A Look at Marketing Automation: Impact on Business Growth and How Does it Work?

A Look at Marketing Automation: Impact on Business Growth and How Does it Work?

Marketing teams often engage in a lot of repetitive tasks as they carry out their daily activities. Conducting a thorough check of all such activities, you’ll find that they consume a significant amount of time, which you could otherwise use for more sales and marketing-focused activities.

By using marketing automation software, you will free up more time, improve your marketing results, and close more sales. Automated marketing campaigns are way more effective because they’re programmed to produce specific results at specific times throughout your customers’ journey with your brand. In this article, you’ll learn about marketing automation and how it can help you grow your business.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation uses technology, dedicated marketing software, in particular, to streamline marketing activities and make them more effective. As mentioned earlier, this software handles repetitive tasks, such as drip email campaigns, social posts, etc., by automating them.

Imagine that a new visitor browsed through your website and purchased a product or downloaded an ebook. Typically, they’ll leave you their email. Minutes after that, you would want to send them a “Thank you” message or an on-boarding message congratulating them for purchasing or downloading your content. But it doesn’t end there. Now that you have their email, you want to leverage the opportunity to keep sending them relevant content or information about other products or services that you think might benefit them.

Doing all that manually can be tiring and time-consuming. At best, you will only be able to keep up with a few prospects and customers. This is where marketing automation software comes in. In addition to automating a significant amount of your marketing efforts, it also gathers useful information about your subscribers, existing customers, and website visitors; how they behave or interact with your business; thereby offering you insights into their needs and allowing you to offer more tailored services to them.

This means that marketers use automation software to nurture leads, which often involves integrations with customer relationship management (CRM) and customer data platform (CDP) software. According to a 2020 report by ResearchAndMarkets.com, the global marketing automation market size is expected to reach $8.42 billion by 2027. This means that marketing automation has and will be attracting much attention in the coming years.

Features on Marketing Automation Software

In case you’re wondering what to expect when you use marketing automation software, here are some typical features to keep an eye out for:

• Lead nurturing: The software comes with a feature that allows it to send a series of automated emails containing useful information to engage prospects until they make purchases.

• Personalized email marketing: These days, this is an important feature you want to include in your marketing software.

• Forms builders for landing pages: A form builder tool included in the software enables you to collect information from your leads/prospects and use this information to build and edit your lead generation forms. This helps you to optimize your landing pages.

• Lead management: Some marketing automation software also feature a lead management platform that serves as a landing spot for leads that don’t quite have enough information to qualify for sales. The goal, in this case, is to nurture these prospects by providing them with relevant and constant information until they are ready to buy.

• Drip campaign management: Based on the actions of your leads or prospects, you can organize automated emails to nurture them as they go through the sales cycle. Drip campaigns allow your marketing team to send direct and personalized emails to a large number of people.

• CRM integration: The software is often integrated with your CRM, allowing you to transfer information about your leads between marketing and sales.

• Lead scoring: The software also comes with an email platform. The lead scoring feature enables you to rank your leads based on their potential to convert to paying customers. Based on lead scoring, a prospect with a higher lead scoring is more likely to make a purchase. Generally, you can adjust your lead scores based on the behavior of your customers.

• Social media management: These days, social media is essential for promoting your content, but you may not have the time to dedicate to the task. The feature allows you to distribute content efficiently across major social media platforms right from one place.

Benefits of Using Marketing Automation Software

Now that you understand how marketing automation works, as well as its essential features, let’s dive a little further into some of the benefits of using marketing automation software:

Lower operating costs

By automating the repetitive manual tasks in your marketing process, you will be saving some costs in your overall marketing strategy. Also, this allows you to invest more time into other core sales and marketing activities.

Free up more time to work on your strategy

Another crucial benefit of automating your marketing is that it gives you some time to sit back and observe things. This way, you will see what is working and where you need to make adjustments. You can strategize and come up with better ways of improving your results.

Analyze and track your results easily

Since you will be operating everything from one place, you can as well use the in-built tracking, analyzing, and reporting features to gain richer insights into your processes. With this information, you can build better campaigns that grow your business.

A centralized tool for your marketing team

Instead of using many different software programs for each unit in your marketing team, marketing automation software makes it possible to integrate all your marketing processes into one program. This makes for easier collaboration, reporting, and analyses. You can schedule social media posts, send out marketing emails, manage contact forms, and even create content from a centralized marketing platform.

Better and broader marketing campaigns

With marketing automation, you can deploy more effective and far-reaching marketing campaigns. You can gather more data from more customer touchpoints and provide tailored services and products to your clients and prospects. Since the work is automated, it is much easier to get it done.

With the information you gather, you can add more relevant content in your emails, categorize customers and prospects by their behaviors, interests, and demographic details, and then reach out to them using the platforms that they interact on the most. In general, this makes your sales cycle shorter as lead generation and conversion are faster and more effective.

So, How is Marketing Automation Different From Customer Relationship Management(CRM)?

In a nutshell, Marketing automation and CRM often work hand-in-hand, but each serves a unique purpose. While CRM keeps the information about your customers/prospect and their respective positions in the sales cycle, Marketing automation utilizes technology and data gathered from prospects to drive qualified leads to sales. Marketing automation typically feeds into CRM by using customers’ and prospects’ data to understand customers' needs at each buying stage and nurture leads and opportunities.

Have More Questions?

If you need further clarifications on using marketing automation to improve your marketing, we’re happy to answer them. Luckily, there are several marketing automation providers on the market, many of which are affordable. If in doubt, do not hesitate to reach out to us at The Mission.

At Mission, we use our profound market insights and expert guidance to help you improve your marketing results and business productivity. As leading partners in the B2B lead generation and marketing space, we have just what you need to grow your business quickly and efficiently.

CONTACT US FOR HELP WITH YOUR MARKETING AUTOMATION