In recent years, the number of platforms and communication channels has exploded exponentially. The world is more connected than it has ever been, and this poses a new challenge for the marketing industry: How to handle all of that?
The answer? Automation. Marketing Automation is the tool that can be used to help businesses keep ahead of their competitors. Handling every social platform and communication channel without the help of a marketing automation solution can, at times, be not only hard but quite impossible.
Businesses, especially smaller businesses which working with a limited budget, can save a lot of time and money with marketing automation if used correctly.
But first,
What is Marketing Automation?
Simply explained, Marketing Automation refers to the technologies that enable users to automate certain repetitive marketing-related actions and analyze the results of their marketing activities to help the business to attract more customers in less time and become more profitable.
These actions and activities are programmed in the marketing automation tool and set to occur when a particular action or moment happens with minimal intervention or help. Marketing Automation allows users to automate a large variety of their workflow, making it a powerful tool that significantly affects the customer’s journey.
If you use marketing automation correctly, you will be able to nurture your visitors and leads, take them through an engaging journey that converts them into loyal lifetime customers. That will happen only if your growth hacking strategy is on-point and you have done everything right every step of the way. This may sound difficult, and to tell you the truth, it’s not always easy, but it’s not still hard.
When Should I Use Marketing Automation?
You should start considering your marketing strategy after you’ve decided on a plan and put together a customer journey strategy. After you start seeing a steady (and preferably growing) flow of new visitors – whether from paid marketing campaigns or organic search results – you should begin automating your marketing efforts.
You should also use Marketing Automation when you start to notice that too much time is spent on social media management or that despite having many leads, you are unable to reach the full potential of your business and can’t generate the expected revenue
What are the benefits of Marketing Automation?
The Main reason you should use Marketing Automation is that it will allow you to continue building personalized communications with customers that should prove vastly more effective. Automating repetitive and tedious manual tasks will free up your time to focus on delivering constant and consistent contact with your audience. This more constant, more personalized, and more effective method of communicating with customers can have a significant effect on your revenue.
Marketing Automation solutions also help nurture new leads and direct them through their customer journey and sales funnel.
How to Save Time and Money using Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation can help by creating a very efficient environment for the creation, administration, automation, and analysis of marketing processes, functions, and conversations. Companies who use Marketing Automation correctly can improve their lead generation significantly and generate more sales at a lower cost, making their business more profitable.
Now let’s discuss how marketing automation can save your business time and money.
- Analytics
Marketers love Analytics. Numbers, graphs, and charts are our bread and butter. We spend much of our time analyzing our efforts to know what went right, what went wrong, and how we could improve our number the next time.
Marketing Automation tools can act as analytics generators. They can do the test and measurements and provide us with the insights to optimize our Marketing ROI and increase profitability in our next campaign.
The tools can generate reports that give us the details and information needed to improve our campaigns and get better results in seconds, saving us some valuable time so we could redirect our focus to what needs our attention the most.
- A Centralized Database for All Marketing Data
Marketing Automation solutions can act as a centralized database where you can store all your marketing data, such as excellent prospect and client interactions and behaviors. You can segment this data to better focus on the right strategy and message for every client and future client.
It is super useful to be able to track client and prospect behaviors, and it makes executing pre-designed actions possible. That’s a process that the marketing automation solution will be able to repeat through every stage of the buying cycle.
- No More Boring and Repetitive Tasks
There are a lot of repetitive actions and marketing tasks that need to be done for your marketing efforts to pay off. The number of these tasks and the time required to perform them gets more prominent as your business grows and expands, making things more difficult.
This is where the Marketing Automation solution will show why it was a good investment, as it can handle those repetitive tasks tirelessly. This will save you valuable resources and give you back the priceless time that would’ve otherwise been consumed by these tasks. The time that you could put to better use.
- Be More Creative
A Marketing Automation solution can help you, and your staff optimizes what clients and future clients do your sales team needs to direct their focus and efforts on, thus making better use of your limited time.
You will also be able to put more time and effort into creative tasks. Focusing more on creative works instead of repetitive and tedious tasks will have apparent effects on the productivity and efficiency of your business. It will also have a positive impact on the creativity and overall personal satisfaction of your team.
- Better Social Media Management
Did you know that you can save more than 6 hours weekly by automating your posts and ads on social media platforms? You can use this time to update your profiles with fresh content and engage better with your audience. This will help you also increase your reply rate by 250%.
- Smart, personalized, and Dynamic Content
Marketing Automation software can show visitors customized content and offers based on your information about them (past behaviors, shopping & purchase history, etc.) This can lead to a more than a 20% increase in sales on average.
- Smarter Scheduling
Did you know that you can save up to 80% of the time you spend on scheduling by using an automated tool? Most Marketing Automation tools can help you automate client reservations and appointments, so you can save this valuable time for something else, like talking with clients!
- Recapture of Lost clients and leads
If you have been in the marketing game for some time, then you know that acquiring a new client or customer is much costlier than retaining one you already have. It could be as high as 30 times more expensive.
Recapturing those lost clients and leads is a crucial part of boosting sales, but it’s not easy. It’s very time-consuming to manually keep up with lost leads and figure out why and when they dropped. However, it’s not that daunting of a task for the automation software.
All you’ve got to do is set up the information, and the solution will do things like offering a shipping discount for clients who abandon their shopping cart to get them back.
- Turn them into loyal customers
So, you have captured a lead, nurtured it into a buying customer. The follow-up emails showed the customer is satisfied with the product or service they purchased. Now what?
As they say, you’ve to strike while the iron is hot. You can send the customers a heads-up for products that you think they might like based on their shopping history. You can send them special offers and discounts on their products.
The secret here is to link up the products ahead of time, and then all you’ve to do is set an automated schedule for sending these emails or notifications.
- Retain your loyal customers
Did you know that about 49% of consumers can easily switch brands with just a coupon? This is great for you if you are trying to make them turn to your brands, but this also means it can happen to you.
How could you try and prevent that? One of the ways is incentive and loyalty programs. Continuously rewarding your loyal customers will help you retain them and ensure that they will not switch when they eventually receive the emails with coupons and offers from your competitors.
In the end, a marketing automation solution is a great way to see a quick return on investment for B2B and B2C businesses alike and can enable your business to have the output (communicatively-speaking) of a large corporation while still running on a tight budget.
When Combining Marketing Automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), businesses can see a jump in their profitability that is very hard to obtain otherwise. One problem, though, is that it can be confusing for some to distinguish between Marketing Automation and CRM.
If you are still feeling a bit confused about the two, what they do, how do they compliment each other and how can you make the best out of both of them, then you should take a minute to learn the Different Between CRM and Marketing Automation here.
If you already know the distinction between the two, you should get on with choosing one of the top CRM software for Small Business.
As always, if you have a question or a comment, feel free to leave it below, and if you liked the article, please share it with a friend or a colleague who might find it helpful, too!
