The rapid pace of technological advancements enables businesses to increase their reach and engagement with their target audiences. The manual processes of your marketing strategy only serve to hinder marketing efforts.
Today’s marketing technology allows companies to automate certain processes to improve efficiency and increase business performance. Marketing automation allows your business to reduce internal time-wastage and focus on important marketing efforts. Marketing automation is all about optimization.
Marketing automation doesn’t necessarily require advanced processes to solve complex problems. Nor should your business utilize automation to completely automate all processes (think social engagement). Rather, it should focus on efficiently saving time and improving conversions.
There are many benefits to automating certain marketing processes. These five offer company-wide benefits, making improvements across the business as a whole.
1. Increase lead nurturing
In today’s global economy, it’s a fierce fight to compete for every lead. If your marketing efforts require manual output, then your business is already behind the rest of the competition.
Automating lead nurturing frees up your highly intelligent marketing team to focus on more intelligence problems. Lead nurturing is a rote task best left to automated processes.
Marketing efforts and lead nurturing can intuitively respond to criteria-based triggers. This limits the potential of human error within the marketing funnel. At the same time, increasing relevant, personalized email responses.
No consumer enjoys receiving spam. Automation affords businesses the ability to deliver the right message, to the right consumer, at the right time. Saving your company time while increasing conversion and engagement.
2. Increase productivity
If a portion of your marketing efforts is spent in menial data entry tasks and ad-hoc marketing, then it may be time for marketing automation.
Automating the above tasks to intelligent, adaptive automated processes eliminates the need for wasted human resource on repetitive tasks. This can reduce lead response times, increase sales output, and personalize marketing efforts to capture more lead information.
Automating rote tasks could be rolled out to various marketing platforms, from lead nurturing, to social media posting, and customer segmentation. This can boost your business’ marketing efforts to allow an expansion of your customer base. Though, a word of caution, certain processes should never be automated.
Social media engagement, for example, should never be automated. Companies have learned embarrassing lessons when trying to introduce automated social engagement.
3. Workflow Automation
Workflow automation implements systemised processes and marketing activities, creating an efficient marketing workflow. Routine tasks that are repetitive in nature encourage human error. Optimizing these workflows eliminates unnecessary risks.
Workflow automation is also scalable with your business. This can include internal marketing processes such as workplace collaboration and budgeting and planning. Automated marketing routines could also be leveraged across multiple platforms to create a range of assets like conversion pages and forms.
This allows your business to optimize multiple channels like email, lead generation and nurturing, and social media.
4. Leverage big data
Big data leads to big insights. The application of the Internet coupled with several other marketing technologies allows companies to aggregate thousands of “micro-observations” into enormous sets of data. Things like click rates, bounce rates, social sharing, and page views could be leveraged by companies to fuel business insights, enhance marketing campaigns, and improve business decisions.
Big data creates tailor-made marketing efforts which assist in improving workflow, fuelling predictive analysis, and improving lead generation and sales. Big data provides companies with the necessary information about consumers and potential customers to create necessary buying personas.
Data is easily stored and managed in automation software. This enables a business to analyze the acquired data and turn it into clear, actionable marketing strategies.
5. Increase revenue
At their core, marketing strategies and campaigns are all about customer acquisition and increasing a company’s ROI.
Marketing automation goes beyond streamlining internal operation processes and reducing staffing costs. It optimizes operational efficiency to grow revenue faster. Automating certain processes throughout the conversion funnel increases its revenue-generating potential.
When you’re able to differentiate when and whom to call as well as what to say to prompt a potential lead to press the ‘buy’ button, then you successful close deals more effectively, giving you an edge over your competitors. Marketing automation software provides these opportunities to grow your business’s revenue streams.
Marketing automation helps achieve better metrics and aligns marketing and sales efforts. This improves customer engagement, ensuring that nurturing efforts lead to the ultimate goal: the buying decision. The customer information and data gathered through marketing automation provides your business opportunities to identify customers ready to buy.
Marketing automation takes the guesswork out of marketing strategies. The capabilities it provides businesses with allows for a more concerted marketing effort. A well-constructed marketing automation strategy will play a key role company-wide.
