Once a futuristic fringe element, marketing automation has seeped into mainstream practices and become an established fixture in many firms’ marketing departments. Marketing automation is here to stay. Estimates indicate the industry could be worth $7.63 billion by 2025, which means if companies want to avoid being left behind, they should be looking to adopt automation in their own marketing departments.
But what is marketing automation and how can it benefit your business? Here we explore four advantages of using automation in your marketing ventures. For more information on how automated marketing can benefit your company, as well as information on how to implement it, head to Digital Agency Milwaukee.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the catch-all term given to any automated solution or tool that performs marketing functions. Email automation, lead generation and targeted content all fall under the marketing automation umbrella, as does data entry and solutions to assist with up-selling and cross-selling.
How Can it Benefit My Business?
Automation is helping marketers maximize their time and increase the returns on their investments (ROIs) in several key ways:
Generate Better Leads
Through automation, marketing departments are able to track a potential customer’s journey through your site. Careful analysis of these movements allows marketing automation solutions to provide a detailed picture of how interested a potential customer is in your product or service and identify to a high degree of accuracy what their potential needs might be.
This allows marketing departments to focus their efforts on customers that have a high likelihood of choosing your products or services. It also allows them to channel their marketing to that customer’s specific needs and position in the purchasing cycle.
Focus on Important Tasks
What once took marketing departments days, now takes them mere minutes. Marketing automation solutions assist with data entry and menial tasks, freeing up marketer’s time to focus on the more creative and important tasks, like generating killer content and solving problems.
Boosts Sales
How much financial capital does your business forgo by forgetting to up-sell, cross-sell or not following up with clients?
If you sell tires, for example, and you are not reminding customers to come in and change their tires several weeks before the end of the tire’s life, you are leaving money on the table. This customer might not realize they need to change their tires, or if they do, they might not remember that they purchased their tires from you last time.
Automated solutions can ensure that your marketing department never misses a chance to up-sell or cross-sell. They remind customers of your products near their birthday or Christmas, offers upgrades at opportune moments and significantly increase your customers’ value.
Personalizing Content
Your marketing team does not have the resources to send content to individual customers one-by-one. But personalized marketing is essential for your business. 77% of buyers want targeted content sent to them at opportune times during different stages of their research process.
Automated marketing solutions allow companies to send customers personalized content throughout the buying process. Not only does this ensure that the right content is sent to the right buyer at the right time, but it also allows departments to streamline their marketing expenditure. They can quickly see what campaigns are working and what are not, and modify their expenditure to favour those campaigns that are delivering sales.