Marketing is among the most demanding and time-consuming business processes for many. You must identify prospects, reach out to them, stay connected, monitor your competitors, and so on. Luckily, you don’t have to handle these labor-intensive tasks anymore. You can now focus on scaling your marketing efforts by automating your workload. For every dollar you spend on marketing automation, you can expect $5.44 marketing returns within the first three years.
We’ve compiled this guide to illustrate how marketing automation can simplify your workload.
What Exactly is Marketing Automation?
Marketers handle many repetitive daily tasks, such as social media posting, ad campaigns, email marketing, competitor analysis, etc. Marketing automation seeks to help marketers automate such processes to focus on more critical business processes.
Simply put, marketing automation is outsourcing monotonous marketing tasks to dedicated software. This way, marketing departments don’t have to use their time and energy to pursue and convert leads. Effective marketing is all about personalization. As a result, marketing automation software integrates with outreach and CRM software to provide timely and personalized experiences for each customer. That’s why at least 53% of businesses leverage marketing automation software.
Some of the best marketing automation software of 2022 include:
Why Use Marketing Automation Software?
Is marketing automation really worth the hype and the money? This is a question every marketer has. The truth is that marketing automation can help your business grow, but so can lots of other tools. So, what sets marketing automation apart from other tools?
Let’s discuss the pros of marketing automation in detail below.
Generate Better Leads
For starters, leveraging marketing automation can help you generate more high-quality leads. Lead generation is among the essential aspects of any business, regardless of size and industry. With marketing automation, your sales and marketing team won’t have to focus on monotonous tasks. Instead, they can turn their attention and energy to creating a better strategy to generate better leads.
Not only that, but marketing automation software can give you a clear insight into your customer behavior. For instance, you can follow a prospect’s path through your website. This way, you will better understand their interests and intentions. You can also use this data to customize your follow-ups. In fact, over 35% of the companies interviewed say marketing automation results in better quality leads.
Nurturing Leads
Did you know that 50% of all the leads businesses generate are high-quality but are not ready to purchase just yet? That shows that generating high-quality leads is only one part of the equation. You still need to guide your prospects through the consumer buying journey.
Unfortunately, not all your leads will convert to sales. For small businesses, nurturing leads is a time-consuming and demanding process. Luckily, small business owners can embrace marketing automation to create personalized experiences and convert more leads.
Improve on the Go
Your marketing automation platform completes several tasks daily. As it performs each task, it analyses every piece of information along the way. This means that you can access information to help you identify what is not and what is working. With access to such data, you can review and improve your strategies on the go.
Saves You Time and Money
Marketing automation aims to help you save time and money by automating tedious but essential marketing tasks like sending emails and social media postings. Completing such tasks on your own is time-consuming and almost impossible.
With a marketing automation platform, you can now interact with thousands of clients about different topics on different channels, all from a click of the mouse. While your platform works hard to provide timely and personalized experiences, you can focus on more critical processes such as support.
Custom Tailor Everything
A marketing automation platform will give you a 360-degree view of your customers’ behaviors. Integrating it with a CRM system will provide you with all the data you need to boost your marketing efforts. This is because you can track everything the prospect does on your website, including:
- The pages they are visiting
- The type of content each prospect is interested in
- Where they are in the consumer buying journey
- Motivation and behaviors relating to their buying patterns
This way, you can custom-tailor all your marketing efforts to suit the interests and behaviors of each prospect.
Improved Efficiency Between Your Sales and Marketing team
Misalignment between the sales and marketing teams is a common occurrence in almost all businesses out there. But why should the collaboration between your sales and marketing team remain rocky when all you have to do is to use marketing automation? By using marketing automation software, your marketing and sales team will be reading from the same page (literally).
What’s the Biggest Obstacle to Marketing Automation
True, marketing automation can take your marketing efforts to the next level. However, you must overcome various challenges to get the most out of your marketing automation platform. Here are some of the barriers to a successful marketing automation implementation.
Marketing Automation can be Costly
Like all business tools, the upfront and running costs of automation marketing can be pretty costly. This might be the most significant obstacle to successful implementation for small businesses. However, its ROI far outweighs the related costs. In fact, you will get $5.44 for every $1 you spend on marketing automation.
Marketing Automation Requires Lots of Data to Work
While it’s true that marketing automation can increase your leads and conversion rates, it requires lots of data to work. For starters, marketing automation will only work if you already have leads to nurture. Secondly, you must clearly understand your prospects and current customers’ behavior. Without a clear-cut strategy, marketing automation will not work.
Marketing Automation Still Needs Human Intervention
Although marketing tools are more innovative than they were a few years ago, they still need human intervention to create more timely and personalized experiences. That means that your sales and marketing team master review each message before engaging your customers.
When to Use Marketing Automation?
We’ve spent lots of time analyzing the pros and cons of marketing automation. But how can you tell that the time is right for your company to start using marketing automation? Firstly, every company stands to benefit from marketing automation regardless of its size and industry.
