Today we are focusing on how marketing automation can benefit your company. Marketing automation refers to the process of making manual processes and systems automated through a software platform. Generally, marketing automation technology will help to streamline, adapt and grow your marketing efforts. The following list is by no means exhaustive but here are the top five super quick and easy ways marketing automation can help you:
1) Efficiency
Marketing automation will make your entire marketing team more efficient. Instead of manually scheduling and posting content which are timely and costly tasks, marketing automation technology automates the process. By reducing this burden on your team, this frees time up for more creative processes such as planning future campaigns and projects. Marketing automation offers the potential to reduce staffing costs which allows more space in your budget for strategic work. Additionally, working with a common marketing automation software will make your team’s working process easier, your staff can create email campaigns, post on social, posts blogs, view analytics, create reports and much more all on one platform.
2) Increased conversion rate
Marketing automation technology will track your leads and provide insight into content and campaign engagement through the buyer journey. Engagement and campaign analytics will highlight which content is delivering greatest engagement and relevance with your potential customers. Using these insights you can optimise and focus your team on content that drives conversion.
3) Lead scoring
A valued function of marketing automation platforms is the ability to automatically notify your sales team when a highly engaged lead triggers a lead scoring threshold. For example marking them as a 'marketing qualified lead' ready for sales validation.
Within the marketing automation platform all engagement activities are assigned a score. The lead will then gain an overall score depending on how much interaction they have had with your marketing strategies. The more they interact the higher their score and is an indication to the sales team how 'warm' they are as a lead. The lead score is an active tally which aggregates the values, allows for decay of score over time and sets off an alert when a score threshold is met.
This provides greater connectivity between your sales and marketing team, reducing the prevalence of silos and enhancing team work. The fact the process is automated means there is a smaller chance of missing 'sales qualified leads' and the sales team knows which prospects to reach out to.
4) Accurate reports
Generating reports is made easy and painless with marketing automation platforms, the software will generate the report for you, making a once mundane and daunting task, manageable and efficient. You will be able to directly compare the effectiveness of different campaigns. Insights will show from which campaigns marketing leads are generated and their relative cost per lead. In sales funnels you will understand the attrition and conversion rates through each pipeline stage understand the value of pipeline today and in the months to come.
5) Nurturing Leads
Marketing automation allows the creation of highly personalised nurturing campaigns.
Nurturing campaigns consist of a series of emails, with highly personalised and relevant content designed to nurture and drive conversion. Leads can automatically be added to these campaigns through appropriate triggers or added manually. No two leads receive an identical email as the platform allows you to add dynamic content that completely personalises the experience based on insights taken from the leads profile or from their engagement history.
The automated process ensures you are never missing out on an opportunity to nurture a visitor and learn from their behaviour. Several marketing and business blogs, including Forbes have remarked that marketing automation is one of the best ways to create a marketing strategy that will grow your business.