Have you come back from summer and feel like you are scrambling to catch-up? You probably either enjoyed the time off and fell behind, or everyone else came back and triggers are being pulled like an Expendables movie. There is an another kind of scrambling going on with companies, and that is for marketing automation. Haven’t heard of it? Heard of it and don’t know what it is? Well, marketing automation is becoming the buzzword these days for any company looking to crush their competition digitally. The concept isn’t exactly new though. It has been around since the 80’s, but only recently has been picking up pace. Today, it is one of the most powerful tools to:
- Attract prospects
- Turn them into leads
- Nurture them into customers
- Continue to sell to those customers consistently.
After all, what could be better than having all of this happen automatically?
So what is it that makes this automation in marketing so popular with each passing day? Let’s find out.
What Exactly is Marketing Automation?
As mentioned earlier, in some form, it has been on the marketing scene since the 80’s. It was primitive back then and couldn’t do a lot, but the whole point of it was to try and automate marketing processes to help drive business.
Today however, automation platforms for marketing provide the creation, management and reporting of all of your digital assets in one place. It also allows these digital assets to continually communicate with each other to give you real time data on what is working and what isn’t.
For instance: You start reading an article just like this one that is posted on a blog, or social media. You then:
- Hit a call-to-action(just like what you will see at the bottom of this article)
- It takes you to a beautiful landing page
- You fill out a form to download a free fantastic eBook
- You receive your fantastic eBook
- A few days later you get an email that gives you even more educational information that you wanted.
- Pow! You become a contact.
Each and every one of these steps is made possible by marketing automation. You build it once and it keeps generating more and more leads and it all happens in real time.
Marketing Automation Available For Everyone!
Gone are the days when use of marketing automation systems was limited to only the most successful and financially secure businesses. Those systems required heavy investments and were developed in-house.
Today, thanks to the increasing number of marketing automation platforms, it has been put within reach of small and large businesses alike. These marketing automation solutions can be used by both B2B and B2C companies. Great platforms either have their own CRM or seamlessly integrate into pre-existing CRM systems to maximize marketing and sales potential! Amazing, isn’t it?
Benefits of Marketing Automation
There are a number of reasons why marketing automation is growing so popular among the marketing and sales teams of companies. Here are a few of the obvious reasons:
It saves time – You can schedule multiple campaigns well ahead of time and have them released as per your preset settings. This saves time by building once and letting it run. Not to mention that all you have to do for a new campaign is duplicate an old one and change the content.
It’s more efficient – Why get tangled up in traditional, manual processes when you can automate day to day tasks? You can reduce the time and effort required to get your marketing efforts running at optimal levels.
It can be integrated into CRM – This can help you keep all your leads on the radar, without having to worry about them disappearing due to a few unsuccessful contact attempts. It also finally gets sales and marketing teams together as all of the data is shared and in the system.
It provides valuable insight – Using marketing automation allows you to collect valuable insight to optimize your marketing campaigns and communication, and make necessary adjustments along the way.
It offers multi-channel management – It’s not easy to manage relationships with customers across numerous channels manually. Thanks to marketing automation, you can nurture leads and existing customers as if they were on a 1:1 relationship seamlessly and automatically.
It saves money, lots of money – Most of these systems are so easy to use, that once the marketing department understands it, generating new campaigns become very easy. Also, due to the efficiency of the systems, you can cut a bad campaign off quickly, make adjustments, and get it rolling profitably faster than ever. In this situation, time really is money.
The leaders that are in the know, understand that marketing automation will supercharge their organizations. If you don’t have a marketing automation platform, get one. If you’d like to understand it better, feel free to download our comprehensive Marketing automation guide. The faster you read it, the faster you’ll stop scrambling and start automating.