Short Summary: Learn how marketing automation helps create plenty of opportunities for business growth and why you should implement it across the different stages in your pipeline.
As a broad concept, marketing automation seems complicated even though many people swear by the wonders it can do to your sales funnel.
The marketing environment today is so modern and high-tech that nearly all related activities can be automated. Automation presents a wide range of tools that afford marketers more time to market the business while lowering the need for resources. It is possible to let go of repetitive tasks and give more time to focus on data analysis and improve decision-making abilities.
By adding it to your existing workflow, you can enjoy the benefits of marketing automation.
Is Marketing Automation Necessary for Business?
Many marketers agree that marketing automation can boost business, but so do blogging, SEO, and a lot of other things. So why should you focus on marketing automation? What are the benefits of marketing automation that other strategies cannot provide?
Before going into the details about its many benefits, let us first check what statistics say about it.
According to a study by Nucleus Research, marketing automation can drive up to a 14.5% increase in overall sales productivity. At the same time, it decreases the marketing overhead by 12.2%. Another research by Annuitas Group found that it can help nurture prospects and help companies get at least a 451% increase in leads. From the qualified leads, automation can help nurture them and increase purchases up to 47% larger compared to the non-nurtured counterparts.
Other important statistics to consider, based on the report by Salesforce include an increase in the lead volume to 27%, a larger campaign deployment at 28%, an increase in lead conversion up to 30%, and an overall increase in marketing ROI at 25%.
So, if you are asking if it is necessary to deploy marketing automation, the data does not lie. It can help any business to realize the goal of increasing the marketing ROI. It can contribute to your business overall by helping you generate and nurture better leads, and giving you the best data to help you make smarter business decisions. Yes, marketing automation is essential and it will be one of the smartest decisions you will ever make for your business.
Ready for more? Let’s dig deeper into the different business process automation benefits and what tools you need to realize them.
What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?
- Reduced Costs.
According to a 2020 survey by Keap, 22.9% of small business respondents manually collect customer information. Not only it is inconvenient but it also consumes more resources for a process that can be automated. Add to the equation the process of marketing, generating, and nurturing leads; you will have to employ more employees because these activities are a handful. Implementing automated campaigns and sending out lead-generation emails saves you time and money because it is faster, cheaper, and runs on auto-pilot.
- Efficiency
Humans are flawed in a way because they get tired. When running a business, no matter how small it may be, errors cannot be avoided when employees are tired or burned at work. In contrast, automation software does not get tired and can do more than a human can in the same number of hours. This means that more work is done, giving humans more time to do more important stuff, such as crafting killer campaigns and refining strategies. Automation platforms also have multiple uses so you can do sales and marketing, appointment scheduling, invoicing, reporting and analytics, lead scoring, and other important tasks in one place.
- Increases Conversion
There are plenty of ways to increase conversion. The problem is that small teams cannot possibly try every method without wasting time and other resources. Automation software, however, can do a handful of jobs in one go. It can track leads, retarget website visitors, collect analytics data, and guide your team on the next steps to improve your marketing strategies. The efficiency of handling multiple tasks at the same time will lead to an increased number of conversions.
- Lead Nurturing
The lead-to-sale conversion rate must be high to say that you have an effective strategy for converting leads. This can be achieved if you can nurture your leads well until they become paying customers. You can use automation to send timely campaigns and on the channels that they use. It can be used to follow leads from the moment of first interaction to the sale.
- Improved Marketing Process.
Collaboration is extremely important to reach business goals. Automation improves marketing by allowing teams to collaborate and seamlessly exchange important information. It facilitates lead qualification and nurturing so the marketing strategy produces more quality leads. The sales team can also base their strategies on the data from the marketing team. The whole process ensures that everyone is in sync with all critical workflows, creating a positive and highly productive workspace for every team member.
- Personalized Marketing Journey.
Without automation, it will be difficult for customers to enter and move down the sales funnel. For example, when potential customers visit your site, you can’t expect them to automatically make a purchase. Even if they view products and add them to their carts, there is still that chance that they will abandon them You need to do a follow-up, like other relevant offers, email promotions, or a pop-up from a chatbot until they do buy the products.
Automation does these things automatically. It does not wait for further instructions from you but instead bases what to do next upon the actions of the customers. Taking the situation above, your system can send a personalized email containing promotions for the products they have in their carts. You no longer have to send generic emails. It makes the marketing process more personalized and more effective because the interest of the customer in the products is already established.
As you can see, the benefits of automation in business are immense. These, however, can only be achieved if you have the right tools that are intended to reap the benefits of marketing automation.
