If you’re like most business owners you find that most of your time is spent following up with leads and customers as you market your business in order to pay the bills. The problem is that while you’re occupied with managing ads on Facebook and Google, keeping up with your social media platforms, blogging, emailing or consulting with potential clients and client retention, there’s little time left over to work on the growth of your business.
For you to fully realize your performance possibilities and maximize your content marketing ROI, you need to take advantage of today’s efficient marketing technologies. Marketing automation will expand the impact and value of your content, capture lead data, boost lead to sale conversion rates, enhance the overall customer experience and drive repeat purchases. In general, marketing automation takes manual tasks and automates them. And guess what -it saves you money too. What’s not to love?
Following are 5 ways marketing automation saves your company.
1. Turns your small business into a powerhouse
The objective of marketing automation is to make it possible for the end user to expand their marketing tactics in a more timely and cost efficient manner. The extra free time they end up with leaves more time to work on other crucial areas, like growing the business and generating more revenue. When combined with a strategic sales funnel, the results can be tremendous. Below is an example of the progression from prospect to lead to customer:
2. Helps reduce the need for outsourcing
Marketing automation is a great way to better utilize your internal team, ultimately cutting down on outsourcing assignments. A lot of marketing automation software options offer built in design templates and content ideas, cost effective components that make it possible to get the job done, and done right, in house. If you have the personnel, there’s no need to outsource, but it’s not hard to find the right agency or freelancer for the job if help is required.
3. You’ll have a clean, effective database
One of the most valuable assets of any business is their marketing database. Unfortunately, it often gets cluttered with duplicate, inaccurate data over time. While there are list cleaning services out there, marketing automation works together with your CRM to automatically clean up duplicate records in the database, eliminating the need of paying out outside services that do the same thing. In addition, bi-directional synchronization between the two tools makes sure that updates made in one system are also made in the other, which means that your database will stay clean and up to date.
4. Monitor campaign performance
Most marketing automation tools allow you to setup automated reports that make it possible to monitor how well your content campaigns are performing. By evaluating marketing performance, you’ll be able to guide future marketing initiatives and achieve your goals. This saves the business because you won’t be throwing marketing dollars at ineffective campaigns.
5. Saves you time and time is money
With email marketing automation you can nurture your leads, 24/7, responding prospective clients while you sleep. Most of these automated programs will also allow you to pre-load content and schedule your social media efforts, sending out your posts at key times, even months in advance.
While Marketing automation, requires costs, typically billed by the month or year, the benefits of using it provides you with a service and system that makes it possible for you to cut costs in other areas. Bottom line, it’s a system with a high ROI.
An Explanation of Lifecycle Marketing, Using Marketing Automation