If you haven’t automated certain aspects of your marketing processes, then your business could be experiencing reduced productivity and diminished returns.
Every organization can benefit from marketing automation. Marketing automation offers streamlined processes for your business. This leads to increased sales and decrease manual processes. It reduces inefficient tasks, making time for work that matters.
Fundamentally, marketing automation is all about optimization. The benefits of marketing via automation is streamlined and effective marketing. This increases operational efficiency and revenue growth. It also produces measurable results.
But like any marketing processes, there are often misconceptions with marketing automation. There are certain channels that should be targeted for automating. These will include processes that foster efficiency within your marketing department and make your business profit.
If you’re considering marketing automation for your business, here are five key marketing processes to consider automating.
Social media
Social media plays a vital role in today’s online economy.
There are many benefits to creating a consolidated social media marketing strategy. It drives targeted traffic, strengthens your business’ SEO, and connects your company with consumers and industry leaders.
But, social media is busy business. The demands to constantly engage with your consumers is indefatigable. Automating social media can be a life-saver. Especially for small businesses already stretched with time limitations to grow their business.
Content is an ideal component of social media engagement to automate. Automating shared and curated content will maintain the consistency of your channels. It will also give you control of your content strategy while freeing up time otherwise spent on curating relevant content.
Community building and conversations on the other hand should have limited automation. These are critical areas of your social strategy where effort should be driven by real people. Both components are key in targeting the right audience for your brand and increase your online presence.
Data analytics
Data analytics is an important marketing process but can prove to be a challenge. Most marketing teams struggle to access or integrate data to be beneficial to their marketing efforts. What’s more, few have the right talent to really unlock to full potential of data analytics.
Marketing automation solves the problem of data gathering and analysis in a matter of ways.
It can serve to segment data, leveraging data to create a better customer experience. It’s ability to collate data from different marketing sources and transform it into a single, actionable report enables your business to act efficiently to fuel predictive analysis and foster brand engagement.
This not only facilitates business growth, but also enables your business to build strategies that lead to better conversions and aligns customer journey, maximizing satisfaction and delivering gains. For example, creating a central platform for your analytical insights of customer data ensures your ability to target different customers in highly relevant ways.
The ability to create personalized customer experiences through marketing automation software may serve as a competitive differentiator.
Content marketing
Automating your content marketing is all about optimizing. You can leverage certain processes to improve your content marketing. There are certain exceptions though, such as ideation and authentic content.
Content automation can lead to consistency across all your platforms. Synchronizing your content processes increases the overall quality of your content. This can lead to greater cohesion between inter-departmental approaches, allowing your business to apply the correct efforts to maximize results.
Automating aspects of your content strategy provide avenues for assertive monitoring. This strategic approach creates a holistic view of engagement throughout all content channels. It also allows for a simplified approach to the brainstorming process and your business to streamline curated content.
Lead and retention management
Lead generation and customer retention are important tools for every marketing strategy. Unfortunately, managing both processes manual is too ineffective. Lead and retention management are viable candidates for marketing automation.
Some qualified leads require long sales cycles. Others will require effective lead nurturing campaigns to guide them through the buyer’s journey. But only half of the work is completed after a sale. Customer retention carries equal weight and demands the same attention as lead nurturing.
Both of these processes could benefit from a streamlined, automated platform. Small automation actions promotes engagement to potential customers. Trigger points can be activated to nurture leads. This can be an automatic welcome message after a newsletter subscription, invitations to an event when downloading a white paper, and showing different aspects of the website (call-to-actions) according to previous customer actions.
These small automation actions nurtures leads and prepares them for the sales team to deliver a more personal approach. Market automation takes out the guesswork and ensures each customer is catered to according to their place in the marketing or sales funnel.
Email marketing
Email marketing continues to maintain its status quo as an effective marketing channel. It’s a great touchpoint for customer engagement and to nurture relationships. With this regard, email marketing must always have their place within your marketing strategy.
But there are certain processes that can benefit from automation. While curated newsletters and one-off campaigns still require considered effort, most email processes could be automated.
Email automation allows companies to create timely automatic emails that are personalized and relevant to its reader. This will increase email open rates, drive traffic to your site, and generate more revenue for your business.
An automated email process can be deployed as a tool to welcome new subscribers, gather relevant product feedback, send appointment reminders, and nurture leads. These automated call-to-actions can help to drive conversions. This minimizes the effort required for email marketing while maximizing results.
Marketing automation is all about generating more for less. But in this regard, marketing automation is not about the elimination of tasks but their reduction.
While it is impossible to attain more time throughout the day, marketing automation frees you up to accomplish more. Automated processes free up significant time. Time that can be well spent focusing on responsibilities that truly matter.
