humans, and your sales team members are, too. This means they might forget to follow up a client, ask the right questions, or send a presentation over. With the help of email marketing, you can double, triple, or even 10x your conversion rates.
If you combine lead qualification with follow-ups, you can really benefit from a marketing system custom-made for you. How would it feel like knowing that you covert one in three enquiries because you asked the right questions and communicated your message clearly in the beginning? This can actually get even better! We have seen One in two or two in three leads converting after implementing a marketing automation system.
Faster Scale and Revenue Growth
Finally, working with a marketing automation consultant will enable your business to scale faster and grow its revenues at a speed that would not be possible if they had no systems in place. If you want to take advantage of a booming market, have an irresistible offer that is competitive, you should not hold back on implementing an infrastructure that enables growth.
Whether you want to increase your sales, volumes, or customer pool, you can do that with smart marketing automation solutions. As you reduce the time it takes to enrol and serve a new client, you can also increase your capacity.
How to Choose a Marketing Automation Consultant
It is important that you ask the right questions before hiring a consultant for your marketing automation. The project can potentially make or break your business, so selecting the right person or company is crucial.
Here are the skills every marketing automation consultant should have:
- Industry experience
- Software know-how
- Branding and strategy experience
- Project management
- Lean organisational management qualifications
- Team management
A consultant might have all the know-how and university degrees to show off, but if they have never managed a project like yours, you are likely to fail at the implementation. If you are lucky, they will just build a half-baked marketing automation system. Therefore, you should ask loads of questions and understand the effort, knowledge, and technical know-how that goes into automating your lead generation and conversions.
The Cost of Automating Your Marketing
Consultancy services don’t come cheap. The more financial benefit your company is likely to get the more you should be prepared to pay. After all, it would probably take you a couple of years to study all the systems, theories, tools, and learn the technical aspects of the implementation. So if the consultant saves you years of learning and makes you money, they should be paid accordingly.
Of course, you might be able to find a freelancer for the job online, but it is going to be challenging to communicate your needs and trust them with insider information. If you hire an experienced consultant, you are likely to pay £10,000 to up to £50,000 per project. It is likely to go on for months, and will require a lot of collaboration, meetings, and research. At LMNts, our marketing automation packages start at £10,000 and we have plenty of happy customers who managed to save time, money, and increase their revenue as a result of the systems we implemented.
The cost of running a marketing automation system ranges between £250 and £650/month. It will depend on the size of the company and the project. Let’s say that you replace one admin role full time and train the employee on something else instead, you already saved at least £2,000 per month, so it is really a no-brainer.
Should You Hire a Marketing Automation Consultant?
Only you know the answer to this question. However, if you feel like you need some guidance, please let us know and we will be happy to arrange a chat.
0 Comments