After its emergence in the 1980s, marketing automation was reserved only for the prominent, well- established businesses with vast customer bases.
Today, marketing automation has become an essential building block of productivity for businesses across all industries, irrespective of size. According to a recent Ascend2's marketing survey, 71% of businesses are now using marketing automation.
But what exactly is marketing automation and why is it important? In this article, we'll delve into the crux of marketing automation and explain why your business needs it.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is all about using software to automate and streamline marketing tasks and workflows. This allows you to become more efficient, grow revenue, and perform all related marketing tasks with little to no effort.
But what workflows are we talking about? Here are some of the tasks that marketing automation allows you to perform effectively:
- Lead generation and nurturing
- Email marketing
- Website personalization
- Cross-channel marketing campaign
- Measuring ROI
- Segmentation
- Landing page creation
Automation seeks to eliminate manual work in all marketing operations. A robust automation tool can send out emails, publish social media posts, or even send email follow-up alerts with zero to minimal human interaction. For example, consistent posting of automated posts on Instagram, may be one of the ways to gain Instagram followers, improve engagement and thus increase profits a business.
Why Is Marketing Automation Important?
The answer is pretty simple. Marketers who use automation outperform those who don't. Here are a few reasons why your business needs marketing automation software.
Enhances Lead Generation & Attribution
Automation software provides an effective framework for generating and nurturing leads. Many people who visit your website or receive your emails are willing to convert but are not ready to commit just yet.
By using automation software for lead nurturing, you can get insights into what is holding them back as well as track where your leads are coming from.
In addition, marketing attribution can help you track where a lead or customer came from, with the goal to measure the effectiveness of each advertising or lead generation strategy you are using. This info can help you know what they're interested in and why they didn't convert as well from certain platforms so you can take the necessary actions.
On the contrary, traditional marketing approaches, such as cold calling, might not give you much information since many people don't feel inclined to respond to marketing calls.
Marketing automation can help you get rid of many routine tasks and manual work. When you automate your social media posts and ads, you can save more than six hours per week.
Thanks to automation, you can schedule everything you need ahead of time, including appointments, social media posts, blogs, etc. which will free your staff's time to focus on other creative tasks. This also eliminates the need to hire more staff which helps to save money.
Personalize Communication
You probably have heard the phrase, " Content is king." But content is king only if it's the right message addressed to the right audience and at the right time.
Automation allows you to design messages tailored to each individual's needs. For example, you can create content that corresponds to a customer's behavior at a certain stage of the buyer's journey, and schedule it to be delivered to the targeted audience.
With the rate at which technology is evolving, any company that is not leveraging automation might not stand a chance in the competitive business world. Marketing automation is and will continue to be the driving force behind the success of many companies you see today.