Whether you're a small business owner looking to run your first campaign or a fully-fledged marketing team with a million-pound budget, automation should be an essential tool in your marketing toolkit.
What is marketing automation, and why use it?
Put simply, marketing automation ROCKS… for years, tech-savvy marketers have made the best use of automation, allowing them to free up precious time usually taken away by repetitive and complex tasks. It’s essentially like having an employee that never sleeps or makes mistakes.
Need to send your lead a super-personalised email when they download a piece of your content or fill in a form? There’s automation for that! Need a friendly customer service tool that requires zero human input? There’s an automation for that too!
You can see a reoccurring theme here, right? Marketing automation is here to make your life EASIER by freeing up time and allowing you to achieve what REALLY matters to your business.
But you can’t get there in one step. No, of course not. You must first make prospects aware of your brand or product, engage with them, convert them into paying customers, and finally ascend them into big brand advocates for your business.
In most ways, marketing is like a real-life relationship; it takes time and effort, which is OK for one or two leads but is not sustainable if you want to scale your business.
That is where marketing automation comes into place, and I will tell you how…
Five ways marketing automation can benefit YOUR campaign strategy.
1. Prioritise leads
With intelligent marketing automation software like HubSpot, you can identify the leads engaging with you the most and move them along the customer journey simultaneously. Perhaps your leads have read a particular article on your website, clicked a particular link in your email, or even engaged with your social media posts; these are all things to consider when qualifying a lead. Allowing you to act on the people who are more likely to convert and nurture those who aren’t quite there yet.
2. Easier (and better!) reporting
Decisions should never be made on hunches, which is why we heavily rely on data in marketing – every penny counts, after all!
Using tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook ads manager, and HubSpot gives you the power to measure the success of your marketing activity down to the very penny. Allowing you to identify what exactly is and isn’t working in a particular campaign and allowing you to track ROI easily.
3. Launch bigger and better marketing campaigns
With stronger reporting comes better data and insights, which means better decisions being made. So, with all this, what’s next? Bigger and better marketing campaigns!
By learning about your leads and collecting data about them at every step, you will be better positioned to launch marketing campaigns that will better address your audience’s pain points and give them what they need to make that buying decision.
4. Enhance your customer experience
Gone are the days when you would spend hours on hold to speak with a customer service rep. With automation such as Drift, Manychat, and Zendesk, you can pre-program your own customer service bot to answer any questions. This allows website visitors to get the information they need on-demand without friction.
5. Scale your business with confidence
No one likes throwing their money into a black hole. With marketing automation on your side, you don’t have to. You’ll have everything you need to make informed decisions based on measurable and easily presentable data. This will not only make for a better overall marketing strategy, but also make you look like an absolute marketing rockstar.
Now, it’s all fun and games telling you the why of marketing automation, but what about the how?
At ExtraDigital, we use marketing automation tools to support highly successful marketing campaigns built on data and years of experience.
With a team of automation marketing specialists at our disposal, we can point you in the right direction when it comes to automating your business.
Are you ready to grow your business?
