5 Reasons why marketing automation is important for your brand
As a process driven person, I am a strong believer in automation. Especially in today’s business environment – in which automation is everywhere – there is no question: Marketing automation is and will continue to be an essential building block of productivity for businesses across all industries. You may already know it is a critical part of any effective content marketing and new business development strategy. And businesses of virtually any size can benefit. After all, if you’re not managing your leads properly, you are wasting your sales and marketing resources, time, and money.
What, Exactly, is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software platforms that execute recurring marketing tasks such as publishing social media posts, sending out emails, getting client follow-up alerts, etc. without any manual effort. When implemented properly as part of your daily workflow and used strategically, marketing automation tools nurture prospects with helpful, personalized content that can convert leads into loyal customers and brand advocates.
Marketing Automation Can Help You:
1. Increase Efficiency
Traditional marketing tactics that force sales to make frequent phone calls and client visits can still drive business success – but marketing automation can make them more efficient. Once customers make a purchase, they are immediately added to the “customers” list in the automation platform. When inquiries are made on your website, they are immediately added to a “lead” list. As the system gathers more information about contacts, you can create a workflow that triggers specific actions at specific times, delivering automatic communications that feel customized. And, by automating repetitive sales operations processes, you can reduce costs and your sales team can spend less time hunting down leads, and more time pursuing qualified leads.
2. Personalize Communications
I’m sure by now you’ve heard the phase “content is king.” But don’t create content for content’s sake. Content is only king if it’s the right message, reaching the right person at the right time. Marketing automation allows you to adapt messages to match the specific needs of each customer. You can design content that corresponds to a lead’s behavior during the lead nurturing process, and schedule that content to be delivered in response to specific lead behavior. So, instead of resorting to interruptive ads, you can implement targeted messaging to an eager, willing audience.
3. Get Better Data (and make it work harder for you)
Marketing automation is an analytics goldmine because it enables you to collect and analyze customer data from multiple digital marketing channels. You already probably know that email makes it easy to track responses and acquire useful analytics, which then can be used to optimize subject lines, CTAs (call-to-actions), topics and much more. Marketing automation systems give you access to this info across all of your channels for all contacts on one, unified dashboard. This enables you to use historical consumer behavior data to improve your targeting. And better targeting means better conversion of leads.
4. LEADS, LEADS, LEADS
In the end, that’s what it’s all about. Marketing automation software provides an effective framework for nurturing leads. Many people who receive your emails and visit your website are actually interested in making a purchase from your company but are not ready to commit just yet. This could be due to a variety of reasons. Using your marketing automation system for lead nurturing can provide insights into what is holding up a purchase decision, then guide leads throughout the sales funnel until they are ready to buy. As busy as people are these days, many are unlikely to respond to cold calling and other traditional marketing approaches. So, your ability to respond to a lead and establish a relationship until they engage with the company’s products and services is essential. But, to provide that kind of personalized attention using traditional means would likely drain resources. Fortunately, marketing automation can help you. For example, leads who visit your landing page and fill out a form to receive more information can be sent a follow-up email almost immediately, as the form triggers an automated response to deliver content in a timely fashion.
Marketing automation also allows for lead scoring, in which the tool assigns each lead a given score/grade based on their behavior and interest in specific products and services. This gives your business the information needed to determine where the lead is in the sales funnel, including how likely a lead is to make a purchase. So, you can focus on hot leads rather than pursuing cold leads.
5. USE Those Leads
In addition to lead nurturing and scoring for existing clients and prospects, marketing automation can help you with lead generation and actionable insights. Marketing automation has important features that will enable marketers to analyze data and identify new resources for growth. For example, an analysis of incoming traffic to a company’s website can determine where the traffic originated as well as potential ways to tap into those opportunities. From there, you can track the performance of your new business development efforts, using your data to determine what works and what doesn’t. Armed with these insights, marketers can develop and implement campaigns with greater efficiency and effectiveness, all while deepening their knowledge of their target audience.
As you can see, I’m passionate about how marketing automation can help strategic, creative campaigns to generate results – as are all of us here at Relish Marketing. If you’ve been wondering about how marketing automation could help your business and improve your productivity, we’re ready to talk with you.
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