Recommended Automation Tools
1. Design, Video and Content Production
Today’s marketing environment sees content as king. You must offer customers premium content to keep them interested and loyal to your brand. Content and design production is a long and expensive process if you do not automate it. You can lose significant time and money and may even risk producing low-quality and unimpressive content. The costly, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks that need human intervention can be eliminated by using automation tools. But it is worth remembering that these applications help to optimize and simplify the work process, it is necessary to organize your downloads properly. Otherwise, it may cause visual noise on your device.
- 1. Invideo.io
InVideo is a robust video editing program that can help you quickly and effortlessly make professional-looking videos. You may choose from a variety of themes, customize them with your own material, and add special effects and music to make your films stand out with InVideo. InVideo has the tools you need to create captivating videos that will help your business thrive, whether you’re generating marketing videos, social media content, or instructional. InVideo is an excellent alternative for organizations of all sizes because of its user-friendly interface and low pricing.
You will need a reliable design tool if you are planning to grow your business. Renderforest is a huge timesaver as it allows you to create stunning animations, videos, presentations, mockups, graphics, and websites. From simple logos to intro videos, it has all the features to let you do it all. It also comes with branding tools, so everything you create will have your brand as the star.
Not having any design skills is not a problem with DesignStripe. This tool has a growing illustration library that can be used for any design project that you have. You simply use the simple but powerful customization tools, and you will have outputs that are on par with those coming from professional graphic artists.
- 4. Kittl.com
You may refer to Kittl as a magical design tool. It has plenty of professional-looking graphic design templates and precision editing tools to easily create even the most complex designs. Warp texts, recolor photos, add pattern textures, or use thousands of high-quality templates for illustrations, icons, shapes, and frames to start creating your design. You can easily speed up the design and content production by adding Kittl to your workflow.
When it comes to automating design and content production, Flexitive leaves no room for failure. It is what you need to create unlimited variations of a design to ensure the best performance across channels. It is the perfect solution whether you are launching a one-off campaign or you want to export your designs for omnichannel distribution. It is like a tool to centralize design production. It supports over 40 ad servers and DSPs, giving ultimate flexibility to reach target markets more precisely.
- 6. Vloggi.com
You can use Vloggi to collect video testimonials from your customers, enabling them to share their experiences with your business and give you invaluable insight into how people perceive your company. You can also use the platform to gather customer reviews and feedback on products or services that you offer, helping you gain a better understanding of what they like and how to improve your offerings. Plus, you can use the platform for product video marketing by getting people excited about what you have to offer through engaging visuals and creative content.
2. Image Processing
Images are important in design. They add a layer of aesthetic value, and they also help prove a point or explain the concept better. Using images, however, requires that they are prepared well. A lot of the steps related to image editing are repetitive, like cropping, adjusting the contrast and brightness, and removing backgrounds. These tasks add up, making the process longer and the designer tired. Automation will take away most of the laborious tasks giving the designer more time to enhance other areas of the design.
This tool is the ultimate solution for both basic and advanced image processing needs. Its main feature is the background remover that is powered by AI technology. It can batch-remove backgrounds in seconds as opposed to the many hours it would take to do the same thing manually. It also has a photo editing tool that lets you enhance and fine-tune photos without leaving the Removal.AI app. With this tool on your workflow, you can save hours, money, and effort from processing images daily.
3. Social Media Marketing
As one of the most effective strategies today, many organizations do social marketing to promote their brands and products. A common challenge with this approach is the huge number of hours allotted to maintain and grow social media accounts. Social media marketing automation can enrich your productivity and optimize the results from this strategy by offloading time-consuming tasks. It allows seamless campaign management and gives you more time to upload interesting content.
Growing your online presence requires plenty of time to create, schedule, publish, organize, and market posts. If you do not have a tool like Socialbee, you will be burdened with all the tasks that will be added to your already full hands. Socialbee has special features that make social media marketing a breeze. You can use it to schedule content posting in a calendar so you will not scramble about what and when to post next. It can publish your content across all social media platforms in a single click so you can save time by sharing content across platforms. On top of these and more, Socialbee can also help you analyze your posts by giving you insightful data about your social media marketing strategy performance.
Missinglettr is an automated social media drip campaign platform that helps you maximize the reach of your content. It’s designed to take any format of your content, such as blog posts, images, videos and podcasts, and add them to the library. From there, the platform will create a series of tailored campaigns that are automatically sent out over time to promote the content. This helps you get maximum exposure and organic reach for your content, as well as grow your inbound traffic.
Plus, each of Missinglettr’s campaigns are fully automated and optimized with A/B testing. That means that you don’t have to spend hours creating and scheduling social media posts – Missinglettr does it for you, freeing up your time to focus on other aspects of your business or content strategy.
