Marketing Automation – 9 Benefits Of Marketing Automation In Your Business

Marketing Automation – 9 Benefits Of Marketing Automation In Your Business

Every successful marketing team’s plan includes marketing automation as a key component. But grasping this aspect of digital marketing may seem difficult to those new to the industry or those trying to break into it. Be at ease.

This article will cover all the essential information about marketing automation if you’re looking to start a new career in marketing or want to improve your marketing abilities. You’ll discover the benefits of marketing automation for your campaigns and how much easier it makes your daily job as a marketer.

In this article, we’ll delve deep into marketing automation to learn what it is, how it functions, and the advantages, best practices, and tools a marketing team can use to improve performance, set goals, monitor progress, and do a lot more.

By the end, you will feel comfortable understanding marketing automation and be prepared to experiment with automation tools in your campaigns.

What Is Marketing Automation?

Adopting software and services for marketing automation means streamlining various sales and marketing tasks to increase productivity, transparency, and objectives and make tracking and analysing vast amounts of data possible.

Simply put, marketing automation can be extremely helpful for any task that doesn’t directly involve a human, whether you’re gathering customer information or organizing a social media campaign. The effectiveness, precision, and productivity of marketing automation tools can be improved in many ways.

When working on email marketing, surveys, follow-up messaging, event scheduling, social media posting, advertising campaigns, or content marketing, a marketer can delegate time-consuming tasks to one of the many sophisticated tools created to carry out these tasks.

Thanks to software that handles the routine aspects of a digital marketer’s job, the team can concentrate on fostering and strengthening enduring and devoted customer relationships.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

When repetitive and frequently boring tasks like emails, social media scheduling, and other website actions are automated by cutting-edge tools and software, they become noticeably simpler to manage, more streamlined, and better suited to the team’s needs.

Although each tool and task in marketing automation is unique, marketers generally adhere to a few general guidelines when converting manual processes to automated ones.

1. They Assess Their Marketing Automation Needs 

What a marketer wants automation to accomplish will be the question they ask themselves before choosing a tool or procedure. Do they have a main objective? Do they desire time savings? Do they want to boost the effectiveness or productivity of the team? Do they desire more precise customer information?

A marketer will be able to prioritize the automation of some tasks and assist in selecting the best tools for the job by determining the core needs of the team.

2. They Identify Their Audience

A marketer will then thoroughly analyse the business or brand’s target market, clientele, or user base. This is because knowing the target market will enable the team to decide which tools will be most helpful in attracting and retaining those users.

When constructing an accurate picture of the current audience (or audiences), a marketer will consider the following variables: demographic, geographic, behavioural, and psychological.

3. They Research And Choose Their Marketing Automation Tools

A marketer will research the automation software that best meets their needs once they clearly understand their objectives and customer data. They will learn about a tool’s capabilities once one has been identified that appears to be a good fit so they can use them to the team’s and the company’s overall goals’ advantage.

4. They Implement, Monitor, And Make Improvements 

A marketer will use the selected marketing automation tool after developing a clear strategy. Team members are made aware of their responsibilities, including those that will arise during the switch from manual to automated processes and what will be expected once the tool is operational.

The tool is watched over and adjusted over time until it meets the team’s needs, streamlines procedures, and improves productivity.

A marketing automation strategy might look something like this: 

• Build targeted lists
• Launch campaign
• Measure activity
• Assess and segment customers
• Feed qualified leads to a CRM tool
• Nurture warm leads
• Analyze overall performance 

Now that we have a good idea of what marketing automation is and how it works let’s look at some of its benefits. 

What Are The Benefits Of Marketing Automation?

For both marketers and their target customers, marketing automation has several advantages. Whether automation is used to execute repetitive tasks or streamline customer correspondence, the range of tasks that can help a marketing team align and simplify constantly expands and offers significant benefits to the businesses and people who use it.

Let’s look at a few advantages that marketing automation can provide. We’ll examine these in terms of the issues they can help marketers with, the objectives they can help them accomplish, and how marketing automation can make their lives easier.

1. Personalization 

Marketing automation enables marketers to interact more personally with customers while still reaching large audiences. Using the user data bank that an automation tool can compile, communications can be planned around user behaviour and preferences instead of being set randomly.

These customized customer experiences strengthen the bond between a brand and its audience and increase audience recall of a company’s name.

2. Eliminates Manual Tasks 

Marketers can set up manual processes using automation once, then set those processes aside. Automated campaigns can be left to run unattended in the background or can be modified and modified as needed.

Reminders, follow-ups, reporting, client emails and newsletters, scheduling social media posts, and data collection are some tasks that automation can replace.

3. Reduces Costs

Marketing costs decrease as a result of the automation of manual processes. This is so that team members can focus their experience and energy on higher-level tasks that better utilize their skill sets since they are no longer required to perform manual tasks.

As team members who are actively engaged stay in their positions for a significant amount of time, lower-skilled positions no longer require recruitment, and recruiting for higher-skilled positions—an expensive and time-consuming process—is less frequently necessary.

