What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is a way of automating some of the boring manual and repetitive tasks your marketing team has to deal with. Automation can free up time and resources, thereby increasing productivity. It can also provide customer intelligence based on what your audience is doing and help you deliver better content offerings and more effective campaigns.
7 benefits of marketing automation
1. Save Time and use it wisely
As a business owner or marketing manager you’ll be under constant pressure to think up new ideas and strategies that help you stand out above your competitors and gain more attention. Automating some of the lengthy tasks on your to do list can save you time which you can spend on the creative side of marketing. Also your sales team could Automate the process of prioritising and scoring leads so they can spend more time developing leads that show real promise and are qualified.
2. Get a detailed look at your potential customers
Marketing automation, compared to manual methods, can provide a much more detailed picture of the behaviour of ideal customers. By tracking every interaction with your landing pages, content, social mentions, messages, ads and emails, you can get a much greater understanding of where a lead sits in your buying cycle. You will know exactly what channels and tactics have had the most success and apply this information to future activity.
3. Customised Sales follow-up
Follow-ups by your sales team can also be fully customised based on your user behaviour. For example, if a customer is viewing and reading about a broad spectrum of products, it may indicate that they are at the beginning of the buying process, researching you and other companies and comparing/shortlisting. At this stage you could send a focused email with a downloadable product guide specific to what they’ve been looking at. Once your sales team are notified this has been downloaded, it opens the door for them to contact the lead.
4. Target your marketing campaigns
Gathering specific data from customer entry points such as website visits, form completion, downloads, social media activity and direct marketing enables you to set up automatic scoring of how engaged the lead is. This in turn can then steer your marketing direction with set Automations including:
- trigger-based messages
- targeted emails to maintain interest
- personalised messages
- Social Media messages and posts
5. Prioritise leads
As well as automating the lead-nurturing process, marketing automation can also allow businesses to build specific measures of progress of the whole customer journey. Guessing a prospect’s readiness to buy was once based around sales intuition, but now it can be pre-defined and measured much more accurately.
6. Improve marketing ROI
Most Marketing Automation systems have built-in CRM, or integrate with existing CRM’s. This is key to avoiding the guesswork of calculating marketing ROI. By mapping a customer journey right back to the campaign that brought them in, adding the total value of the customer, you can effectively see where your major successes have come from..
7. Predict future investment more accurately
Closed-loop reporting allows your business to accurately calculate the cost of each opportunity and the ROI of all your marketing efforts. This is something that marketing managers and business owners have been crying out for over the last 10 years.