- Scheduled.so
Scheduled.so is a comprehensive LinkedIn scheduling tool designed to streamline your marketing strategy. With its intuitive interface and advanced features, such as content calendar planning and automated posting, Scheduled.so empowers businesses to efficiently manage their LinkedIn presence. By enabling LinkedIn users to schedule posts in advance and analyze performance metrics in real-time, this platform enhances productivity, consistency, and engagement, ultimately optimizing your social media marketing efforts for maximum impact.
4. Email Marketing
This strategy is an opportunity to provide a better customer experience, increase retention, and promote loyalty. Running automation makes it easier to personalize email content and send it on time.
This tool has all you need for almost all marketing strategies: email and SMS marketing, WhatsApp campaigns, Facebook Ads, effective landing pages, and more. For its email marketing feature, SendInBlue can help you create beautifully designed emails to promote and grow your brand. It has a template library to build a new email design with a style that fits your brand. It has advanced email personalization options with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder to personalize the email design and content and impress your target audience. When you are done with your email, you can use SendInBlue to do A/B testing, so your emails are sent promptly. The system is automatically triggered using machine learning-powered send time optimization. It is an intelligent way to send emails promptly and more effectively.
If you are interested in achieving business process automation benefits, you can start by exploring your options with Apollo.io. This tool effectively searches, engages, and converts people with its sales intelligence and engagement features. You can use it to analyze and optimize your strategies based on split tests and sales analytics. Enrich and tweak your CRM and marketing automation system with over 200 scoring and routing data points. When using it for email marketing, take comfort in the knowledge that it segments the audience accordingly. With its advanced filtering feature, you can use it to build a precise list of contacts. This is helpful if you only want to reach a specific group for certain campaigns. It also has a strategic sequencing feature to automate email sending to ensure better engagement.
Blaze.today or Text Blaze is here to help you take the manual labor out of writing. Whether that’s a letter, or even a resume, Text Blaze has got you covered. With easy-to-use templates and powerful email automation tools, you can have full control over your content with no repetitive typing and no mistakes. You can even customize and personalize your emails and replies in templates. Try Text Blaze today and see how much easier content creation can be!
BigMailer makes managing your brands and emails easy and efficient. Not only can you store, organize, and send emails in one place, but you have the option to customize your campaigns for maximum ROI. BigMailer’s smart workflows allow users to create automated email sequences that are tailored specifically to their individual needs. You can also set up RSS-to-email campaigns to keep your subscribers updated with the latest content.
By utilizing BigMailer’s powerful automation features, you can save time and maximize your marketing efforts. You will be able to reach more people in less time, while still making sure that each message is customized for maximum effectiveness.
5. Content Marketing
Launching a content marketing strategy requires daily marketing tasks that can easily drain time, energy, and creative resources. Automating the process can benefit you in multiple ways, especially in terms of saving money for the sales and marketing departments.
Accurate, quality and relevant content can take a while to generate if you are doing it manually. It would take lots of time to do the research, compose the content, and check for errors. With Ai-writer, however, you only need a headline to create better content and fast. While it primarily helps generate content fast, this tool can also help increase efficiency and profits. It ensures that the content generated is SEO-friendly and it can reach the target audience. It also reduces the time spent on manual content generation by up to 50%, giving you more time to be an entrepreneur, not a content creator. More so, it saves you the trouble of researching and writing every article because it can generate unique articles from scratch.
6. Marketing Attribution
One of the most effective ways to track the progress and performance of your marketing strategy is through marketing attribution. The problem, however, is that it can be a bit lengthy and complex to do on your own. By automating the process, you can simplify it and really gather all of its benefits. With automation, gathering and analyzing data will be seamless. Some reliable attribution tools can even make suggestions on what you should do next to improve your performance.
You can measure and analyze marketing performance easily with Dreamdata. Not only does it help you maximize the effectiveness of your strategies, but it also helps improve ROI and gives you the confidence to scale success. With Dreamdata, you can measure and compare all revenue-generating activities in one place. You can break down performance across all Ad networks for you to easily attribute revenues. By having this tool to monitor performance, you can identify which strategies are effective on which channels. Your team can understand the ROI of SEO efforts and cross-channel campaigns, prompting them to do better.
Conclusion
The benefits of automation in business can be realized only if you take the initial steps to do it. Marketing automation is a revolutionary technology that will allow you to manage all processes involved in marketing. It is an all-encompassing tool that you can use across every marketing channel and campaign. With automation, you can effectively handle repetitive tasks, maximize content production, and make employees more efficient at tackling their tasks.
Knowing about these tools should give you the confidence to add them to your workflow and reap the benefits of marketing automation soon.
Chief Saasologist
Myself Snehil Prakash aka Chief Saasologist of Howtobuysaas. I am a saas marketer, who loves studying evolving software that is bringing change to the world. Share the same with people via howtobuysaas platform.
