As a business, you need to be careful about what you are spending especially if you are a small business. You need to spend every cent wisely, ensuring that you get the tools that you need within your budget.
This means knowing where you can cut corners and where you should spend your money. One of the tools that is worth the investment is marketing automation. This is a tool that your company can greatly benefit from.
But what is marketing automation? Why do you need it? Reading on, you can learn more about marketing automation and all of the benefits that your organization can gain from investing in this tool for your business.
Marketing automation is a platform that businesses can use to streamline, automate, and measure their marketing tasks and workflows. What this means for you as a business is that you are more efficient and can increase your profits. It also gives your marketing team the power to grow into a more effective team.
What does marketing automation help your business do more effectively? Here are just some of the ways it can help you be more effective:
These are strategies that successful businesses have in place, but it’s made a lot easier when you have the right marketing automation platform on your side. As your marketing team grows, automation helps you keep that individual attention that customers are looking for while you are still growing as an organization.
Now that you know what marketing automation is, it’s time to take a look at what it isn’t. There are a lot of misconceptions about what marketing automation actually is. For one thing, this isn’t a tool that is meant solely for pushing out spam emails. It’s also not a tool that is meant to replace your marketing team. It doesn’t create marketing campaigns for you. Marketing automation is meant to help make your marketing team even more powerful and effective, allowing you to better scale your marketing operations in a far more sustainable way.
Marketing automation also isn’t just limited to email capabilities, though it does have excellent tools to help make email marketing more effective. It’s a platform that can encompass all of your different marketing channels, including social media marketing and any direct mailing campaigns. Email is just a fraction of what marketing automation can do for your business.
Potentially the biggest misconception that people have is that marketing automation is only a tool for your marketing team. They are not the only ones that can use the marketing automation platform and benefit from its use. The marketing team will use this tool, but your sales team can also greatly benefit from marketing automation solutions. This is because marketing automation can help the sales team by better defining quality leads so that they can easily make the conversions that they need.
Do you need marketing automation? There are some questions that you can answer, which will help you determine whether or not marketing automation can be a great idea for your business:
If you answer “No” to any or all of these questions, then you likely need marketing automation.
There are so many different benefits that you can enjoy with marketing automation. If you’re still uncertain whether or not this is the best approach for you, this section will take a look at some of the many benefits of marketing automation.
Efficiency
Probably the biggest benefit that you get from marketing automation is efficiency. This can not only save you money on staffing costs, but it can also free up more time for your marketing team to work on other things. This means that they can work on bigger projects with the added potential for more profit, instead of wasting their time on things that the marketing automation platform can handle for them.
For instance, instead of having your marketing team create social media postings every day, you can use marketing automation platforms to handle this task for you. This allows your marketing team to focus their creative energies on other aspects of marketing, such as coming up with amazing projects and campaigns that can give your business a significant boost in new customers and conversions.
Marketing automation is also able to make your marketing team’s tasks a lot easier to complete. They can create social media posts, start an email nurturing campaign, post your blogs, or create the perfect landing page all from one convenient platform. This will offer you major time savings when it comes to creating and launching new campaigns.
Better Alignment of Marketing and Sales
Marketing and sales teams are both very important for your business, but they handle different things for your organization. They each usually use different tools for their work, but these tools may not necessarily integrate well with each other. Through marketing automation, you can automate sales and marketing using a single platform. This allows you to better align the efforts and goals of these different departments. Marketing automation is able to make the process of transitioning between marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads easier than ever.
It is estimated that marketing automation can give you a nearly 14% increase in your company’s sales productivity and about a 12% reduction in the marketing overhead in your business. This solution can even help you generate more leads, which then increases your sales. The marketing team gets more time to focus their time on creating strategies that will increase your conversion rates while the sales team gets an increase in productivity.
In short, better alignment between your sales and marketing teams mean increased productivity and efficiency which increases sales.
Increase in Conversion Rate
As previously mentioned, marketing automation is a great tool to increase your conversion rates. You can manage your leads much better, which means that you can focus your attention more on leads that are more likely to purchase your products or services. This is a major way that your sales department can become even more productive thanks to marketing automation systems.
With marketing automation, the sales team is able to better manage their leads, which increases their conversion rates. A good marketing automation platform can track your leads and can even retarget any website visitors who aren’t converting, which increases the conversion rate.
You can increase your conversion rates with marketing automation because you get more time to closely analyze your marketing strategy and figure out ways to get those conversions that you are looking for.
More Accurate Reporting
It can be an overwhelming process when it comes to reporting your company’s analytics. But, with the right tools, this doesn’t have to be such a daunting process anymore. This is where marketing automation comes in to help.
Thanks to marketing automation, you can use this software in order to generate automated reports. This not only makes a complicated task simpler, but it also gives you more accurate reporting. Since it’s automated, this means that there’s less human error involved in the reporting process.
