Are you using marketing automation in your business yet?
If you aren’t, you could be missing out on one of the biggest opportunities to scale your business while saving time.
As an entrepreneur, startup founder, or marketing leader, you know how hard it can be to keep everything running. Every customer and lead needs to feel like their needs are being prioritized. All of your business’s messaging, from your homepage to your customer service, needs to feel consistent.
With so much going on, it’s almost impossible to keep from overlooking something important. And when the thing you’re overlooking happens to be potential customers, that can cost your business money.
But there’s good news. With modern technology and some preparation, you may be able to automate some of the things you’re doing to acquire customers. In fact, there may be dozens of processes keeping you busy that you can eliminate with marketing automation.
To find out what marketing automation is and why it’s important, keep reading.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is exactly what it sounds like. Simply put, it’s the practice of setting tools to implement your marketing strategies automatically.
Email autoresponders are a common example of marketing automation. When someone enters their email address to join a mailing list, they automatically receive a series of marketing messages. Mailing list software almost always has simple automation features like this built-in.
Who Needs Marketing Automation?
You may be wondering what kinds of businesses are best suited for marketing automation. More specifically, will it be the right choice for your particular business?
The truth is, just about any business of any size can benefit from marketing automation.
Large businesses can use it to create more individualized and personal-feeling experiences for their customers. Small businesses can use it to maximize productivity with a limited workforce. And mid-sized businesses can use it to help them scale to the next level without overwhelming their customer relationship teams.
No matter what kind of business you run or what stage it’s in, marketing automation can be a powerful tool.
What Are the Benefits of Automation?
From email list management to social media marketing, automation software can streamline and unify nearly all your marketing actions. Here we’ll explain exactly why marketing automation can be so beneficial.
Better Leads
Lead generation is one of the most important parts of running a business. The more steps in the lead generation process you can automate, the more consistent your messaging can be, and the more efficiently your business can run.
Behavioral tracking software can help your team understand prospects better. Automated follow-up software can enable your business to stay in touch with leads without spending time on each one. You’ll also be better equipped to recognize and focus on the most promising leads.
More Efficient Lead Nurturing
Getting new leads is just half the battle. Once you have an audience that’s getting your messages, how you treat them is what counts.
Lead nurturing is tricky because every prospect is a unique person with different wants. You must be equipped to meet all leads where they are to coax them into a sale.
Lead nurturing can also be very time-intensive, especially when leads aren’t quite ready for a hard sell. Automated email and text messages can provide value and keep cool leads interested while your team focuses on warmer leads. That way, every lead will get the attention they deserve without spreading your team thin.
Enhanced Personalization
Modern consumers care a lot about the experience they get from working with brands. It isn’t enough to simply provide a product. To thrive, modern businesses must be prepared to thrill their customers and prospects.
Much like lead nurturing, providing a personalized experience can be time-consuming. Once again, marketing automation makes it easy by providing the right kinds of messages to the right people at the right times.
Improved Data
It’s impossible to make the best business decisions possible without high-quality data. You need to understand your target audience and their needs.
Marketing automation software helps by sourcing and consolidating data from your audience’s behaviors. And since it works automatically in the background, it can help you make smart choices faster.
Unified Sales and Marketing
Sales and marketing are similar fields, but you might not know it from the way some businesses operate. Sales and marketing teams sometimes want to keep to themselves. This can cause misalignments between the ways the two teams represent the business.
While it isn’t efficient or reasonable to combine the two teams into one, automation software can provide the next best alternative.
Marketing automation solutions can help teams maintain a consistent tone and message. This way, all customer communications feel the same. And combining data from the sales team with the data from marketing, everyone in the business can be kept on the same page.
Use Marketing Automation in Your Business
If you’re like many business owners, discovering the benefits of marketing automation probably has you excited. It’s probably easy to imagine the possible use cases of marketing automation for your business. But imagining the possibilities won’t boost your leads or sales—implementation will.
Fortunately, Pivotal New Media has you covered. With expert consultants experienced with working for Fortune 500 businesses, we offer cutting-edge knowledge and guidance to help automate your business’s marketing. If you believe it’s time to employ marketing automation in your business, then take the next step and connect with a Pivotal consultant today.
