For businesses to succeed in the modern world, keeping pace with rapid developments and completing digitizing has become essential. With the pressures of such a competitive market, businesses need to develop real strategies to increase efficiency and achieve more in less time, while also growing their audiences.
As a result, automation is a critical component for brands building the multifaceted strategies required when creating a strong online presence.
When used properly, marketing automation can help your business achieve great results, whether it’s in simple sales processes, customer support, or even content planning on social media platforms.
What is marketing automation
Marketing automation is the simplification, automation, and measuring of marketing processes and workflows with the goal of increasing operational efficiency and accelerating revenue growth.
The goal to increase revenue and growth while reducing expenditure is universal. However, many companies struggle to align their technology, processes, and staff with these targets.
Marketing automation solves this problem by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks and enabling companies to sell more successfully across multiple channels simultaneously.
While it has potential, marketing automation is not a fix-all and cannot do everything. Indeed, one of the best practices of marketing automation is that it requires human oversight to execute tasks effectively.
Here is more detail on how marketing automation can help you grow your business:
1. Lead generation and nurturing
Ultimately, everything done in B2B marketing and demand generation should result in marketing attribution, and consistent lead generation is one of the best ways to ensure that. As data-driven campaigns are essential for guaranteeing results and ROI, marketing automation is critical for lead generation.
If you are trying to convert your leads from an MQL to an SQL, make sure you are pulling data from your automation software, because data drives every component of the marketing funnel.
Essentially, marketing automation can be a fantastic tool for your lead-generation strategy. Marketing automation enables targeted content syndication, landing page distribution, retargeting, and many other customized lead-generation methods.
Lead nurturing is another prime candidate for automation. With marketing automation, you can set precise needs-based goals and create realistic buyer personas. This fuels your nurturing strategy with a better understanding of your target clients’ behavioral tendencies and allows for more accurate targeting.
Any information gathered over the lead generation and nurturing process then enables you to develop personalized content for future marketing initiatives. It also gives you more opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, contextual targeting, and email retargeting to increase user engagement.
2. Workflow management and performance tracking
Automation can handle multiple processes with less room for human error. Automating internal workflows can help you work effectively, even with limited resources and budget constraints. Most importantly, automation can also free up more time for priority tasks.
A typical example of how automation lightens workloads is by cleaning contact lists. If a subscriber remains inactive despite all your efforts, focus on others. To ensure that you are reaching interested buyers more often, contacts need to be purged on a regular basis. This can be facilitated with automation software, as rules can easily be programmed to remove contacts if they fail to match lead scoring criteria.
As with all marketing efforts, it is essential to track progress. Marketing automation systems provide real-time reporting features that generate comprehensive reports on the performance of your campaigns. This enables you to monitor your ROI, assess which aspects of your campaign are most effective and which are not by analyzing how your audience is reacting to your strategies.
Utilizing marketing automation simplifies the monitoring of multiple marketing initiatives and their effectiveness with certain segments or even specific accounts.
3. Email marketing
Despite the growth of other channels, email marketing is still a very powerful marketing tool and is often considered the foundation of any outbound campaign. Plus, according to DMA, for every $1 spent on email marketing, marketers can expect an average return of $42. Of course, this significant ROI is reliant on the right strategy empowered by marketing automation.
Successful email campaigns are comprised of targeted messages sent over the course of the entire buyer’s journey, either in the form of larger automated campaigns or individual emails. While the impact of individual, personalized emails is substantial, automating elements of email campaigns is a more economical use of the channel.
Email automationhas many measurable benefits. Not only can marketing automation facilitate the creation of complex email marketing campaigns but it can also lessen sales team workloads.
With the right software, you can create an automated email process that sends a new, personalized email whenever a person takes a specific action, such as clicking on your landing page, downloading an ebook, or subscribing to your newsletter. With email marketing automation, you only need to program each email pipeline once. Your software sends relevant emails to users whose behavior matches the behavior triggers you set.
In addition, marketing automation software can be used to segment your target market based on activity and events triggered during your processes. For example, new subscribers to your email list who did not open your welcome email could automatically be identified. All you need to do is set up workflows and add actions that flag your subscribers based on their actions.
4. High return on investment (ROI)
Marketing automation has excellent ROI.
Companies that use marketing automation achieve better results with their campaigns. In fact, in a study by WebFX, companies that automate some of their marketing tactics experience 53% higher conversation rates than those that do not.
The same study also found that higher conversion rates lead to more customers for your business and, for most businesses, a 34% increase in overall revenue.
Automation is an effective way to yield impactful results quickly. Approximately 75% of companiesusing automation see an increase in ROI within a year, and many do so much sooner.
While marketing automation cannot replace strategic insight and innovative campaigns, it does facilitate their implementation.
5. Personalized marketing
Personalization at scale is a key benefit of marketing automation software. Although the method of marketing personalization has evolved over time, the basic principle has not changed: focus on the topics that matter to buyers.
Personalized content is also essential for lead nurturing. Indeed, according to a 2021 Salesforce article, 77% of consumers expect specific, targeted content at every stage of their research.
How does automation facilitate this?
Marketing automation solutions make it easier to deliver the right material to the right buyer at the right time to suit the specific needs of target accounts and personas. Automation also contributes to the optimization of personalization with the collection of useful insights such as the following (name a few):
Emails with the highest open and click-through rates.
Top performing content across multiple channels such as email and social media, as well as how this translates into website visits and other user actions.
The impact of mobile messaging.
This data will aid your understanding of target segments and how best to communicate messaging in their language to better speak to pain points as you develop your marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
The success of most modern businesses relies heavily on utilizing the right tech stack that meets changing needs. Marketing automation software is one of the most effective tools you can invest in and has the potential to elevate your marketing efforts.
Not only can it automate monotonous tasks, but it can also boost lead generation, increase conversion rates by helping companies focus on leads with buyer intent, and optimize workflows for greater efficiency.
Source: https://techdayhq.com/community/articles/5-vital-benefits-of-marketing-automation-for-your-business
