Inbound marketing is an amazing methodology, and equally amazing is the marketing automation that facilitates the various components of inbound marketing.
If you have a limited staff and want to carry out the magic of inbound, marketing automation tools come to your rescue to carry out all the complex activities, including social media posts, email marketing, blogging and most importantly it provides with the essential metrics that plays a vital role in determining the success of each initiative in the inbound campaign. It helps in deciding which methodology could the business continue with in the future. Marketing automation also makes it possible for businesses to connect with their prospects in a more personalized way by allowing them to segment them on the basis of the individual data.
The ease, with which marketing automation combines sales and marketing, was only a dream for businesses years ago. However, the advancement in marketing technology has facilitated not only convenient execution of various components, but it now provides valuable insights to the businesses about the behavior of their prospects.
Below are the reasons why your online marketing campaign couldn’t survive without marketing automation in the current age.
Productivity:
The most important function of marketing automation is that it makes the regular organizational and marketing tasks very convenient to execute. When all the processes are substituted by marketing automation all the repetitive manual processes are mitigated effectively. This is directly instrumental to increased productivity.
Time-Saver:
Marketing automation is proven to cut down time on various processes of online marketing. This is because you could create multiple social media posts, email campaigns, and content and schedule them well ahead of time. Most of the brands have put in the practice of scheduling their tweets one week or even one month in advance. The best part is that it only takes less than one day to schedule the posts on a particular social media channel for one whole month.
Doesn’t Require A Huge Staff:
Even if you have a limited staff, marketing automation will ensure that they are utilized efficiently and you will not feel the need of expanding the staff. Even a single staff member will be able to execute complex and ongoing campaigns. The single member will connect with the customers that are relevant and are responding by following on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels, or responding to lead generation forms and emails.
More Revenue:
Investment in marketing automation isn’t a cheap affair. However it could get more ROI if used to its full potential. You could justify the investment if you know all the hacks of the marketing automation tool.
Here are some statistics that you could consider:
- 20 percent increase in sales opportunities is reported from nurtured leads by B2B marketers.
- Marketing automation has been accepted as a key instrument to improved revenue by 78 percent marketers.
- Between 2012 and 2015, 84 percent of the top-performing businesses have used or are planning to use marketing automation tools.
Detailed Reports:
One of the main reasons behind the immense popularity of inbound marketing is the detailed reports that it provides. Every email that you will be sending will be tracked by marketing automation solutions. In addition to that you will know how your content marketing efforts has been successful in garnering the attention of your prospects. Some of the best tools in the industry will provide the reports with graphs, statistics and other vital data that could be analyzed to determine the future marketing initiatives. All the data is automatically collected and organized and it is very easy to review all the data.
Consistency Across Multiple Channels:
Marketing automation makes it possible for you to be consistent across all the multiple channels where you have maintained a presence. If you have scheduled a particular post on Twitter, the same could be scheduled on Facebook and on other platforms so that they get posted all together and connect with all your followers at the same time. Maintaining a consistent brand will enable your brand to establish a connection with all the prospects irrespective of their preference of content. When your customers have multiple options to connect with your brand they feel comfortable with you because you are providing them the freedom to interact with your brand in their preferred way. It helps in increasing the visibility and it helps in drawing new customers. You could also get a single solution to connect on multiple channels.
[Editors Note: You may also be interested in reading “Customer Service Management via Social Media“]
Customer Retention:
If a company is serious about growth, it will have to strike a balance between customer acquisition and retention. While it is very existing to get a new customer in your kitty, your business will benefit more if you are successful in retaining the existing customers. Some marketing automation provides the wonderful feature of marketing intelligence that give valuable insights into customer intent. This information helps the marketers in predicting the needs of the customers and their decision pattern that eliminates the possibility of wastage of time, money and other resources.
Relationship Marketing:
Relationship marketing, in simple terms, focuses on providing high levels of customer satisfaction that results into optimal retention rates. Customers’ lasting relationships with a brand translates into sales and brand advocacy, which turns out to be a powerful marketing tool. Marketing automation is an effective tool to enable relationship building with every customer and lead through relevant strategies that include lead qualification, nurturing, trigger campaigns, lead scoring models and sales and marketing alignment.
Conclusion
Marketing automation is a lucrative tool to serve your targeted markets better. Successful conversion, customer acquisition and customer retention, which forms the part of a complete marketing strategy, are all supported effectively by marketing automation tools.
Featured Image source: Joe the goat farmer on Flickr.
About the Author: M V is the founder and CEO of SOL Inbound Marketing Agency. There is nothing else that gives him a rush than seeing prospects go down in the buyer’s journey. He visualizes all things pertaining to online marketing in the inbound marketing funnel and his life revolves around website traffic, click-through-rates (CTR), email open rates, lead generation, cost per lead and more.
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