Marketing automation
Automation is a marketing strategy that cannot be ignored any longer. Almost every company uses automation, and there are many tools available. Which tools you can use is worth a separate discussion. In any case: investing in marketing automation should be a top priority for most organizations, if not all. We will explain why this is so in this blog.
Automation saves you a lot of time
We’ll start with an obvious one: automation saves you quite some time on repetitive tasks. I mean, just look at your own set of tasks: the repetitive kind is precisely the kind we don’t like to do. Am I right?
Think about sending emails, internal processes such as email alerts and notifications when your target group triggers something, social media publishing, and so on. When setting up your automation platform, get some help from a specialist. He or she will help you set it up the right way so you can reap all the benefits.
Once everything is set up correctly, you will start saving time on those repetitive tasks. You can invest that extra time in other things, like sales or your marketing operations. Or you can take your content marketing to the next level.
Working more cost-efficiently
You and your employees will now save a lot of time by automating repetitive tasks. The budget you are saving this way can be spent on other marketing tactics that add more value. For example, you can start with video marketing. Or you can invest more budget in advertising on Facebook or LinkedIn, or ramp up your Google ads campaigns. You know what, it doesn’t even HAVE to go to other marketing tactics: why not reallocate some budget to sales if needed? All of that is possible once your marketing overhead goes down. Which it certainly will, IF you automate the right way.
Sales and marketing alignment
Once upon a time, sales and marketing were 2 very different teams within your organization. They had almost nothing to do with each other. Sales worked their magic with hardly any input from their marketing colleagues. And marketing-generated leads and then just threw some leads over to sales. That’s just how it was. And even today you can still see sales and marketing do not play nice in some organizations.
It doesn’t have to be like that. With marketing automation, you’re able to reach more people with the same amount of work. It will help you get more leads. And more leads mean more sales. Your marketing manager will be proud of the rise in leads and the growing pipeline. And your sales manager will be happy to be able to report increased sales. By the way, you can also improve the way sales and marketing communicate and report to each other. That’s how you align your sales and marketing, which will also result in higher revenue.
Measure success
Marketing automation platforms help you collect all relevant data in one place. You can have several campaigns running on different channels. These all generated valuable data. In a marketing automation platform, you get all the data together in one system that offers you reports and dashboards with insights that you can use to make decisions.
It’s possible to extract all these data yourself from Facebook, Google Analytics, or Mailchimp and throw them together in an Excel sheet. That will cost you a lot of time, and it still will not paint the whole picture. It’s up to you as a marketeer to then analyze the data and decide which action to take, and that’s a whole lot easier with all your data in one place.
Ready to grow
When a company is just starting, it soon comes up against the limits of its marketing tools. They often choose cheap or free solutions and these usually cost a lot of time and effort. Those tools often automate very little.
If you go for a serious automation tool, it gives you the possibility to test, optimize, and scale your marketing actions. Solid tools allow you to automate a lot no matter how many visitors you have on your site, the number of contacts in your CRM, or the size of your team. This will make your marketing efforts future-proof and allow you to focus on growth within one platform, without having to move to different tools after a few months.
These are just 5 of the many reasons why investing in marketing automation should be a top priority for your business. If your company is still managing its contacts in Excel or sending out manual email campaigns, then it’s about time you ask yourself this one question: ‘Do I want to grow’? If the answer to that question is yes, then we can only recommend you seriously consider marketing automation.
Check out demos and reviews to get a better idea of what automation can mean for you. If you have any questions, we’ll be happy to help.