Marketing automation platforms also allow you to get an excellent overview of your company's overall process. This is important because this allows you to see any complications and friction points that your business needs to deal with. As a result of using automation and getting streamlined reporting, you can better see where things aren’t working as well for you. This includes things like where you lose leads during your lead nurturing email campaigns or if you lose them during your company’s sales processes. The analytics can pinpoint where in this process you lose leads to help you fix the problem as soon as possible.
Creating a Personalized Marketing Strategy
Customers don’t want to just be a number to the business that they are purchasing products and services from. Personalized content can go a long way with your customers, which is why this is something that should be a priority for your business. The problem with this is that typically your sales and marketing team are caught up in manual data entry work, preventing them from giving this more personalized experience.
Marketing automation allows you to target the persona on various channels, such as social media, email campaigns, and search ads. This is because marketing automation can help you turn any visitors to your website into potential leads. Once you know who your leads are, you have the ability to segment them based on their different characteristics and behaviors.
Ideally, every aspect of your lead nurturing process should be personalized. Personalized messaging is important because it increases engagement between your company and your lead. For instance, if you’re a clothing company and you notice that a lead put items in the cart without checking out, you can send an automated email about an item in their cart. Personalized messaging also allows you to track your engagement with the lead and improve your ability for lead scoring.
Lead Scoring
Marketing automation software can be a big help in creating lead scoring, notifying members of your sales team when the lead goes from a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead. This goes back to helping create better alignment between the marketing and sales teams.
What makes marketing automation platforms really great here is that it automate this process and offers real-time information. This translates to no wasted time, meaning that your sales team can immediately reach out to these prospects to close the deal and get those conversions your business needs.
Scalable
You need the flexibility to scale as needed when it comes to your marketing systems and processes. You need a solution that is able to scale with your company, growing with it rather than holding you back from growth. If your marketing systems and processes aren’t able to be easily scaled as needed, it will be really hard for you to expand your business.
The good news is that with marketing automation, you get the ability to scale your processes as needed. With manual processes, you are dependent on a person to scale. With automation, you just have to worry about growing your business.
Nurturing Leads
It’s hard to get those important conversions if you aren’t properly nurturing your leads. Marketing automation can help you out with lead nurturing. For one thing, you can use this software to create drip email campaigns as well as track the success of these campaigns.
It’s possible to nurture leads without marketing automation software, but the problem is that it’s a lot harder. This also requires a lot of resources to do, which can be costly as far as time and money goes.
Reduction in Costs
This is a benefit that small businesses can really enjoy. Small businesses often struggle with finding the resources and time that they need for marketing. They tend to stick with manual processes like cold calling and in-person strategies. These are time-consuming approaches to handling your marketing and sales processes.
Automation software allows you to use fewer resources on marketing strategies, freeing up time for your employees. Something that may take 30 employees to complete can now be completed by one or two employees. This saves you money on your operational costs. You also save time, which matters because as they say, “Time is money”.
Refine Your Marketing Processes
With the right marketing automation software, you can have the ability to map out the customer journey for your leads. While doing this, the marketing strategy that you have in place can build upon this information to create processes around the customer journey. By doing this, you will have an easier time processing targets and nurturing leads.
Why does refining your marketing processes matter so much? Statistics show that potential customers will move onto your competition if you don’t respond back to them in a timely fashion. You can use automation to rethink your current follow-up strategy, improving customer satisfaction. By being able to respond faster to potential customers, you will increase the chances of them working with your company.
Integration into Other Software
If you’re like many businesses, you may be hesitant to add another software or platform that you need to use on a daily basis. This is especially true when you have software that doesn’t integrate with each other. Marketing automation is usually capable of integrating with your other software, including your CRM software.
This integration is incredibly helpful, allowing you to compile essential information in one convenient location. You won’t have to continually manually input this information into other software, which can be time-consuming and increase the likelihood of human error messing up your data.
Measures Success
There’s nothing worse as a business than spending time and money on marketing campaigns that aren’t giving you a great ROI. You need to make sure that your marketing campaigns are doing their job and if they aren’t, then you need to pivot to a new strategy as soon as possible. The problem is that sometimes it isn’t easy to measure the success of your campaigns without the proper tools.
Marketing automation solutions do give you the ability to measure the performance of your various marketing campaigns. Marketing solutions can often not only offer essential reporting on marketing campaigns, but some may also offer a forecast on your future campaigns based on past data, thanks to the use of AI and machine learning.
Getting a clear picture of your marketing campaigns in real-time can help you stay ahead of any weaknesses in your marketing strategy, allowing you to pivot to one that might offer you far more success.
Conclusion
Marketing automation is the tool that your business needs to be more efficient and productive. The more efficient and productive your teams are, the more profits your business gets. This is a wise investment into your business, allowing your sales and marketing teams to better optimize their time to increase conversions and create new campaigns to bring more attention to your brand. The less your marketing and sales teams need to focus on mundane tasks, the more they can help you grow your business. It’s important that you do take the time to select the right marketing automation solution for your business and know how to properly utilize it to make the most of this platform. But once you do, you will notice a significant improvement in your business.