When you’re starting a business, it can be difficult to know where to allocate your valuable time and energy. While it might be tempting to focus on sales and product development, you also 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. In fact, 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 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 automations comes in.
However it may be the end goal, it’s more than just automating your team’s marketing activities and workflows. Marketing automation is about making use of 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 way more than just email marketing, a CRM tool or just a shortcut to better results and lack of strategy.
Marketing automation offers a great deal of features and capabilities to help marketers drive results for their organizations. A marketing database, analytics tool and an engagement marketing platform are just three of them.
How does marketing automation work?
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 softwares that have these type of functionalities allows marketers to send emails, segment leads, publish social media posts and increase customer loyalty through personalized actions.
Marketing automation trends
Now that we have gone through what marketing automations is and how it works, let’s take a look at what features companies use the most and 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 become better at predicting outcomes and recurrent behaviours without being explicitly programmed to do so. 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.Automated Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing can also make use of automated marketing. As a result, companies can improve 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
Personalization plays a vital role in marketing these days! 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 and with marketing automation software it is possible to organize customer data and use it in a personalized way.
Marketing automation benefits
Automating repetitive actions frees up time to allocate resources on other tasks which can optimize your business’s resources.
1.Efficiency
The main benefit of marketing automation, as it 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 nurturing leads
Automating steps between marketing and sales to generate leads faster gives your team more time to focus on those leads, select the most promising ones and nurture them in a proper way. Otherwise businesses just get overwhelmed with the amount 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 is crucial that they feel unique with 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
There are several marketing automation tools available on the market at different price ranges and adequate for different sized companies. In this post we will present some of the best options available so you can find just what suits your company best.
