The Internet has transformed the world of marketing: digital marketing is more measurable, dynamic and personalized, making traditional outbound marketing look clunky and ineffective.
However, for all of the opportunities that digital offers, there is an important impact on the resource of marketing teams. More opportunities not only mean more financial resource, but also more time being spent on marketing.
That is why you need marketing automation. Not only is it an opportunity to save time, but you can also step-change your marketing, making it more effective. Here is why you need it:
Consistency – One of the pitfalls of increasing the number of marketing tools you use is that your consistency can suffer. This is a challenge being faced by millions of organisations every day with social media. But with marketing automation, you can control the tone of voice to a large number of communications at once.
Finds your audience – For most companies, your target audience will spend at least some of their time online: the difficulty is finding where they hang out and where they would be receptive to your message. Finding your audience on social media, by using a tool such as Socedo, and managing the interaction that you have with them (automated of course) will help to move people from prospects to customers more efficiently than ever.
Customer management – Ensuring that new customers get all of the right communications at the right time can be difficult to manage. But marketing automation can deal with that for you. For example, you can send a welcome email, confirmation of order and any series of marketing messages direct to that customer dependent on their behaviour. And if you do it well, it will feel personalised and not automated at all.
Makes money – We are not talking about automation making a saving to your headcount budget: automation should be viewed as an opportunity to embrace new marketing ideas. If you are choosing the right ones, then this will have a positive effect on your revenue growth while keeping your headcount the same. And for the best automation tools, you don’t need to be technically gifted to work it, they are simple and intuitive.
Better results – Well, I can’t actually promise better results, but what marketing automation does offer is better reporting and if this is analysed well, then the actions taken will result in better results. A lot of marketing automation tools are able to integrate with the most popular CRM systems (MS Dynamics, HubSpot, Marketo, etc.) meaning that joined up reporting is a possibility at last.
What is your experience of marketing automation? After adopting it, what changes did you note within your team? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.