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When you’re starting a business, it can be challenging to know where to allocate your valuable time and energy. While it might be tempting to focus on sales and product development, you need to invest in marketing if you want your business to grow. One efficient way to do this is through marketing automation.
Most business leaders would likely agree that automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks is a good way to improve workplace efficiency. Marketing automation is no exception. When it comes to marketing, automation can be the key to unlocking scalability and freeing up time for more high-value activities.
Marketing automation platforms allow you to create, manage, and execute marketing campaigns and repetitive tasks with little to no manual effort. This not only reduces the chances of human error but also dramatically speeds up the process.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation’s core ability is to nurture leads acquired in your website, through your conversion funnel. This results in increased performance and revenues given that visitors will be more engaged with your brand. When leads are in low quantity and not demonstrating the loyalty you would hope for, there are several actions you can take. This is where marketing automation comes in.
However, it may be the end goal is more than just automating your team’s marketing activities and workflows. Marketing automation is about using technology to streamline marketing efforts (repetitive ones, most often) and make them more effective. This evolution in marketing activities results in a more efficient way of marketing that helps reduce time and costs.
Besides that, it even helps to “filter” and nurture the more relevant leads. Unlike many may think, marketing automation is more than just email marketing, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool, or a shortcut to better results.
Marketing automation offers plenty of features and capabilities to help marketers drive results for their organizations. A marketing database, an analytics tool, and an engagement marketing platform are just three of them.
How does marketing automation work?
Automated marketing enables marketers to market their products consistently and effectively. Repetitive tasks can help you become more productive in another way as it allows you to interact directly with clients.
In this context, automation must have the best information available to it. If a user joins a list, purchases something from the website, or clicks your advertisement, they provide valuable information.
As mentioned before, marketing automation uses software to automate marketing activities related to lead nurturing, usually repetitive and monotonous work. Usually, these tools include data integrations, customer segmentation, and campaign and lead management functionalities.
Marketing automation software that has these functionalities allows marketers to send emails, segment leads, publish social media posts and increase customer loyalty through personalized actions.
What is marketing automation used for?
Automating sales is a great tool to reduce time. It reduces repetitive task errors and makes the task much easier to perform. The result, instead of attempting to do it manually, focus on other strategic tasks like campaign design, target development research, branding consistency, KPI measurements, etc.
Marketing automation software helps you streamline these tasks by improving customer data, and Marketing Automation Software helps you build more customer profiles by providing a more comprehensive database and improving customer profiles.
Marketing Automation vs. Customer Relationship Management
Marketing automation and CRM work in parallel but perform differently. Automated marketing focuses on the most efficient means of turning marketing prospects into sales while providing an outstanding customer experience. Marketing automation and CRM share a symbiotic relationship so it is important to use an automated CRM platform to ensure a clean data flow across all marketing automation systems.
Marketing automation trends
Now that we have gone through what marketing automation is, let’s take a look at what features are trending in the market, according to findstack:
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1. Machine Learning
Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence that allows software applications to better predict outcomes and recurrent behaviors without being explicitly programmed. This is possible due to historical data as inputs to predict future output values.
2. Chatbots
Probably you have already encountered automated chatbots whilst navigating on the web since they are so popular these days. Chatbots are conversational programs that offer customers a personalized way to get information. This technology uses machine learning to offer the best answers possible to questions asked frequently by website visitors.
3. Social Media Marketing Automation
Social media marketing can also make use of automated marketing. As a result, companies can improve their social media presence, especially those with multiple accounts. Automated social media marketing helps achieve consistency in social media platforms by scheduling posts and sharing them automatically.
4. Personalized Email Automation
Personalized experiences play a vital role in marketing these days. Email marketing is no exception! Customers are trying to escape mass markets so it is important to personalize your brand communications whenever you can. Email is a great way to deliver a tailored message to your audience. With marketing automation software it’s possible to organize customer data and use it in a personalized way.
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Marketing automation benefits
Automating repetitive actions frees up time to allocate resources to other tasks which can optimize your business’s resources. Below are explained common marketing automation benefits in businesses.
1. Efficiency
The main benefit of marketing automation, as was already mentioned in this post several times, is efficiency. Automation frees up your team’s work increasing productivity by making them available to work on other tasks.
2. Generate and nurture leads
Automating steps between marketing and sales gives your team more time to focus on those leads, select the most promising ones and properly nurture them. Otherwise, businesses just get overwhelmed with the number of leads they get and spend loads of time just sorting them out.
3. Personalize the customer journey
As it was mentioned above, customers are trying to escape mass markets. It’s crucial that they feel unique at every interaction with your brand, and marketing automation is the way to do this.
Marketing automation platforms simplify the process of getting the right content and message to the exact customer, at the appropriate time. This happens because these tools organize data in a way that any human being would take endless hours to achieve.
Best marketing automation tools
It is important to implement a marketing automation solution to increase productivity and streamline tasks in sales and marketing departments in particular. Below are 3 marketing automation tools available on the market at different price ranges and adequate for different-sized companies.
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HubSpot’s Marketing Automation Software
HubSpot’s Marketing Automation Software, also known as Marketing Hub helps businesses attract the right audiences and convert visitors and leads into customers. This intuitive software allows the creation and management of entire inbound marketing campaigns. Hubspot offers a free version of this software that you can then upgrade along with your company’s scaling.
Monday’s Marketing Automation Software
Monday’s Marketing Automation Software helps you boost your team’s alignment and efficiency. Its main goal is to increase productivity and improve workflows. Its automation tools allow businesses to streamline processes and focus on other time-consuming tasks.
Just like Hubspot, you can start with a free plan (up to 2 users) and then upgrade when you feel the need to.
Mailchimp’s Marketing Automation Software
Mailchimp’s Marketing Automation Software is the tool to engage and convert more customers through several automation tools like customer journey builder, automated email marketing, and the setup of retargeting ads.
Mailchimp allows you to view all of your contacts in one place and gain an overall view of their behavior which helps to target your audience better.
There is a free version with the possibility to store 500 contacts. Paid plans start at 11,11€/month and go up to 301,86€/month.
Key Takeaways
Organizations must have the ability to take advantage of technological advances. Marketing automation platforms are great tools to streamline efforts and turn them into more effective marketing.
