Marketing can be overwhelming. There are so many channels and tactics you need to know about. What should you be promoting? Who is your target user? How will they find you? If you’re anything like most companies today, you’ve probably hired a team of consultants to guide your marketing strategy.
The problem is, it’s not enough. You need more than just one expert to help you scale, grow, and reach new customers. It’s time to embrace the future with marketing automation.
In this blog, we’ll explain everything from why marketing automation is your new best friend, to the top benefits of implementing an integrated marketing software package. Read on to discover more…
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the process of automating business communications like email marketing, campaign management, and lead generation. Automated communications are important for a few key reasons:
– They can increase response rates.
– They can free up your team to focus on more important tasks.
– They can increase your bottom line.
Why Do You Need Marketing Automation?
The wheel has truly turned full circle. Back in the late 2000s, marketing automation was the new wave. SMBs were flocking to marketing automation platforms like Marketo, Salesforce, and HubSpot, in search of the next best thing. Then, in 2016 and 2017, marketing automation started to take off. It’s not surprising.
As more and more people adopted email as their primary channel, and more and more marketing departments were centralized, the need for automation was ever more pressing. With so many email channels and tactics to manage, it was easy to put off marketing automation. And, as email adoption rates rose, it became more and more necessary to scale.
It’s not just necessary, it’s essential. Marketing automation allows you to speed up your lead scoring, increase your ROI, and reach a far larger audience. And, with most platforms, you can also create a highly personalized experience for your subscribers, making the process feel like a one-on-one conversation.
Benefits of Using Marketing Automation
Efficiency
Automating marketing tasks like email campaigns, social media posts, blog articles, and website content means you can save a ton of time. This frees you up to focus on more strategic activities and lets you build a more efficient company culture.
Automated campaigns can also be executed more quickly and reliably than manual marketing efforts. If you’ve ever spent hours trying to perfect a marketing campaign only for it to go viral for the wrong reasons, you know how frustrating this can be.
Marketing automation can also free up your team from the burden of constantly monitoring, tweaking, and troubleshooting marketing campaigns. Instead of hiring additional staff to help with this, you can assign them more strategic tasks and have them be more productive.
Speed
Of course, the biggest benefit of all is the increased response rates that come with automated communications. You don’t have to worry about writing and sending compelling emails every time.
Instead, you can focus on making the emails better, not worse. The same goes for social media posts and other forms of content. You can write once, publish once, and optimize once, without any human error.
Accuracy
Another huge benefit of marketing automation is the accuracy of lead scoring. With human-powered marketing, errors are bound to creep in. They’re more likely to happen when you’re sending emails manually, especially if you have a large list. And, of course, they can dramatically reduce your ROI.
Automating your marketing channels helps you improve the accuracy of your campaign performance. Even the best, most experienced marketers can make mistakes with their campaigns. A great example of this is when you’re using an automated campaign to drive traffic to your website. If you make a mistake, or if there’s a technical glitch, your website will be the one bearing the brunt of the negative impact of this.
With marketing automation, you can create highly accurate campaigns with the help of software. You can use content analytics to see where your traffic is coming from and what kind of content is driving them to your site. You can also use lead scoring to determine whether each lead is a legitimate customer. This helps you identify high-quality leads that will become customers.
Scale
One of the biggest challenges of marketing today is reaching a large audience. Automation allows you to scale your efforts without scaling your team. Automation can help you reach new audiences, like those who may be using different devices or are based in different time zones. You can also create targeted campaigns that target specific segments, like high-value decision-makers.
Personalization
The last benefit of marketing automation is the ability to create highly personalized experiences for your subscribers. For example, you may want to recommend a product if they recently purchased a certain service. To do this, you need to create a customer journey. With marketing automation, you can do all of this and more.
You can also personalize the content you publish, for example, by adding images or links to products. You can even create email campaigns based on specific events occurring in customers’ lives, like how many new followers they have on social media. This can help you build a relationship with your audience that lasts well beyond their email campaign.
Lead Scoring
A common cause of customer complaints is poor customer service. This is usually because the person complaining wasn’t satisfied with the way they were treated by the company.
A customer complaint can quickly lead to a lawsuit if the company doesn’t respond quickly enough. One solution is to use lead scoring to determine whether each lead is eligible to become a customer. This helps you identify high-quality leads that will become customers.
Increase Conversion Rate
If you want to increase your conversion rate, one of the best ways to do this is by creating content that resonates with your audience on a personal level. You can use marketing automation to create content that reflects this human side while also delivering the business content your audience expects.
If you’re looking to improve your lead generation initiatives, you can use marketing automation to create content that encourages people to share your content and reply to your messages. This can help you drive new traffic to your website and create more leads.
How to Get Started with Marketing Automation?
There are a few key things to keep in mind when it comes to getting started with marketing automation. First, you need to choose a platform that works with your current technology and that suits your team’s skill set. Second, consider investing in a marketing automation platform with a sales and marketing team.
Third, partner with a marketing automation software provider that offers services like marketing consulting, customized onboarding, and an experienced support team. As you can see, it’s important to approach automation with a strategy. If you go in without a plan or strategy, you’ll never get anywhere.
You’ll also waste a lot of money. According to one study, 63% of marketing budgets go to unsuccessful campaigns. The good news is, you can get much more out of your marketing budget if you’re using marketing automation.
Final Words
Marketing automation is your new best friend. It’s time to embrace the future with marketing automation. It allows you to speed up your lead scoring, increase your ROI, and reach a far larger audience.
Instead of making countless tweaks to your campaigns, as you might have to do manually, you can test new content, landing pages, and creative assets without needing to make changes to every single instance. You can use marketing automation to increase your lead generation initiatives.
In addition to creating automated emails, you can also create automated social media content that encourages people to share your content and reply to your messages. With most platforms, you can also create a highly personalized experience for your subscribers, making the process feel like a one-on-one conversation.
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