Let’s face it, the business of emailing prospects regularly, posting on the various social media platforms, and ensuring blog posts and website content are up as and when due is not exactly a tea party.
Sometimes, the activities of the day can be overwhelming such that it becomes difficult to combine them with the demands of marketing products and services. This is where marketing automation comes in.
Marketing automation refers to employing a software to handle the marketing process. It ensures that all activities involved in marketing goes seamlessly through automation. It is designed to efficiently execute those routine marketing actions that can be time-consuming and takes care of marketing tasks that would have been carried out manually. This provides a leeway for the marketing team to deploy time and energy to other important activities.
The goal of increasing revenue through marketing can be faster achieved when marketing automation is embraced. Regardless of the kind of brand you are trying to sell or the size of your organisation, getting a software that automates marketing for you is one of the best decisions you can take to achieve faster and better results.
However, it is one thing to acquire a marketing automation system, it is another to deploy it to the best possible. So for instance, if your business involves the sales of furniture, you can guide your leads through the purchasing process by sending unique messages to specifically identified targets.
Your process may look like this:
- Sending an email invite to pre selected contacts to download your furniture catalog
- Following up with a thank you message to those who downloaded the catalog
- Sending another email communicating a special purchase discount to those who take the time to visit your showroom on a particular date
- Your sales team following up on leads who indicate interest in the showroom visit, because they are the ones who are most likely to buy.
The process above will ensure that you aren’t just sending generic emails which are likely to be ignored, but narrowing down to targeted contacts. Your probability of nailing a sale also increases significantly because you are communicating directly to those who are actually interested in what you have to offer.
Your marketing automation must align with your inbound marketing strategy to ensure you are providing the right content for prospective clients.
While marketing automation is designed to make the marketing process easier and ease the burden of manually taking on the end-to-end marketing tasks, it should not take the place of personal consumer engagement.
With marketing automation, you are able to attract, retain and convert your target audience. It also provides insight into what interests your target audience online, and with this information, you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing automation alongside consumer behavior.
