If you run your own business or head a marketing team of any kind, it is more likely than not that you have encountered the concept of marketing automation where certain aspects of your marketing efforts are automated through the use of specialized software.
You are also probably thinking that employing marketing automation to a certain extent will help your marketing efforts. In short, the answer is yes. However, as you should never take anyone’s word for granted, here are a couple of reasons why you should be using marketing automation.
To be precise, here are 13 reasons.
1. Less Repetition
Let’s be honest – a whole lot of marketing ends up being about doing myriad little things over and over again, keeping track of all kinds of data and details and making sure everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing. In the end, you spend three quarters of your time managing minute details. With marketing automation, this is done automatically, which frees up your time and allows you to concentrate more on the important stuff- new and innovative ways to do marketing. You are not a clerk – you are a marketer.
2. Upselling
Upselling is one of the easiest and steadiest ways to increase your revenue. In the B2B sector, upselling is a must as you start to sell more and more to your existing customers. Unfortunately, a vast majority of companies underperforms when it comes to upselling and it often has to do with the fact that it requires a bit of marketing. Many marketing automation tools are actually developed with upselling in mind, making it simpler and easier to offer more expensive products and services to existing customers.
3. Improved Accountability
Modern marketing teams are far more diverse and versatile than they used to be in the pre-digital days. While this is mostly a good thing, it can lead to a certain drop in accountability. In other words, when certain campaigns and other marketing efforts underperform (for whatever reason), it can be difficult to figure out who dropped the ball. Marketing automation tools enable you to better track who is doing what and provide you with data to establish accountability more easily.
4. Multi-Channel Targeting
A big aspect of digital marketing is that it happens all over the place – from emails to social media, content marketing to paid digital marketing. It can be difficult to ensure that your marketing is reaching everyone everywhere and this is where marketing automation can be of huge help. More often than not, you will find that your marketing automation tool enables you to send your marketing messages across various channels, without wasting time and effort setting everything up manually.
5. Scheduling
When we are talking a multi-channel ecosystem such as digital marketing, one can end up using enormous amounts of time making sure everything goes out at the best time (especially since various channels yield different results depending on times of day and days in the week). With marketing automation tools, you can schedule all of your marketing messages well in advance, ensuring that they reach as many people as possible. This is, in fact, one of the major reasons marketing automation works so well in the modern business ecosystem.
6. Data-Based Lead Scoring
Often times, marketing and sales will disagree on the validity of leads and things can get quite messy in this respect. With a marketing automation tool, it becomes much easier to put specific value to various leads and the various marketing campaigns that have brought in those leads. For the head of marketing, whose leads are often maligned by the salespeople, this can be an invaluable tool to show that their team is getting its job done and that it is the sales that are underperforming.
7. Improving CRM
While we are on the subject of marketing and sales interaction, we cannot forget to mention customer relationship management with all its innumerable intricacies. Once again, marketing automation can be of huge help, improving the collaboration between marketers and salespeople, as well as customer service and customer success people. In short, it pools everyone’s data, helping everyone improve their customer relationships. For marketers, this provides an abundance of data that can help in future marketing efforts. Keep in mind, this is just the tip of the iceberg when we talk improving CRM.
8. Repurposing Content
Marketers are nowadays working with copious amounts of content and, often times, they lose sight of content that has underperformed and that might actually be repurposed. Marketing automation tools provide a plethora of features that can help identify such content and even help with repurposing it for future use. This may not seem like much, but it can reduce your content expenses greatly.
9. Speed Up Campaign Creation
Sooner or later, there will come a time when the success of your marketing campaign will depend on how quickly you get it out. In such a situation, a good marketing automation tool (or an entire stack) will definitely come in handy. It will cut the time you will take to come out with a campaign by taking care of the time-consuming but non-crucial steps in putting out a campaign.
10. Continuous A/B Testing
Digital marketing has been around for a relatively short time and people are still trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. One of the best ways to ensure you are not wasting your time on inefficient practices is to engage in A/B testing where you test various features of your campaign. Marketing automation tools enable you to do continuous A/B testing and constantly improve the efficacy of your campaigns.
11. Lower Staffing Costs
It may sound callous to consider this a plus, but we are all adults. Marketing automation tools can handle many of the entry-level marketing tasks and they can result in huge savings for mid-sized marketing teams and especially larger ones. Even the priciest marketing automation stacks will be cheaper than paying salaries and benefits.
12. Save Time on Social
Social media marketing has become an integral part of every digital marketing strategy and if you have to take care of a whole bunch of social accounts, it can be one of the more time-consuming parts of your job. Considering that a large part of your social presence does not actually require that much human output, it becomes obvious that a marketing automation tool can be of huge help here.
13. More Data, Less Guesswork
When all is said and done, the greatest benefit of using marketing automation is that it reduces the amount of guesswork and subsequent bad decisions that come with it involved in your marketing efforts.
Data is data.
