Is your marketing campaign not doing as well as you’d hoped? Don’t feel bad. Even big-name companies like Dove and Pepsi miss the mark sometimes.
It’s not easy to handle your marketing and run a business. When the fatigue begins to set in, mistakes will happen. That’s why you should invest in a marketing automation solution.
It can take care of your marketing campaign while you and your team focus on other aspects of your business. It will also help you track and find new leads.
Those are only a few benefits. Check out this guide for an entire list of reasons why you should automate marketing processes.
1. Better Customer Journey
Marketing automation software walks customers through every step of the buying journey. It looks a little something like this.
The customer clicks on your ad. From there, they’re redirected to your website, where they can browse around. They don’t want to commit to a purchase quite yet, so they exit the page.
Thanks to automated marketing, they continue to see ads, so the customer never forgets about your company. Eventually, your marketing program sends them an email with a juicy discount. This prompts the customer to buy from your shop to take advantage of their coupon.
Without automation, you would have to take the time to do all of this on your own.
2. Track Leads
Leads are potential customers that might be interested in investing in your goods and services. Marketing automation tools can help you find them.
They’ll search several channels to spot your ideal customer. Once they find a potential lead, they’ll analyze their online behavior and buying habits to create personalized ads.
3. Free Up Your Team
Running a business is a big job. It’s also expensive. With automation software, you can downsize your small business marketing company.
Automation takes care of all the boring, repetitive tasks that your team doesn’t want to do. They want to flex their creative muscles by brainstorming ideas for the company’s next big campaign.
Forcing them to spend time looking for leads and writing reports is a waste of your team’s talents. It also puts more work on their plate, which can lead to burnout.
4. Combine Your Marketing Campaigns
Cross-marketing automation will allow you to track leads across several different ad channels. You can lump your SMS marketing campaign in with your email and live chat campaigns.
That means you’ll be able to reach out to leads no matter where they are. You can even contact old customers with special offers.
5. Stay Consistent
When it comes to your marketing strategy, timing is everything. You have to be consistent about when you reach out to leads.
When a customer asks you a question, they expect to hear back right away. With automation software, you can schedule your replies, so no one is ever kept waiting.
6. Easier Reporting
The most boring part of marketing is writing analytics reports. There’s also a lot of room for human error because it’s complicated.
Automating your paperwork ensures accuracy. It will give you an overview of your progress, letting you know how far your marketing efforts have come and how far you have left to go.
Analytics will show you what areas you’re failing in so you can make changes to fix them before it’s too late.
7. Increase Your Conversion Rate
Your conversion rate is the percentage of your leads that go from browsers to buyers. Your automation software will track leads that haven’t converted yet and target them with well-placed ads.
You can even use your software to reach out to past customers that haven’t visited your site in a while to try and reconvert them.
These are all tasks that your marketing department would have had to do manually in the past. Now, they can let the computer take care of it while they double down on your marketing strategy and come up with their own creative ways to get potential customers to convert.
8. Lead Scoring
A marketing-qualified lead is a lead that your marketing team has deemed likely to convert. They haven’t committed to making a purchase yet, but they might with the right push.
A sales-qualified lead is someone that ready to go. They’ve been keeping an eye on your company, and they want to buy what you’ve got.
When someone is still in the marketing-qualified stage of things, it’s a waste of time for your sales team to give them a call.
So, how will your sales department know when it’s their time to shine? Your automation program will notify them.
9. Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the practice of slowly building a relationship with potential customers to ensure that they turn to your business when they are ready to make a purchase.
Most companies do this through a drip email campaign. They’ll use their automation software to send prospects an occasional promotional email.
You’ll be able to track the progress of your drip email campaigns through your automation program as well.
You can learn more about the basics of marketing automation and email marketing from this blog from Adobe Experience Cloud.
Invest in a Marketing Automation Solution
Trying to take care of your marketing campaign and run your business can be complicated. Between reaching out to leads and brainstorming new campaign ideas, your marketing department would be more interested in doing the latter.
Give them what they want by putting the little stuff in the hands of your marketing automation solution software.