Regardless of its size, if your business is doing well, you’re operating at full capacity more often than not. This means that your staff’s time will be at a premium. While you can always hire more employees if need be, you should also be aware that there are different ways to maximize productivity.
One surprising way to achieve this is by exploring the possibilities of marketing automation. With machine learning and artificial intelligence advancing daily, marketing automation strategies are more readily available than ever, all easily overseen with Scoro’s project management software.
What is Marketing Automation?
Before developing a marketing automation strategy, it’s worth taking a moment to unpack precisely what marketing automation is. At its core, the definition is simple: using software to automate marketing-related activities.
In practice, this means taking elements like email-based marketing to customers out of the hands of workers and putting them into the lap of the algorithm. This frees your team from focusing on overly tedious or time-consuming processes, giving them more time to concentrate on the creative parts of their roles.
How effective is marketing automation?
In its ideal form, automation is one of the best tools available for content marketing. It allows companies to tailor their marketing strategies to their customer’s evolving needs, creating positive feedback loops between strategy and customer behavior, and to increase productivity and efficiency while doing so.
It’s not a magical solution to all content marketers’ needs, but it can be a highly effective tool.
How prevalent is it?
According to recent statistics, just over half of companies use automation as part of their marketing strategy. Even more impressive, overall spending on marketing automation is expected to reach $25 billion by 2023, up from just $11.4 billion as recently as 2017.
Is it worth investing in?
As always, the answer to this question will depend on your business, needs, and circumstances. After all, technology is a tool, and automation is no different. When used correctly, automation can help businesses of all sizes achieve marketing goals more effectively and efficiently.
The Three Main Forms of Marketing Automation
Marketing intelligence
Marketing intelligence refers to monitoring users’ online behavior through the use of tracking codes embedded in the back end of a website.
By tracking what customers have bought in the past, software can then build a customer profile and algorithmically compare this with the behavior of similar customers. This information can then be used to make predictions about how customers might behave in the future.
Business development
A form of customer relationship management, business development seeks to turn potential customers into actual ones, moving them from initial awareness of the business to the point they’re ready to buy.
Software can aid this process by identifying potential customers’ actual and likely interests, using this information to develop a picture of customer intent. From here, it offers the most likely suggestions to bring a customer to the buying point. As such, business development relies on insights gleaned from marketing intelligence, and the two are closely related.
Workflow automation
Unlike the other two forms of marketing automation, workflow automation is an internal process. Where marketing intelligence and business development mostly involve customer interactions, workflow automation seeks to streamline operations by automating internal processes like budgeting, scheduling, and sending reminders.
This form of automation has recently become far more available to smaller businesses, and many are already seeing the benefits.
Why is Marketing Automation Useful?
Now that we’ve explained what marketing automation is and outlined its most common forms, it’s worth exploring how it can benefit your business. As we always point out, every business is different, but if you use marketing automation properly, you can expect to see many benefits.
1) Boost productivity
The core equation here is simple: if your workers are spending less time manually performing tedious tasks, they’ll be free to concentrate on the more creative side of their job.
Automating repetitive processes can quickly improve productivity by allowing your workers to focus their energies on the things that matter to your overall goals and mission. It can also minimize how much time your company spends managing its internal affairs, which lets you pay more attention to fulfilling projects and meeting clients’ needs.
2) Increase revenue
This one might seem obvious. After all, it’s rare for any new business process to catch on quickly if it doesn’t offer some financial benefit. By saving time and increasing client satisfaction, a marketing automation strategy can help your business become more profitable.
By the same token, the more detailed a picture marketing automation can give you of your customer’s preferences, the less time you’ll waste crafting the wrong sorts of campaigns.
3) Retain customers
Customer relationship management is one of the most important aspects of successful business marketing. It’s well known that it costs more to source new business than to retain and nurture existing client relationships. It can also be a better use of your time to focus on the data you already have on customer interests and behavior.
Automated content marketing tools allow you to keep your customer portraits updated, raise awareness of your business, and recommend products and services that might appeal to them, among other features.
4) Generate leads
Although it’s easier to retain existing customers than convert new ones, no growing business wants to rely solely on maintaining its current client base. After all, you want to grow, generating and nurturing new leads, with the end goal of turning new customers into loyal, repeat clients.
Marketing automation can help you generate and nurture leads by selecting the most effective pop-ups to display and analyzing which landing pages are more likely to produce conversions. It also lets you identify the best platforms on which to place ads to reach potential customers.
While it is perfectly possible to generate leads without marketing automation, machine learning and artificial intelligence are getting exponentially better at identifying who to advertise to and when and how best to do it.
So long as you give your software the right instructions and feed it the right data, you can gain truly helpful insights into customer preferences and behavior from it. These can be invaluable in helping you find new customers.
5) Improve flexibility
Finally, a strong marketing automation strategy can help you make more flexible plans, which will make your business model more resilient in the face of any unexpected changes and shocks.
Digital marketing can be an especially fast-moving industry, with technological advancements and external shifts constantly threatening to undermine even the most meticulously planned campaigns.
Marketing automation can help you prepare for and deal with the unexpected by providing you with the tools you need to identify and understand changes in customer behavior as they occur and to analyze which products and campaigns are more successful in as close to real time as possible.
Artificial intelligence can keep track of huge numbers of different variables and help you cut through a mass of data to zoom in on what matters the most to your business. By handing the more mechanical work of collecting and cutting data over to machines, automation can provide your workers more space to focus on making flexible plans and responding to changes.
Marketing automation can be an incredibly powerful tool, then. It’s also one that more and more businesses are using more frequently, with content marketing software increasingly relying on machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Whether you’re automating internal workflow, setting up a large-scale automated content marketing campaign, or just exploring how new technologies might help your business, there’s a lot to be gained from staying on top of developments in automation.
To experience the benefits of workflow automation firsthand, why not try Scoro today and see how it can benefit you.