What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is all about using software to help make marketing tasks easier that humans would normally perform. Marketing departments tend to automate repetitive actions such as social media posting, email automation, and even advertising campaigns.
Not only does this prevent the marketing team from wasting their time on monotonous tasks, but marketing automation can also help provide a personalised experience for customers, especially if there are a wide range of target audiences.
The automation of marketing allows many modern promotional strategies, including lead generation, segmentation, lead nurturing and scoring, marketing relationships, cross-selling and upselling, chatbots, retention, measurement of return on investment (ROI) and account-based marketing.
What is Email Marketing Automation?
Email automation is a way to produce emails that target the right people with ideal content at the perfect times, sending automated messages using a marketing automation tool without having to do lots of fiddly work. Based on your email marketing plan, you can target individuals based on actions, interests, and previous sales when you connect your website analytics with your email marketing platform.
You can then personalise the experience of each customer and improve the relevance of your digital campaigns. There are many different email automation software companies to use for your marketing, including:
Why is Marketing Automation Important?
Marketing automation can grow a business exponentially, from building up a social media following, increasing reach and therefore growing a customer base, and also help target individuals through automated emails and adverts. Let’s look at how this works:
Social media following
Utilising social media is so important for businesses in this day and age, and that’s because it’s a great way to reach potentially hundreds of thousands of people with one simple post. Running a social media campaign takes time, patience and some skills and is an essential part of any business that’s online these days.
Did you know that there are around 166 million daily active users on social media? That’s a lot of people! Creating careful and precise content for your target audience and using marketing automation platforms such as Hootsuite , Bulk.ly or Crowdfire will help you reach more accounts than ever.
Many automated scheduling platforms also offer hashtag suggestions, best posting times according to your audience’s behaviour, and also reports to help you keep track of your growth. In turn, this helps your business reach further and attract new and potential customers to not only follow you, but buy your products or services.
Targeting individuals
If you have multiple audiences to please when using marketing, automation can really help make things easier. For example, you may sell a range of products that would only appeal to a certain market. Marketing automation helps you separate each target audience through:
- Separate mailing lists
- Hashtag use
- Email templates
- What time of day to post
Of course, you could choose not to use marketing automation software, but this could create many problems for you and your marketing team such as forgetting to post at a certain time, incorrect hashtag research, and spending more time making sure that the right content is put in front of the right people. While marketing automation may be an investment, it’s definitely one that will eventually pay for itself!
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8 Ways Marketing Automation Boosts Your Business
1. It boosts your productivity
Marketing automation helps your team effectively carry out their day to day tasks without having to spend lots of time on social media, scheduling marketing emails, and essentially, get on with what you hired them to do – help your business grow and move forward. Every moment saved using marketing automation means your business can move forward in other areas such as strategic planning, content marketing and face to face sales pitches.
2. You get real-time data
When you choose to do all of your marketing manually, you can see some statistics, but they’re not immediate. You may notice your social media following growing ever so slightly each month, and you may notice that certain posts gain a lot more traction than others.
When you use marketing automation, you get instant, real-time data. You can track how many people are on your website, their location, age ranges, and how long they spend on each page.
Collecting this data and analysing it will help you refine your content in the future to ensure you keep people engaged. You’ll notice which posts perform well and those that don’t, you can either improve or reduce the frequency in which you post them.
Knowing what content performs well and using the data you’ve collected will help drive people to your website or business and promote sales.
3. You’re able to stay personal
As briefly touched upon above, marketing automation helps you personalise your content to reach your target audience, all the while helping you with customer loyalty. If you were selling beauty products, for example, yet you also sell power tools and gardening equipment, you will want to separate your content to ensure it reaches those who are going to be interested in what you’re talking about. You would use marketing automation to:
- Create emailing lists to ensure content is put in front of the right people
- Hashtag lists for social media
- Content is posted at times where that particular audience is more likely to be online.
- For example, someone who’s in the DIY industry may not use social media or look at their emails during the day time, and may be more active in the evening when they’ve finished work.
4. An improvement to your ROI
As a business owner, your ROI is extremely important to you, so how does marketing automation improve your ROI?
It Can Significantly Improve The Quality Of Your Customer Relationships
Marketing automation software is designed to strengthen and build existing and new customer relationships. Strong customer relationships lead to sales, and sales lead to the growth of your business.
It Can Produce Highly Targeted & Relevant Communications
You don’t want your emails to be interpreted as spam, and a wealth of data and tools are used by marketing automation technology to help you deliver the right information to the right consumer or customer group.
It Increases Conversion Rates & Reduces Sales Cycles
Lead nurturing is shown to improve the conversion rate of lead-sale. It’s only natural for sales executives to follow up on leads with customers that are ready to buy right away. Marketing automation ensures that no lead is left behind and that your sales team will be notified when someone is showing a ‘ready to buy’ interest.
You Can Make Better Marketing Decisions
Knowing what works for your target audience is imperative, and this will constantly change as customer bases grow and trends change. Marketing automation helps you keep track of this and make better decisions.
Automating Saves You Time
As mentioned earlier, your team can save much more time on marketing to concentrate on other things which in turn, will help grow your business further. In order to save your resources and optimize your multi-location marketing successfully, you can use marketing software from Adplorer.
5. Revenue Growth
As mentioned above, increasing revenues is the number 1 reason about 80% of marketers use it. It’s also the reason B2B marketers who implement marketing automation software see on average a 20% increase in new sales opportunities.
The ability to collect detailed analytical data on your clients and leads is one of the nicest features of marketing automation. This data enables businesses to make better decisions on how to concentrate their initiatives and their budgets. And you’ll be able to better engage your clients by using a data-driven strategy, which can lead to higher revenue and a distinct competitive advantage.
How does marketing automation help with revenue growth? Describe 2-3 ways it does so
6. Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is following up with existing or potential customers that have shown interest in purchase. This data might be collected through an abandoned shopping basket on your website, and this could be followed up with a friendly email to remind them of their shopping cart. Your team can then assist this customer further to promote a sale.
7. It helps you with keeping your current customers
It’s much easier to maintain existing customers than it is to gain new ones, and that’s why it’s important to keep them engaged too. Marketing automation gives you the data you need to put content, emails, and adverts in front of your existing customers to keep them coming back over and over.
8. A better marketing strategy
Social media in itself can be extremely time-consuming. There are many platforms you can reach your customers on, and creating content to post on each platform is extremely time-consuming.
Using marketing automation helps condense this into one post that will be simultaneously posted on each platform, saving you lots of time! Other examples include simply choosing an email list rather than choosing individual contacts, and seeing real-time data on your marketing efforts.
Overall, marketing automation saves a ton of time and effort and brings in more data and results than manual marketing strategies and there shouldn’t be anything stopping you from pursuing it.
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