Marketing automation is a combination of autonomous software that will simplify marketing efforts. In this increasingly technology-dependent world, using automation is more important than ever. Companies need to benefit from technology to understand the customers, increase sales and provide a superior experience for employees. When marketing and sales work with different tools for different goals, it may be challenging to obtain targeted returns.
What is Marketing Automation?
Using marketing automation ensures the integration of sales and marketing. Both sales and marketing can be run in one panel. Operations like customer analysis, sales and advertisement campaigns can be done practically. Marketing automation can be beneficial to many different parts of a company and has an important effect on departments like finance, sales, and marketing. All the traditional manual operations get automated in this process and through data collection, creating and measuring campaigns and checking sales numbers, following customers’ behaviors gets easier.
Why is Marketing Automation Important for Your Business?
There are many benefits brands can get from marketing automation. We‘ve summed up the most critical ones to give you a better idea of this trendy topic:
- Marketing automation lets you collect and analyze customer data from your various engagement channels. This unified and appropriate data is super critical for running successful campaigns.
- It reduces costs & increases efficiency by automating repetitive operational processes.
- As far as personalization and one-to-one marketing are concerned, it’s the perfect tool to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time & place.
- It’s one of the most efficient ways to increase conversion performance. It’s an effective playground to lead nurturing activities.
- Using marketing automation to determine the historical data of consumer behaviors and actions improves targeting. Better targeting leads to better lead conversion.
- It helps businesses improve their customer experiences. Response timing decreases and customers feel more personalized and engaged.
- Using marketing automation reduces errors caused by humans in the marketing processes.
- With flexibility on board, using marketing automation allows effective integration with the core internal and external systems (CRM, ERP, etc.) easily.
- Using marketing automation improves the alignment and integration of sales and marketing, creating a unifying tool that orchestrates the different parties’ actions. Also, it helps to shorten the sales circle with the aid of highly responsive and interactive actions
Marketing automation is the way of the future and allows businesses to quickly and effectively automate processes that once took very long to put in place. For a marketing strategy to be as effective as possible, automation is becoming more necessary. These benefits should tell you just how important marketing automation is becoming and how vital it is for businesses to incorporate these tactics into their marketing efforts.
What are the Benefits of Using Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation promises you more customer candidates and feedback and better sales with less work. Businesses that use marketing automation correctly are known to deliver 72% faster customer turnover and increase their revenue attributable to automation by 175% (Thomson Reuters).
Using marketing automation substantially reduces costs. It increases the working speed of all types of businesses as the accuracy of repetitive marketing tasks is understood more easily. There’re a lot of platforms that are suitable for the needs of businesses and automate many aspects of marketing. Evaluating options and deciding which automation tool to use can be entirely determined based on business targets. Choosing automation will depend on the size of the business, the brand’s scope and the tool’s skills. As some marketing tools stand out with emails, others may be designed for social media.
7 Valid Reasons For Using Marketing Automation
In the digitized world, most companies can now receive optimum benefits when using marketing automation correctly. Using marketing automation creates a great interaction factor for businesses. It provides better time management, strategic behavior, and result-oriented thinking. The reasons why using marketing automation are as follows:
Simplifies and Scales
Marketing departments must pay attention to many factors today if they want to make an impact. Social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, search engine marketing, Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, online customer services, webinars and many more digital automation helps to bring all these separate tools together and deliver a full-fledged marketing message.
Provides Better Reporting
Using marketing automation makes it easier to follow the success and the progress of campaigns. This helps reach the target audience rather than creating a marketing concept and hoping to reach the target audience. With reporting and analysis of results, digital access can also be optimized practically.
Determines the Target Audience
It’s important to target the audience with the right message and using marketing automation provides ways to do that more effectively. Suppose you’ve a product that addresses both CEOs and the owners of small businesses. In that case, the relevant message can be created for each audience and targeting can be done properly through the digital channels they’re interested in.
Reduces Costs
Digital marketing automation helps to reduce costs. It allows marketers to save time spent manually on social media posts, digital advertising, and more. This means the same amount of general marketing duties could be done by fewer people.
Helps Focus on Creativity
The marketers and the managers can concentrate more on retargeting and creating engaging campaigns that can have a bigger impact. Broadcasting these campaigns how and on which channels can be determined based on the marketing reports.
