What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation has seen a rapid increase in value and use for many businesses. Simply put, marketing automation is about using software tools to automate marketing activities. Businesses require frequent contact with clients and potential customers, but not everyone has the time to individually send out each email, post each social media content or reply to each customer’s inquiries automatically. Thus, the creation of marketing automation has been a huge leap for businesses to efficiently solve this dilemma.
Basic Lead Generation Methods
Before the popularity of many marketing automation tools, basic lead generation methods have been used. Rather than having instant contact and response times, marketers would manually review each individual lead and personally reach out. For example, cold emails would be sent out to each lead personalized with their name and industry, or social media posts would manually be uploaded onto each channel. These tasks may seem tolerable, but imagine the number of cold emails reaching 100 or more, or the frequency of social media posts being every day for six months. Simple marketing efforts then become quite tedious and inefficient.
Generating leads can also be quite challenging. In order for businesses to grow, leads need to come in consistently. However, with the mentioned lead generation marketing tactics, they can be quite time-consuming and inefficient, and result in a decline in quality, performance and overall growth. As a result, many businesses resort to easy solutions like buying leads. Purchasing leads to nurture is a quick fix to generating leads, however, high-quality leads are not guaranteed and this strategy is definitely not a long-term solution.
What Does Marketing Automation Do?
Marketing automation simplifies and streamlines these tedious tasks to create a reliable and consistent system for lead conversion. Tasks like sending out individual cold emails can be turned into digital email campaigns that are automated but still personalized with names. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools can also be integrated to establish a space to manage leads and clients throughout the whole process of generate, capture and nurture. The list for marketing automation goes on from landing pages, campaign management, social marketing and more.
Marketing automation gives businesses the opportunity to implement digital marketing strategies with a simple click of a button, rather than manually pressing “send” for each and every submission. The key advantage of automation tools is that they mitigate the risk of human error while identifying better ways to convert leads into customers.
Who’s Using It?
Businesses ranging from large enterprises to small and mid-sized businesses have all seen the value in implementing marketing automation tools into their operations. Organizations from diverse industries including “business-to-business” (B2B) and “business-to-consumer” (B2C) have adopted automation strategies to maximize efficiency and increase revenue. Studies show marketing automation leads to a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% decrease in marketing overhead. With cost effective yet just as powerful strategies to target customers in mind, adopting automation into marketing activities is the next big step for business growth.
If you want to take your business to the automation stage, contact us and we can get you started!
