Are you looking to streamline your marketing tasks to save time and resources?
If yes then, automating marketing processes with the help of specialized software platforms is what you need. Such automation solutions can help your business improve customer engagement and boost sales and revenue while providing more efficient analytics capabilities.
If you’re considering implementing marketing automation for your organization, then it’s important to start with an in-depth understanding of what it is, how it works, and what key benefits to expect before you start talking to a marketing automation service provider.
First thing first: What is marketing automation?
The “marketing automation” term is used to describe a variety of solutions, platforms, and tools that help businesses streamline, automate, and measure their marketing tasks and workflows. By doing so, marketing automation can help companies increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. The automation can encompass anything from email automation to demand generation to revenue attribution. It is quickly becoming a favorite for every marketing team. If your team hasn’t yet adopted a marketing automation platform, there are 22 reasons why it’s an investment worth making today.
So, what are some key benefits to expect from leveraging marketing automation?
The scope of marketing automation goes beyond simply saving your time by automating repetitive marketing tasks. The software can benefit you in several ways including in sales, customer engagement and, loyalty, overall business growth, and others.
Hence, we have explored all types of benefits you can attain as a whole.
How does it benefit the marketing team?
Here we focus on how a marketing automation platform can drive the efficiency of your team and the effectiveness of your marketing campaign in generating higher revenue.
1. Revamping marketing operations: Implementing a marketing automation system requires visualizing the customer journey and marketing strategy to create processes around them. Hence, the use of automation can enable your business to consistently revise how you need to target, acquire, and nurtures leads.
2. Targeting potential leads across major channels: Marketing automation systems offer the ability to reach personalized messages and campaigns to target customers across different channels. When creating a marketing sequence, your marketing team can use the automation platform to schedule different campaigns such as emails, text messages, social media posts, or phone calls to target prospects from diverse channels throughout the customer journey.
3. A/B testing of marketing campaigns: Marketing automation tools make it exceptionally easier to conduct A/B tests. You can run pre-launch and post-launch A/B tests to achieve incremental improvements on emails, landing pages, forms, and other assets that will optimize your messages and campaigns accurately to specific lead segments which can boost your funnel drastically.
4. Improves upsells, cross-sells, and customer lifetime value: With marketing automation, your marketing team performs cross-selling and up-selling by creating automation rules. By automating upselling and cross-selling, you can significantly improve your customers’ lifetime value.
5. Managing social media campaigns: Marketing automation platforms can enable your marketing teams to manage your social media campaigns from a single dashboard. It let you schedule and share posts across multiple social channels and accounts. Though this feature is available with social media management tools like Hootsuite, automation systems are more powerful by enabling you to track and measure lead movements through social as well as email, or other marketing channels from the same system.
6. Schedule and automate campaigns ahead of time: Marketing automation systems can enable your teams to plan, schedule and automate your diverse marketing campaigns well ahead of time. Thus, your team can organize, track, launch, and manage those campaigns easier and stay on top of all activities and also, create separate campaigns for different segments of customers, based on customer data synced from the CRM system.
7. Save time in creating campaigns: Most marketing automation platforms feature drag-and-drop capabilities that let users build various marketing assets such as email campaigns, forms, landing pages, text messages social posts without using any technical help. Thus, it can save time, minimize or avoid delays, and sends emails at the highest audience engagement time.
8. Reuse existing content for lead nurturing: Using marketing automation, your team can reuse and recycle existing content for nurturing leads. You can configure automation rules to use content that can inform and guide your leads to solve their problems using the content through different stages of the customer lifecycle. Hence, you can get the utmost value from your investment in content marketing.
9. Improved reporting and analysis of the effectiveness: Marketing automation software can sync with your CRM system to update the data automatically once synced. Therefore, you can use the analytics and reporting tool; to identify which marketing campaigns are working, on which segment of audiences. This level of data analysis and insights can enable you to create better-personalized messages campaigns based on the customer behavioral data.
10. Build referral programs to Incentivize your loyal customers. Marketing automation tools have features to support building and managing referral programs. You can configure a referral program that will incentivize your affiliates and loyal customers when they promote your services or products, hence you can generate more leads and conversions using referral programs.
11. Hyper-targeted campaigns: The ability to create hyper-targeted or personalized marketing campaigns at a large scale is one of the biggest reasons or benefits why marketing automation is so popular among marketers and organizations. By creating the most relevant offer, messages, or content for a potential customer or a segment of customers, you increase opportunities and shorten sales cycles.
