Thanks to the numerous advancements in technology, the world is as fast-paced as ever. This rapidly growing landscape ramps up the competitive side of every business, which means it pays to be up-to-date with the latest trends or else you might not be able to keep up.
Marketing is one of many aspects of running your business, and like the rest, your marketing team's job is extremely important for long-term success. Important as it is, it can still take a lot of time to do your marketing right. You need to keep several "plates" spinning, like social media channels, emails, website updates and more. This is exactly why "marketing automation" has been revolutionary for helping businesses manage their marketing efforts in recent years. But what is it, and how can it simplify running your business?
What is Marketing Automation?
In short, marketing automation helps you simplify repetitive processes like email follow-ups, social posts, and running ads, leaving you more time to focus on building your business.
Marketing Automation pertains to the utilization of software to automate marketing tasks or activities. Such tasks include but are not limited to: sending emails, posting on social media, and running ad campaigns. Marketing Automation even covers data-gathering and insight, which helps a lot with making future marketing decisions and campaigns.
A good example of a Marketing Automation tool would be HubSpot. HubSpot is a strong automation tool known for its ability to effectively list down potential customers and target them in a timely manner. Doing this manually would take a relatively longer amount of time, and the workload would have to be divided among a team of detail-oriented folk.
Since most of the hard work is automated, Marketing Automation helps solve a lot of business problems, especially those relating to efficiency and human error. Marketing teams can focus on building strategies and brainstorming for content instead of spending so much time doing all the legwork.
How Can Marketing Automation Benefit My Business?
By automating the "easy" stuff, you can spend more time doing what you do best - strategizing, growing, and serving your customers. Now, is marketing automation the right solution for your business? There are massive benefits to setting up automation in your business, but today we will focus on three:
-
Email
-
Ads
-
Reporting
Email Marketing Automation Benefits
Let’s face it: managing emails can be a chore. Sending and receiving emails is definitely not as simple as it looks. Fortunately, automation can help you do with email management, even allowing you to go as far as triggering an email to be sent whenever a user interacts with your website. The following are some specific examples of solutions Email Marketing Automation can provide:
-
Automated thank you messages for website form submissions.
-
Re-engagement emails based on user activity. (HubSpot is a prime example of a tool
that can do this.)
-
Emails asking for feedback upon the user’s consumption of your services.
-
Automated emails specifically for converting potential customers into actual customers.
-
Increased customer engagement with personalized messages
-
Tracking of users who are highly interested in your product/services.
-
Filtering of leads on the basis of engagement and interest.
-
Scheduling of email marketing campaigns ahead of time.
Ads/Campaigns Automation Benefits
Apart from emails, ads and campaigns can also be automated. These kinds of automations allow for a better understanding and analysis of the users interacting with your products and services. The following are good examples of such benefits:
-
Social media campaigns using various platforms and accounts can be accessed and managed from a single portal.
-
Customer targeting is made easy as the analytics provide some insight on user interests, causing the marketing budget to be spent more wisely and in a data-driven manner.
-
It also reduces the amount of repetitive tasks you have to do all in all, leaving you with more time and energy to focus on ad strategy.
Testing and Reporting Automation Benefits
Automation tools such as HubSpot also provide testing and reports dashboards, which give you an overall view of the statistics and data behind every interaction your users have with your business. You can expect the following when using automation for tests and reports:
-
An increase in your ROI can be very much expected by cross-sell, upsell, and follow-ups.
-
Identifying which stages your marketing leads are in is also a known feature of such automated dashboards.
-
A/B Testing built into HubSpot is bound to improve your marketing campaigns and plans.
-
Reports gives you a detailed view of what’s working versus what isn’t among your marketing campaigns and efforts.
-
Some reporting tools such as HubSpot, uses Lead Scoring to identify your best customers.
.gif?width=400&name=giphy%20(1).gif)
How Can My Business Get Started With Marketing Automation?
There are many great tools and resources available online if you want to get started with automating your marketing processes yourself. Some great marketing automation tools are platforms like HubSpot, MailChimp, ConvertKit, Zoho, etc. These all come with a bit of a learning curve, but if you are digitally savvy you can get up and running in a small amount of time.
If you have extra time to spend, there are lots of great education resources as well such as Udemy, HubSpot Academy, Google Digital Garage, Lynda.com etc. We happen to be a HubSpot Solutions Provider, but there are many similar tools available. Call us if you'd like to find out if Marketing Automation is a good fit for your business.
To Summarize,
Marketing automation is a brilliant means to help grow your business to the next level. However, marketing automation on its own does not guarantee success overnight. Having an expert can really unlock the benefits of using tools like the ones we mentioned above.
Wondering how to start with this amazing technology? Our team here at Loop are experts in automating your marketing. Book a free discovery call and let's chat about your business today!
