We recently delved into the arena of Marketing Automation after internally experiencing the toils of keeping tabs on Form Submissions, Web Site Traffic, Drip Marketing, Lead Scoring, and the DREADED, building Landing Pages and FORMS.

Unbeknownst to me, all of those items fall under the management of several marketing automation software packages. And the research began! We found 3 leaders that fit our needs. They’re different, and fit a variety of companies marketing goals.

As Marketing Director at BrainSell, I was originally on the hunt for an INTERNAL product. It just so happened that we loved 3 of them so much that we’re now reselling them. We saw a rediculous jump in marketing success here by using these tools that it was a no-brainer to bring these tools to our customers. Really, we love this stuff!

So how did we do it? Grow our business 44% in one year? With VERY little investment? The story is kind of long, so this is the abridged version.

***Side note, because I know my call to action needs to be higher up in the post, Sign up HERE for a free session with one of our marketing gurus.

Jim Ward, BrainSell’s President, read the book Inbound Marketing. He listened to what their message and hired me, an ex-journalist, to create valuable content for our marketing operations. No problem. Then I realized that it was VERY difficult to get this valuable content OUT. I would write a white paper and then have to spend 2 hours building a landing page from scratch (I’m a writer, not a programer). Putting a form on it for download, and putting the link up all over social media. I was SPENT. I hated this process and knew there must be a better way.

There was!

First I found Hubspot, mostly because Jim made me read Inbound Marketing, and the authors invented Hubspot. With Hubspot, I was able to create my content and have a FAST way of getting it out there. There is a landing page builder with FORMS that send people automated emails! And those leads are stored in Hubspot, and can be synced with CRM for follow ups. It will tell you if a visitor has returned to the site, and handle drip marketing, so once that visitor returns, they can get an automated teaser email.

Hubspot also tells brings your social media to one page. I was able to see what was trending in our industry and respond to Twitter posts right from Hubspot.

It made everything very VISUAL. I finally saw what was working. Our organic search traffic was up because of all of my white papers, and Hubspot told me that with their traffic source feature. About 9 months ago, we DROPPED PPC adds. And our web traffic kept going up. Up 120% year of year, in fact.

Hubspot guided me through my marketing education. And it was a lot easier than going back to grad school! I knew how to create the content, but just needed some help getting it out there. That’s where Hubspot shines.

Some companies already have expert marketers. They might need less social media guidance and more help on segmenting all of their incoming leads, to market to them correctly. That’s where those other 2 products come in.

I searched for more “bottom of funnel” tools for our clients who had the marketing mostly figured out. Pardot and Net-Results were clear leaders. They integrated with our client’s CRMs (MSCRM, SalesLogix, SageCRM, Salesforce, Sugar), they are easy to use, and they are VERY good at things that Hubspot does on a lighter level.

Pardot: Great landing page builder, more detailed drip capabilities than Hubspot, on-screen visitor alerts, superior reporting tool, superior lead scoring.

Net-Results: The only mar-automation company with a SalesLogix integration, industry leader on SEGMENTING leads (example: any lead who spent more than 32 seconds on 4 pages gets this drip email), great drag and drop campaign building UI.

This warrants a new white paper! So look for that soon (-=

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