Marketing Automation
Taking an active role in your marketing is a critical part of helping your business succeed. With competition fiercer than ever in just about any industry, you can’t rely on a philosophy of “if you build it, they will come.” However, the need to take ownership of your marketing efforts doesn’t mean you have to do everything by hand. Effective use of marketing automation tools can empower you to work smarter, not harder.
What is Marketing Automation?
In essence, marketing automation refers to software platforms that automatically serve content to target audiences. This includes social media management tools, email drips, sales workflows and other digital marketing efforts that are powered by pre-scheduling, audience engagement, and analytics. To learn more about what marketing automation is in-depth, check out sharpsprings detailed guide.
Drive More Leads
The most obvious application for a marketing automation platform is to enhance sales and marketing efforts. A recent survey of marketing leaders found that the most important strategic goals of marketing automation are to increase lead generation (61%) and lead nurturing (57%). Marketing automation features the unique ability to automatically nurture leads and serve prospects valuable content based on their behaviours. Because customers are constantly confronted with messages from your competitors, it’s essential to remain top-of-mind. With effective use of a marketing automation platform, you can set up rules, drips and, workflows that do the hard work of nurturing your top-of-funnel leads until they’re ready for a more personal touch and ultimately, ready to make a purchase.
Maximise Marketing Spend
Marketing automation isn’t just about driving leads and making sales. A truly robust digital marketing automation platform will also feature in-depth reporting on a variety of metrics. Being able to back up your marketing efforts with hard-and-fast performance data can help justify your marketing spend and enhance efforts that continue to perform well. According to SharpSpring’s research, 45% of marketing agencies rely on a marketing automation platform to demonstrate ROI. With CRM pipeline visibility, campaign traffic analytics and email reporting, marketing automation features the ability to understand how your efforts are performing, and where you should continue to invest.
Be More Efficient
A truly powerful marketing automation platform will serve as the central hub of your marketing and sales efforts. With the ability to have all of your applications and campaigns centralised in a single location, you empower collaboration across your team and reduce the risk of individual leads falling through the cracks. Marketing automation integration into social media, Google Ads, blogging, SEO and email, enhances your ability to work smarter rather than harder. Operational inefficiency is extremely expensive, costing businesses anywhere from 20-30% of their annual revenue. Marketing automation enables you to reduce inefficiencies and minimise time spent on repeatable tasks so you and your marketing team can do more important high-touch work.
Summary
The desire to improve the way you spend time and money isn’t unique to marketing. The benefits of marketing automation give marketing teams the unique ability to strengthen their efforts through digital transformation. By leveraging automation for repetitive tasks, reporting, and top-of-funnel engagement, your time and energy can be used to further build your strategy, create content and engage with high-priority customer needs.