So, how can a marketing automation platform benefit your sales reps?
Will it benefit your sales team to improve the outcome of their sales efforts? Contrary to common beliefs, marketing automation is highly beneficial to sales by combining CRM and other marketing data systems. Let’s show you how marketing automation can improve the efficiency of your sales team.
12. Removes the guesswork of lead scoring: Configure the marketing automation system by creating automation rules and setting up criteria that will score your leads automatically based on the responses and actions.
In most marketing automation tools, leads are scored on a scale of 1-5 and categorized as ‘marketing qualified leads’ or MQLs and or ‘sales qualified leads’ SQLs. When If a lead is scored as an MQL, it is saved in a nurturing campaign and nurtured till it is scored as an SQL.
Thus, your sales team can focus on following up on pre-qualified SQLs without wasting their efforts on unqualified leads.
13. Keep CRM data updated: Once the CRM and the marketing automation system are synced, the two systems get updated automatically. Thus your CRM database will be updated with the campaign data and stay valuable for your campaigns and follow-ups. The CRM and automation sync help you capture more lead data information while ensuring that data is valid and updated on both platforms.
14. Identifying the best time to follow up: Apart from the lead qualification and scoring data, your sales reps can also monitor leads’ movements and actions that determine their interests in your brand or offerings by tracking their visits to the website and engagement with your posts and emails. It also enables you to configure notification alerts to get notified of the pages they are visiting in real-time. These insights will better prepare your reps to know when the qualified leads will be interested to talk and what they are thinking about the product, offers, or solutions.
15. Shorten the conversion cycle: Your sales team can reduce the time usually takes for prospects to get converted into customers with a more efficient, thoroughly tracked, and measured view of your leads. For example, Thomson Reuters achieved up to a 175% overall increase in revenue by implementing a marketing automation system from a conversion rate of 72%. They attributed the conversion growth to the implementation of the automation platform.
16. Automate lead follow-up: According to research by the Harvard Business Review, automating the follow-up within an hour, rather than waiting to pursue it after a day or two, can help businesses enhance lead qualification by up to 60 times. Additionally, automation enables you to guarantee that each hot lead is immediately followed up on. Without an automation system, it can be difficult to follow up with prospects in the early hours of the day such as when it’s at 6 in the morning or later hours on a Friday, when you cannot possibly present.
Capterra found out that leveraging the marketing automation system has resulted in a 400% increase in their sales qualification rate.
17. No more cold calls: If you don’t like making cold calls, marketing automation can help you. When the marketing department generates enough leads that are suitable for sales, you have sufficient information on your leads, from what their difficulties are to which pages on your website they clicked on and when, thanks to the amount of data that automation technologies record.
How does marketing automation benefit a business overall?
These are the top five huge advantages of using a marketing automation tool, in my opinion.
18. Lower staffing costs: By employing marketing automation software, employees can carry out their tasks that would otherwise require a marketing and sales department of a huge team. Setting up lead nurturing and marketing programs that are automatically launched based on predetermined criteria makes this possible. After creating these automatic campaigns, your company can gradually start sending thousands of personalized emails every day on autopilot.
19. Increased revenue and average transaction size: Businesses can raise their client lifetime value by automating cross-sells, up-sells, and customer follow-ups. Sales activity can result in a better ROI when combined with improved lead management and prioritization.
20. Improved accountability of the marketing and sales teams: Using clearly defined automation rules and pipeline reporting features, the marketing automation tool can make it easier for your business to identify the problem areas. This can enable your employee and department to maintain smooth and efficient operations.
21. More efficient use of resources: There is always a certain level of limitation in the availability of resources to grow a business, irrespective of the size of the company. The use of the right marketing automation system will allow your business to maximize its resources and time effectively.
22. Less repetition, more innovation: When automation rules and templates can help you spend less time on tasks that are mostly repetitive. Your employee’s time can be freed up to focus on more creative tasks. Your team members’ effectiveness and productivity increase when they can work on varied, creative work rather than tedious, repetitive tasks.
Conclusion
You should now have a better idea of how automation software can be used.
The next step is to decide which tool is the best fit for you if you’ve decided it will help your business – If you need help to get started, then let Sootra Consulting guide you. All you need is to ask or send us your business information or email requirements at support@sootraconsulting.com. So, let’s start talking!
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