How Marketing Automation Can Transform Your Business
Hopefully by now you’ve heard of some of the wonders marketing automation can do for a business, or you may have heard the term floating around but the concept is still a bit elusive. Well, we’re here to break down the magic a properly implemented strategy can have on your business!
First off, marketing automation is the use of technology to streamline and, you guessed it, automate repetitive marketing tasks. It can be used to manage a variety of marketing activities, including email marketing, social media marketing, lead generation, and customer segmentation. The goal of marketing automation is to increase efficiency and effectiveness and reduce the amount of manual work required for marketing activities, freeing up your human team to do what they do best (whatever that is!). A single word comes to mind…SCALE.
1. Say Goodbye to Manual Labor – Gone are the days of manual data entry and endless email sending. With marketing automation, all your tedious tasks are taken care of with just a few clicks. This leaves you more time to focus on more strategic marketing activities, such as developing new campaigns and analyzing data.
2. Better Customer Engagement – Another benefit of marketing automation is the ability to personalize and target marketing efforts. With marketing automation software, businesses can segment their customer base and create personalized campaigns for each segment. This allows businesses to send the right message to the right audience at the right time, all while making their customers feel like valued VIPs, win, win!
3. Increased Productivity – Marketing automation streamlines your processes, freeing up valuable time and resources that can be redirected towards other important tasks. With manual marketing, it can be difficult to handle an increase in leads or customer demand. Marketing automation allows businesses to scale their marketing efforts to meet this demand, without the need to increase staff or resources.
4. Generate (and Nurture) Leads – Lead generation is another area where marketing automation can be transformational. Marketing automation software can be used to track leads through the sales funnel and trigger specific actions based on the lead’s behavior. For example, if a lead visits a pricing page on a website, the system can automatically send them an email with a special offer, or compelling mid-funnel content. This type of lead nurturing helps convert leads into customers more effectively, while protecting the time of sales teams.
5. Bridge the Gap – What about those pesky sales and marketing silos? With marketing automation, you can break down the barriers and bring the two teams together. No more fighting over leads and who gets the credit (or blame for unqualified leads). Marketing automation ensures a smooth handover of leads from marketing to sales and makes sure that both teams are on the same page.
6. Better ROI – With marketing automation, you can track your results in real-time and make data-driven decisions that will increase your return on investment and help inform future campaigns and marketing efforts. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t love a good ROI?
While all of this probably sounds pretty amazing, it’s important to keep in mind that marketing automation doesn’t replace the need for a human touch. While automation can handle repetitive tasks, it can’t replace the creativity, strategy, and emotional connection that human marketers provide. Marketing automation is a tool that can be used to enhance and support the work of human marketers, not replace them.
Additionally, implementing marketing automation does involve upfront capital and time investment (though well worth it in the long run!) Most platforms today will provide a major lift with their out of the box functionality, but there is definitely a learning curve so working with an outside implementation team can help speed up the process and create functionality and processes you might not even realize are possible!
At the end of the day, marketing automation can completely transform your business through freeing up your sales and marketing teams and creating processes for scale. If you’re interested in implementing a customized automation strategy for your business, give us a call!
