Marketing automation is the process of streamlining your marketing efforts by using software that automatically processes and analyzes data. Over the last few years, the popularity of marketing automation has only witnessed a rising trend with businesses focusing most of their efforts on implementing and adopting such techniques and systems.
This helps businesses make their departments more efficient, which is also the ultimate aim of marketing automation. In today’s post, we are going to discuss the top benefits of marketing automation and its impact on businesses around the world.
How to Automate Marketing?
Marketing automation can be done using different automation tools. Artificial intelligence is perhaps the most powerful tool that can make businesses flourish. With that being said, chatbots are being used by prominent brands and companies across the globe to keep the customers engaged and answer their queries within seconds.
In addition to that, you can set up automated marketing analytics and CRM tracker to track your successes or losses and emails, meetings, etc. respectively. Although such tasks can only take a few minutes everyday but when coupled with other tasks can increase the overall burden on your sales and marketing personnel.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Efficiency
First and foremost, marketing automation is supposed to make your department more efficient as mentioned earlier. It allows you to cut operational costs and focus the efforts of your team towards more strategic goals. For instance, using marketing automation software, you can upload posts on social media platforms automatically instead of doing it manually everyday.
This means that your team can spend more time brainstorming and developing new marketing strategies and tools. In addition to that, working in an automation platform allows the staff to create landing pages, make posts on social media, and post blogs using the same software.
Marketing and Sales Alignment
Another benefit of marketing automation is that it combines your sales and marketing automation efforts within the same software. As a result, the efforts and goals of the company automatically align as well. Essentially, the process of going from marketing qualified lead to sales qualified lead is made much easier.
It is estimated that marketing automation can increase productivity by 14.5% and decrease marketing overhead by 12.2%. Additionally, marketing automation can also help you achieve more leads and sales. While on one hand, your marketing team focuses on increasing conversion rates, the productivity of the sales team increases too. A win-win situation.
Increase Conversion Rate
Apart from increasing sales and leads, marketing automation can also help make your team more effective. Such software can improve conversion rates and allow the business to manage leads relatively more efficiently.
A marketing automation software can be designed to track your leads, allowing you to retarget website visitors that fail to convert. Again, marketing automation can make the marketing processes simple for the marketing team and provide more space to analyze marketing strategies.
Accurate Reporting
Accurate reporting is a difficult task with several individuals managing the same responsibility. Discrepancies and flaws are common but this does not have to be the case if you are using marketing automation platforms. The software will combine and display all reports within seconds, removing manual headaches.
Furthermore, marketing automation platforms can also provide an overview of all the marketing processes and results. This will allow your team to pinpoint strategies that are going wrong and work on developing newer strategies that work in favor of the business.
Personalized Marketing Strategy
Since the job of marketing automation systems is to constantly collect data on visitors and leads, the marketing team can easily develop personalized marketing strategies as a result. Otherwise, the entire process is cumbersome and takes weeks if not months to accomplish.
Once you have the data in hand, you can target your audience on multiple channels. Marketing automation does a good job in turning your website visitors into leads. Upon finding who your leads are, you can easily divide or segment them based on characteristics or behaviors.
Lead Scoring
Marketing automation software can develop lead scoring, which notifies the sales team when a lead goes from a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead. Then again, it also leads to the better aligning of both your sales and marketing team. As a result, the marketing team’s time is not wasted and they can immediately get on to reaching out to prospects.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is another important benefit of marketing automation. Using the same software, you can create drip email campaigns and track their success. If you ignore lead nurturing, your marketing department will have a hard time converting leads into sales prospects.
Scalable Processes
While marketing automation software has many benefits to offer, every business should develop scalable processes. It is often that businesses plan processes but fail to grow at the same time since they are simply not scalable. Marketing automation in that respect helps companies develop scalable processes so that no effort is wasted.
The most common reasons for companies not being able to expand are individuals setting high expectations, aims, and goals with no tools to achieve them. A target set by an individual may not settle well amongst the entire team. Therefore, scalable processes created by marketing automation allow the marketing team to work on realistic and achievable goals and objectives at the end of the day.
Final Word
Marketing automation has proved beneficial for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Therefore, upcoming startups and entrepreneurs should consider automating their marketing efforts to streamline their processes right from the beginning. However, it is important at the same time that the vision, mission, and goals of the business/company align with the goals and aims of marketing automation.