Increases Sales
The effect of using marketing automation can be seen when looking at the sales that a business makes. Automation is a way to convince customers that they may benefit from other products based on products that they’ve already purchased. It can list the needs of the customer again and make a need reminder on a regular basis. Therefore, it increases sales and customer loyalty.
Improves Sales
Automation can connect you with customers before, during and after the purchasing process. Using marketing automation ensures a good relationship with customers. This directly strengthens the company’s quality, prestige and brand value, and affects sales. Even if the customer doesn’t buy the product, he gets satisfied with the attention he receives. Brand, company, product or website may leave a mark on the customer’s mind. Suppose you’re also looking for a way to improve your marketing strategies and reach out to more customers, with automation. In that case, you can solve many marketing problems and get better results.
What Questions Should You Answer When Choosing a Marketing Automation Product?
Knowing the right questions to ask when deciding which marketing automation products best suit your needs is very important. You want to know that you aren’t just getting the best product but that you’re getting one that works for your unique needs. The following is a look at just a few questions you should be sure to ask when it comes to using marketing automation products and services.
Reputational Side
The reputation of a brand or business is very important and can help you to decipher which would best suit your brand. The following questions can help determine if the business is worth using.
- Does the product have proven success backed up with recorded results in different industries?
- Is the product reliable as far as customer service and support are concerned?
- How do the clients evaluate the product? How do the reviews reflect the platform?
Having information surrounding the reputation of the business you plan on using can ensure that you’re more informed on what they’ve to offer. By finding proven success records on businesses with similar needs to your own, you can ensure that you’re getting the most effective product based on your needs.
Operational Side
The operation and overall function of the automation you use will ultimately impact your consumers. This makes it vital to ensure that the operational side of your marketing automation tool functions well.
- Does the platform have user-friendly interfaces? (Does it put control directly in the hands of the marketer for quicker setup, modification, execution, and reporting?)
- Is the product business unit agnostic? (Can different business units use it as a centralized system in harmony?)
If a product is complicated and hard to use, you may not be able to effectively create marketing automation strategies. Asking the above questions will give you information on how the software operates and whether or not your business would find it beneficial.
Spec Side
You need to know whether the specifications and technologies provided are going to help you when it comes to using marketing automation software.
- Does the platform provide seamless customer experiences? (Unified and up-to-date profiling across the channels, trackable customer history, unfragmented consumer journeys)
- Does the product have the capability of performing as an all-in-one platform? (Profiling, omnichannel campaign management and messaging, automation, tracking, reporting). Do the channels work flawlessly, integrated and synchronized to get the expected results? Are cross-channel campaigns applicable?
- Does the product have event-based capabilities? (Tracking complex events, behavior patterns, and trends for millions of customers concurrently and alerting marketers to needs and opportunities sooner than through traditional campaign-focused marketing).
- Is the product conversational marketing ready? (Does it provide a ground for building, connecting, deploying, and managing intelligent bots to interact with your users across messaging platforms.)
- Is the product sensitive to user data privacy? (Does it include consent management? Is it compliant with regulations like GDPR? Does it support contact policies?)
- Does the product provide predictive and intelligent insights and action points for future campaign success? (Like the next best channel offering).
- Does the product support location-based marketing actions and geofencing for reaching on-the-go users?
- Does the tool go beyond simple automation? Does it support omnichannel, real-time, multi-step, and multi-action scenarios?
- If you specifically look for an enterprise solution, does the tool provide custom development, custom integrations, and customized modifications to meet your unique business needs and requirements?
Technical Side
The technical elements of the marketing automation tools you use will make or break you. Ensuring that these technical aspects align with what you’re hoping to achieve is vital for the success of your business.
- Does the platform have flexible deployment options? (Is it possible to implement it as on-premise, cloud, or hybrid?)
- Is the implementation process fast? How quick is the deployment? How solution-oriented are the vendor technical teams?
- How easy is it to integrate the tool with external and internal systems (like CRM, core business, social media, analytics, etc.)
- Does the platform have the capability of evaluating high volumes of volatile data, such as transactional and behavioral data from various internal and external data sources to detect changes in behavior over time, as well as significant changes in real time?
Choosing the right marketing platform may not be easy, but starting with the right questions will be helpful to proceed to the right decision.
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