4. Better Conversion Rates 

Marketing automation used in lead generation has been shown to increase customer conversion rates. This is so that an organization can draw in its target market and target its campaigns and initiatives at the appropriate users using the data amassed through automation. The likelihood of a sale rises when the appropriate groups are communicated with in a way that satisfies their needs and interests.

5. Improved Customer Retention

Every marketer knows that customer retention is equally as crucial as customer acquisition. A company can more easily determine what to do to keep its customers satisfied and loyal by using marketing automation tools, which can give marketing teams access to customer data and analysis.

Automation tools can give a business instantaneous updates on consumer trends and behaviour thanks to tracking and reporting technology. This makes it simpler for a company to adapt quickly to change and maintain relevance with its user base.

6. Increased Revenue

Adopting this technology increases revenue and sales in addition to the efficiency savings it produces. According to studies, marketers who were proactive in utilizing data-driven marketing were three times more likely to have increased revenues than those who did not use automation technology. Automation was also found to shorten sales cycles and help sales teams close deals more quickly.

7. Better Data For Smarter Decisions

To help marketers make decisions that are supported by data, marketing automation tools can collect, analyze, and synthesize customer data. By creating thorough user profiles and forecasts for a team to study, many sales and marketing automation platforms provide comprehensive solutions for gauging consumer responses to marketing campaigns.

8. Refined Marketing Process

Their customers’ experiences on their platform are better understood by marketers thanks to automation tools. As a result of these experiences, marketing initiatives and strategy can be improved, allowing for simpler processing of targets and lead nurturing.

9. Increased Productivity 

Marketing automation freed team members from boring, repetitive tasks, allowing them to concentrate on more important, interesting tasks that call on their knowledge and experience. Marketo’s research revealed that implementing marketing automation increased staff productivity in 95% of the companies surveyed.

Marketing Automation Examples

To give you an idea of the scope of actions marketing automation can help with, here are some of the tasks that a marketer might consider automating: 

• Analytics and ROI tracking
• Social media planning, scheduling, and posting
• Campaign segmentation
• Content curation and management
• Email marketing 
• Lead generation, analysis, and management
• Testing
• Website visitor tracking

Now let’s explore some best practices you’ll want to remember if you’re implementing marketing automation. 

Marketing Automation Best Practices

You should bear the following best practices when using marketing automation tools and strategies. They’ll assist you in making the most of your marketing automation tools and keep your focus firmly on the objectives you’ve set for yourself and your team.

1. Set Clear Goals 

Knowing which tools to use and where to best invest your time is made easier by establishing the objectives or ideal results you’d like to see from automating some of your marketing processes.

Many marketing teams find it useful to set their goals around the following:

• Quality leads attracted
• Leads which are ready to move to the sales team (often called “SQLs” or sales-qualified leads)
• Conversions which the marketing team contributed to and where in the customer’s journey they happened

2. Know Your Customers 

You can target your campaigns at the appropriate user groups, cater to their particular needs, and prevent generic messaging by clearly understanding your audience. You can remember the type of person your content should target by creating personas.

You can collect the data needed to create a persona via the following means: 

• Surveys, interviews, and focus groups
• Website and social media audience analytics
• Contact form data
• Insights from your sales team

3. Get To Grips With The Customer’s Journey

Consumer behaviour, expectations, and brand engagement are all constantly evolving. This is true, particularly when transitioning from being a brand follower to a customer. Never static, an automated campaign should be designed to support each phase of the customer journey.

An illustration of this would be the user getting useful information pertinent to the stage they are currently in. A customer journey map, which details all the stages and points of contact a customer has with the business, is typically created by marketing teams.

This map will allow the team to decide what kind of content each stage’s customer should receive and set up automated marketing workflows to distribute it.

4. Build Workflows Around The Customer Journey 

Once personas are in place and a map of the customer journey has been created, it’s a good idea to map out workflows for each persona to engage them with the brand and address their problems, questions, or concerns at each stage of the customer journey. 

Workflows might be built around the following customer stages: 

• Awareness – User has a problem and is seeking a solution
• Consideration – User is looking at numerous solutions 
• Decision – User opts for one solution and becomes a customer
• Post-purchase – Has questions or needs additional products or services 

5. Establish Lead Scoring

A marketer can assess a user’s level of interest in their business with the aid of lead scoring. It is assigned a numerical value depending on how well a particular customer action demonstrates that user’s interest in the brand. For instance, leaving a comment on a blog post or following the business on Instagram are both behaviours that show interest.

Each action a customer takes is given points using automation software. To determine a customer’s potential, you can look at their overall score. You can more effectively target your campaigns with the help of this information.

6. Make Great Content

Your target personas will be the ones defining the content you should be producing, so no matter how effective your workflows are, they won’t care if your content isn’t interesting and relevant to them. Because of this, it’s crucial to develop interesting content that speaks to your target persona’s needs and provides them with answers at various points along the customer journey, whether for social media, email, or blogs.

Recall the four phases we discussed earlier. the stages of awareness, deliberation, decision, and post-purchase. Create content that is appropriate for the customer’s stage in the journey and that supports and motivates them to advance to the following stage.