Have you ever thought about the feeling of having something to do the whole marketing job for you? Wouldn’t it be so nice to just sit down, have a sip of coffee, and watch things fall automatically into place? If the job of doing marketing related tasks becomes a bit laborious and you’re not enjoying it anymore, then, you need something to help you with. Well, you might be interested in marketing automation.
If you are a marketer, you might have heard of the word marketing automation loads of times already. Tons of vendors are claiming to provide the top marketing automation tools in the web with almost the same promises. But what is marketing automation tools and what difference can it make to your current marketing strategy? Read through the end to get a deeper understanding about marketing automation and gain knowledge on how to choose the right one.
What is Marketing Automation?
To define marketing automation is a bit of a mouthful as there are overwhelming words and phrases to describe it. Loads of articles are written about it including all the enticing benefits it can give. Basically, it is a software created to automate marketing procedures for you. More and more marketers are venturing into this medium because of the ease it gives to every marketing tactics.
Marketing automation platforms have so many tools available, but instead of being properly used, it often leaves marketers the feeling of being overwhelmed and not knowing where to start and what tool to use first. Here is a list of the primary tools to use in a marketing automation system from the article “The 5 must-use marketing automation features”– NEWFANGLED.com:
- Lead Scoring – marketing automation tools have lead scoring features that enables you to reach your best prospects. All you need to do is to conduct careful research in order to come up with profile classifications and restrictions to indicate whether the lead is a qualified prospect or not, thus, making it easier for you to segment leads.
- Targeted Emails – marketing automation includes email marketing tools to let marketers make campaigns through highly targeted email lists. The contents you make may not always be relevant to everybody; marketing automation tools allow users to send email campaigns to people whose interests and behavior are relevant to the content you make.
- Webpage and Customer Relationship Management Integration – having a well-integrated website allows you to improve a strong bond among customers. Marketing automation has customer relationship management platform that enables you to easily track customer behavior and determine which of your marketing strategies are making impact on your marketing system.
- Continuous Profiling – generating leads and gathering their information is one of the main goals of every marketing campaign. Marketing automation allows you to do that a hundred steps-up than that of the manual way. Through continuous profiling leads, you will be able to learn fresh information about them through forms they fill out from your website.
- Lead Nurturing – lead nurturing feature is last but not the least must-have feature of every marketing automation app. It’s probably a bit of a cliché, but nurturing your leads gives you so many opportunities. Marketing automation allows you to create campaigns with personal touches that leads and customers will find more inviting.
Ideal Strategies for Small Biz
Marketing automation is undeniably excellent as a marketing tool. However, it is not as simple as ABC; human effort is needed in order to achieve success. To help you with that, consider doing these strategies from an article “3 marketing automation strategies you can implement today” – SmartInsights.com:
- Dynamic Content – is a great way to put learning to good use by sending varied contents, which reflect the experiences and behavior of your customers. Marketing does the job of email segmentation, which will save you so much time if you do it manually. According to an article from Mailchimp.com, segmentation can lead to a 62% higher click-through rates. However you want to go about it, dynamic content is a proven strategy in reaching your audience effectively.
- Drip Campaigns – timely email series sent to audience can be extremely effective especially for new customers. According to a case study from com, drip campaigns have shown 98% conversion rate. It basically aims to communicate to educate clients in regular intervals, welcome new clients, and nurture leads. When doing drip campaigns, make sure your marketing automation tool supports automatic sending; timing and consistency is the key.
- Nurture Campaigns – this marketing automation strategy helps in generating more leads at a much lower cost as compared to non-targeted campaigns. Nurture campaigns are actually great for undecided leads on a sales point of view; they are more likely to be converted if you send them contents which portray nurturing.
Those are the three easy ways to implement marketing automation strategies; to give you more, here are another tips from an article “How to develop an effective marketing automation strategy” – leadliaison.com:
- Focus on Customers – customer satisfaction must always be the core focus of every marketing strategy; automated or manual. The key is to understand the behavior and interests of your customers and using those to create a lead-scoring plan.
- Lead Profiling and Ranking – once information is obtained, marketing automation tool compares and ranks leads based on those information. All these strategies will need a mindset of capturing accurate and comprehensive lead profile.
- Grouping Segmented Leads – from the details gathered, leads segmented should be grouped based on wants and needs similarities. Marketing automation software will not be able to effectively target each leads individually because of the big volume of leads it generates.
- Valuable Contents – last very important aspect is to provide contents that leads and customers will find valuable. The contents you should be providing to your audiences must be informative, useful, and will somehow provide solutions.
Importance of Marketing Automation
Since marketing automation has been one of the biggest innovations in e-marketing today, getting to know its importance and benefits is just right. Below are some of the main benefits of using marketing automation tools for your business:
- Cost-saving – through using this platform, you will be able to save costs especially on human resource. Instead of hiring a team, one person can do the whole job with most likely the same or better quality.
- Reach Potential Customers – one of the benefits is that it allows marketers reach target customers across multiple channels online or offline.
- Constant Content Publishing – features that allows you to create multiple posts at a time and set them on schedule to be published live; thus, allowing you to be consistent with your publishing schedule.
- Extremely Targeted Campaigns – marketing automation has features, which do the job of segmenting leads and grouping them according to interests and behavior, therefore making it easier for a marketer in creating content relevant to the target audiences.
- Social Media Campaign Management – one of the best avenues for promoting campaigns is social media. Marketers know the importance of social media promotion for publishing contents; it is definitely one of the most effective approaches to every marketing strategy. Marketing automation helps you in managing your social media channels within a single dashboard.
- Improve Creativity – the advantage of automating marketing tasks is that you are able to do one task at much smaller time, and you will have more time to do other important stuff, thus increasing productivity and creativity.
- More Effective Marketing Activity – because you have the ability to create a highly targeted marketing campaign, you are actually gaining the advantage of a more effective marketing strategy as a whole. The more relevant your contents are, the more your prospects are likely to be converted.
- Nurture Leads Ad Customers – through personalized campaigns, you are able to make your leads and existing customers feel valued. Loads of marketing campaigns nowadays are being sent to people’s email, which are completely irrelevant; being different from those marketers and sending contents with personal touches gives you an edge in the competition.
Marketing automation is a great tool; however, without proper strategies, marketing success is hardly possible. It is also important to choose a tool that will help you elevate your marketing system; seeing marketing automation tool reviews is recommended before buying.
So those are the easy but definitely effective strategies of using marketing automation software for small businesses. If done right, marketing automation can make a massive difference to your current marketing strategy. It is also important to choose marketing automation tool that is right for you as there are a lot of software made for different types of businesses. Remember, relying on the software alone won’t get you any bounty; dedication is still always the key.
To help you choose the right tool, see a list of the top marketing automation tools from CrowdReviews.com and know how people go about theirs by reading marketing automation tool reviews from the site.
Jeev Trika
Latest posts by Jeev Trika (see all)
- 5 Reasons to Use Compliance Software for Business Management - November 25, 2016
- How to Find Reliable Reviews of Video Conferencing Software - November 24, 2016
- Why You Must Read Best Business Intelligence Software Reviews - November 23, 2016