More than half of companies use marketing automation to gain efficiencies, personalize campaigns, and enjoy other benefits. Is it time for your company to adopt it?
Pardot from Salesforce, Hubspot, MailChimp and Constant Contact. These are all examples of marketing automation platforms that have become household names. Whether you realize it or not, you interact with products and marketing materials generated by these companies every day.
Today, as they realize the enormous benefits it offers, more and more organizations are adopting marketing automation . More than half of companies use it , in fact, while 58% of B2B companies plan to adopt it. Perhaps this is why the market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 17.67% between 2021 and 2027.
So it's natural that you're wondering if this is the right solution for your business.
Marketing automation in a nutshell
Simply put, marketing automation is the use of tools and technologies that automate marketing initiatives, campaigns and tasks, making them faster for marketers. Using a set of tools or a single platform, they can deploy their campaign across different channels without having to invest the time to do it manually.
Email marketing, customer relationship management , marketing analytics, social media, and workflow automation are just a few of the different types of marketing automation. Some platforms cover all or some of these different features.
These platforms bring a series of additional benefits, in addition to efficiency. For example, many of them offer detailed marketing analytics on campaign performance. They can also facilitate lead generation .
5 main benefits
1. Time saving
Perhaps the main advantage that marketing automation brings to your business is considerable time savings. Marketing activities, when carried out manually, require a lot of time and effort. When you can automate many of the most routine and repetitive tasks, you free up hours for human professionals to focus on responsibilities that require a “human touch.”
Marketing automation means a more simplified and refined overall system. There's no need for intensive manual data entry, and you don't need to deploy the same campaign across all channels — your platform will do this and other activities automatically. Plus, you can schedule campaigns to run in advance, meaning you don't have to wait to send.
2. Data accumulation
Marketing automation platforms and activities generate a huge amount of actionable data. Each contact entered into your system means a lot more information – what content they are responding to, as evidenced by their opens, clicks and sessions, as well as additional preferences.
Additionally, most platforms offer data visualizations , allowing you to see overall trends and insights into the success of individual campaigns and an overview of your efforts over time. If you take advantage of features like A/B testing, you can also compare content.
3. Personalization
By leveraging marketing automation, you encourage customers to interact with your brand. You can cultivate relationships with them by collecting data about who they are and what they want, as well as nurture those relationships by staying in touch with them. You can also personalize your messages and media by offering relevant content that correlates with your interests.
This could be sending push notifications to alert consumers to new products that might appeal to them, or deploying emails relating to specific groups with a specific interest or demographic, for example.
This ultimately helps your business become more profitable, as well as generating greater loyalty.
4. Usability
From a marketer and business perspective, marketing automation platforms tend to be straightforward and easy to use. They rarely require considerable technical knowledge or any coding experience. Most of the time, they simply involve adding your content and scheduling or clicking send.
Of course, this varies depending on the platform itself and how complex you want your campaigns to be. But overall, you'll find marketing automation tools easy to use.
5. Better customer service
The ultimate goal of your marketing efforts is to improve the customer experience . And by using marketing automation tools, you'll do just that: engage your current audience and keep building it.
Take CRMs, for example. This is an example of a marketing automation tool with the singular objective of nurturing relationships with your current or potential consumers. You will be able to see all critical consumer data in one place and gain insights that will allow you to drill down into what specific individuals or businesses really want, thus allowing you to target your communications accordingly.
Even a chatbot can be considered a marketing automation tool. They require little human intervention and can solve problems as well as provide information automatically, helping to meet consumer needs quickly and efficiently.
6 best practices
Marketing automation is not a one-size-fits-all solution. That said, there are some general practices you should follow when using it:
- Articulate your goals and objectives before investing in marketing automation software .
- Gather data from your campaigns to evaluate their ROI and effectiveness.
- Segment your audience to target your campaigns as specifically as possible.
- Whenever you can, use tags to personalize your messages.
- Test. For example, use A/B testing to evaluate different content and strategies.
- Don't leave everything to automation. Your main content needs to be strong in its own right – automation should only augment your efforts.
As your business grows, you'll need to look for ways to improve your efficiency and hone a cohesive strategy that saves you time and money. Marketing is a core function of any business, and adopting marketing automation will help you achieve your goals, no matter what type of work you do. Is this the year you learn what this critical tool can do for you?
Source: BairesDev
