Taking an active role in the marketing for your agency or business is a critical part of attaining success. With competition fiercer than ever in just about every industry, you simply can’t rely on a philosophy of “if you build it, they will come.” However, the need to take ownership of your marketing efforts doesn’t mean you have to do everything by hand. Effective use of marketing automation tools can empower you to work smarter, not harder. Here are the main marketing automation benefits you need to know.
What is Marketing Automation?
In essence, marketing automation refers to software platforms that automatically serve content to target audiences. This includes social media management tools, email drips, sales workflows and other digital marketing efforts that are powered by pre-scheduling, audience engagement and analytics. To learn more about exactly what marketing automation is, check out our detailed guide, then come back to see the top marketing automation benefits for your business.
Marketing Automation Benefit #1: Drive More Leads
The most obvious application for a marketing automation platform is to enhance sales and marketing efforts. A recent survey of marketing leaders found that the most important strategic goals of marketing automation are to increase lead generation (61%) and lead nurturing (57%). Marketing automation features the unique ability to automatically nurture leads and serve prospects valuable content based on their behaviors. Because customers are constantly confronted with messages from your competitors, it’s essential to remain top-of-mind. With effective use of a marketing automation platform, you can set up rules, drips and workflows that do the hard work of nurturing your top-of-funnel leads until they’re ready for a more personal touch and ultimately, ready to make a purchase.
Using behavioral tracking methods to predict what consumers are most likely to do is essential to driving more leads. Marketing team members can customize follow-ups for stalled leads in an attempt to boost sales. For example, if a lead has gone through most of the sales funnel and decided to abandon the shopping cart, the marketer will see this. You can then craft a personalized follow-up email to entice that lead to come back and complete the purchase.
Data collected for better lead generation can include social media activity, website visits, downloads, submission forms and more. By collecting this type of information through marketing automation, marketers are able to score and prioritize leads. You can then create trigger-based automated messages, drip-feed email campaigns, personalized emails and even custom social media messages. With this type of customized consumer journey, brands will be more likely to generate more leads and nurture those leads into becoming loyal customers.
Marketing Automation Benefit #2: Maximize Marketing Spend
Marketing automation isn’t just about driving leads and making sales. A truly robust digital marketing automation platform will also feature in-depth reporting on a variety of metrics. Being able to back up your marketing efforts with hard-and-fast performance data can help justify your marketing spend and enhance efforts that continue to perform well. According to SharpSpring’s research, 45% of marketing agencies rely on a marketing automation platform to demonstrate ROI. With CRM pipeline visibility, campaign traffic analytics and email reporting, marketing automation provides the ability to understand how your efforts are performing, and where you should continue to invest.
A crucial part of market spend is time. Time is money and marketing automation will save companies a lot of it. A solid marketing automation platform can replace a team of 50 marketing employees. This will drastically reduce staffing costs and consolidate many repetitive tasks into a flow under one system of operation. Leads can be quickly identified, email campaigns can be sent out on autopilot and data can be collected at an exponential rate.
A marketing automation platform can also identify where the weakest links are inside the marketing team. If the workflow has not been smooth, the point of the bottleneck can be found and modified quickly with the help of a marketing automation service.
Using a reporting system that provides companies with a bird’s eye view of the marketing pipeline, executives can easily see where any issues may be. For example, if hot leads are being generated but those leads are not turning into sales, the issue is with the nurturing of those leads.
Feedback can be automatically given where it is needed and marketing tactics should be adapted to remedy this problem. In return, this can improve the performance of the marketing team members by showing them where the weak points are.
Marketing Automation Benefit #3: Be More Efficient
A truly powerful marketing automation platform will serve as the central hub of your marketing and sales efforts. With the ability to have all of your applications and campaigns centralized in a single location, you empower collaboration across your team and reduce the risk of individual leads falling through the cracks. Marketing automation integration into social media, Google Ads, blogging, SEO and email, enhances your ability to work smarter rather than harder. Operational inefficiency is extremely expensive, costing businesses anywhere from 20-30% of their annual revenue. Marketing automation enables you to reduce inefficiencies and minimize time spent on repeatable tasks so you and your marketing team are able to do more important high-touch work.
Marketing automation enables the company to squeeze more creative juices during a shorter amount of time. By allocating redundant tasks to an automation system, companies will be freeing up time for marketers to focus on developing creative ideas and strategies.
It also helps to get management and marketing teams on the same page. Misalignment between two departments can happen. However, this can be avoided by streamlining the workflow of repetitive marketing tasks and providing feedback. With marketing automation, the company can set a goal and marketers can create a flowing cycle to achieve that goal. By using one platform as the main marketing tool, this decreases the chances of disconnect between departments. Essentially, it makes every piece of the engine run smoothly and effectively.
Marketing Automation Benefits – Start Growing Today!
The desire to improve the way you spend time and money isn’t unique to marketing. These top marketing automation benefits give marketing teams the unique ability to strengthen their efforts through digital transformation. By leveraging automation for repetitive tasks, reporting, and top-of-funnel engagement, your time and energy can be used to further build your strategy, create content and engage with high-priority customer needs.
To learn more about marketing automation and how it can help you start growing your business today, sign up for a free demo today.
