Marketing as we know is the lifeblood of any business, be it a startup or an established organization. A business may have an outstanding service or product, but it will be futile if the target audience is unaware about it thus, preventing the business to achieve its optimum potential. Worst-case scenario, it will push your business to a slow death.
And as business competition witness new and evolving cutthroat levels, marketing too has become a challenging and humungous task. In fact, marketing professionals around the world are striving hard to keep up with changing market dynamics and consumer demands. This is the reason an increasing number of marketing experts are resorting to modern marketing technologies/concepts and marketing automation is no less than a mainstream in today’s digital age.
Here’s how marketing automation can benefit your company by leaps and bounds:
#1 More leads
Yes, data never lies. Yes, marketing automation can help a business drive its growth and marketing ROI. It all begins with lead generation. As we know, lead generation is one of the most critical aspects for an organization’s growth. By automating the various steps between sales and marketing allows your sales and marketing team to focus more on lead nurturing strategy. Successful lead nurturing leads to more prospects and more prospects means more customers and business.
Further, marketing automation gives you a detailed picture and insights into the behaviors of your potential customers. User behavioral tracking practices like tracking a user’s website usage/browsing patterns through a good social CRM software equipped with excellent marketing automation capabilities can help a marketing team identify and understand the interests and/or preferences of prospects. Eureka! Follow-ups and marketing campaigns can be customized and targeted around those intelligent insights derived through marketing automation software.
#2 Positive ROI
Marketing automation not only saves time, but also saves money. Yes, a company’s marketing budget will see a decline in labor costs, which can be invested in other strategic and result-oriented tasks thus, contributing to the company’s bottom line. Automation frees a company’s marketing budget as well as team and helps channelize the money where it is required the most, be it a yearly digital marketing campaign or a dream advertising spend to put across your message to literally thousands of people. Bottom line is that marketing automation assures positive Return on Investment (ROI) when implemented in an effective manner.
#3 Intelligent marketing data
Though everyone is talking about big data these days, only a few business houses know the secret to utilizing it effectively. Marketing automation facilitates a business to leverage big data in an effortless way by helping it collect actionable intelligence at the speed of light. For instance, a good marketing automation software offers a unified dashboard to track analytics and run reports. Not to forget, marketing automation tools are an excellent platform to measure your marketing campaigns as well as predict customer behaviors, all from a single platform. One of the coolest benefits of marketing automation is that it helps you assemble a comprehensive profile of a prospect, which was not possible a few years ago. Last but not the least, marketing experts can A/B test their marketing plans to identify as what technique would work best.
#4 Successful lead nurturing
Lead nurturing is a tricky and tedious process. This is the reason it has become a priority to guide a lead throughout his journey. Here comes the cache: According to a Gleanster Research, 50% of the qualified leads are often not ready to buy the very moment.
Now this can be a dilemma for a small enterprise! As half of the leads generated are qualified, but need to be nurtured. For a small business that employs a small team that manages both marketing and sales operations, it is next to impossible to achieve such a feat of constantly keeping a track of the leads. Not to worry, as this is where marketing automation can help! Yes, marketing automation by taking care of the routine and monotonous admin chores can free the sales and marketing team thus, helping them focus more on lead nurturing.
#5 Personalized customer experience
Personalized content undoubtedly is the key to successful lead nurturing. After all, who wouldn’t love a personalized message on their birthday or anniversary from a brand? Marketing automation solutions streamline the entire process of putting across the right type of content to the right customer and at the right time. They help capture the data such as emails that customers click and open, posts that receive good engagement on social media, website visits, search patterns, etc. Marketing automation can help you with all these as well as various other marketing strategies.
Takeaway
Investing in marketing automation can help a business reap these five prominent benefits along with many others. If you wish to take your marketing endeavors to the next level, then marketing automation is for you. Next, pairing it with a customer relationship management or CRM software would help you unlock detailed user behavior tracking such as pages a prospect visits, type of content they prefer and their purchase pattern. A sales and marketing team when equipped with such intelligent customer insights can work wonders when it comes to driving sales and customer experience.