However, marketing departments and business owners must ask themselves the following questions to determine whether they should use marketing automation:
- Will marketing automation help you improve the quality of your lead generation and nurturing?
- Are marketing tasks taking up the majority of your time and effort?
- Do you see results from your current marketing efforts?
- Does your sales and marketing team understand how to nurture leads and guide prospects through the consumer buying journey?
- Does your marketing and sales team thoroughly understand the analytics that matters most to your business?
How to Implement Marketing Automation Successfully
As with all business strategies, you must successfully implement marketing automation to get the most from it. Utilizing what you already have is a great way to get started with marketing automation. From there, identify your goals and preferences before buying marketing automation software for your business. Discover steps you should follow to implement marketing automation successfully below:
✔ Identify Your Goals and Objectives
Marketing automation is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. As a result, you must take your time to set clear goals and objectives before buying software. Do you want to use marketing automation to find better quality leads? Or perhaps you want to identify areas of improvement? No matter what you plan to achieve, setting clear goals early on will help you get the most from automation.
✔ Monitor Your Competitors
It would be best to figure out how your competitors leverage marketing automation. The goal is to identify what is and not working for your competitors. This way, you will be more informed before buying automation software.
✔ Work With Your Marketing and Sales Team
Your marketing and sales team will be responsible for implementing and ensuring the successful management of your marketing automation strategy. For that reason, it’s only wise to engage your sales and marketing team throughout the process. Ask them about their needs and how they plan to make the most of automation.
✔ Choose a Tool and Integrate it With All of Your Media Channels
Finally, pick a tool to help you and your team achieve your goals and objectives. After that, integrate your new tool with all your media channels, CRM, analytics, and contact list to tailor your marketing experiences and take your marketing efforts to the next level.
✔ Optimize Ad Creation
After choosing your preferred digital marketing automation software, take advantage of data to make better decisions on ad creation, such as scheduling, analytics, and more.
✔ Constantly Monitor Performance
Marketing automation is an ongoing process. With that in mind, continuously monitor performance and make data-driven adjustments to optimize performance.
What is an Example of Marketing Automation?
Here are typical examples of marketing automation in action.
Marketing Automation for Emails
According to marketers, email marketing is an efficient way to achieve business goals and objectives. So, if you are planning to leverage automation marketing, email is the best place to start. With automation, you can use email marketing to increase your leads, returns in revenue, conversions, and more. Examples of email marketing automation include:
- Customer survey emails
- Abandoned cart emails
- Welcome emails
- Cold prospect outreach
- Product launch emails
Automation for Social Media
Apart from emails, marketers can also automate their social media activity. Social media marketing automation simplifies workload and allows marketers to create more engaging content. Here are examples of marketing automation for social media:
- Post scheduling
- Automatically sending messages across all social platforms
- Providing customer service
- Notifying users when a new post goes live
- Tracking activity and campaigns
Automation for Lead Generation
Marketing automation can also be used for lead generation. 39% of marketers using marketing automation say that it increases lead quality. Additionally, these marketers say that marketing automation leads to more conversions. You can take the hard work out of the process by using automation for lead generation. Below are examples of automation for lead generation:
- Creating conversion-ready landing pages and forms
- Monitoring visitor activity
- Running welcome messages and pop-ups
- Answering customer inquiries
- Allowing automatic form fills
- Tracking and monitoring your leads, conversions, and engagements
- Measuring ad campaign effectiveness
- Running A/B test
- Monitoring competitor performance
- Making each part of the consumer buying journey easier
- Identifying new prospects
- Managing employee efficiency
- Lead scoring
- Sales calls
Automation for Content Creation
Creating high-quality content can be tedious and expensive. That’s where the automation software comes in. Businesses can produce high-quality content with minimal human intervention by utilizing marketing automation software. You can now use AI writing software to create engaging and compelling content automatically. Automation for content creation can be used for:
- Copywriting
- Social media content
- Editing and proofreading
Marketing Automation for PPC
PPC or pay-per-click can have a positive and significant impact on your business. It’s one of the most cost-effective marketing techniques to achieve all your business and marketing goals. No matter your goals, you must invest significant amounts of time and money to get optimal results from your PPC campaigns. For starters, you must use your time to research, stay up to date with current trends, bid, and more to increase conversions and save money.
Fortunately, marketing automation software simplifies PPC management. Your marketing team can now use a marketing automation platform to manage ad campaigns automatically. For instance, you don’t have to spend countless hours updating your bids depending on the current prices when you use automation for your PPC campaigns.
Start Using Automation to Increase Your Bottom Line Today
If you are ready to increase your business’s bottom line seriously, digital marketing automation is among the top strategies you should immediately implement. Marketing automation can simplify your workload and optimize ad performance when used correctly. Above all, this long-term investment will increase your ROI dramatically.
Our SEO and digital marketing experts are ready to help if you want to learn more about marketing automation. Let’s talk about how your business can leverage marketing automation today.
