Benefits of Marketing Automation

No matter what niche your brand fits into, chances are you have a lot of competition out there—so you need a robust marketing system with solid oversight. But you may have discovered marketing processes are sometimes at odds with effective time management and, at worst, result in your talented marketers doing a lot of busywork.

Luckily, the need to take ownership of your marketing efforts doesn’t mean you have to do everything by hand. This is where marketing automation systems come into play. Effective use of marketing automation tools can empower your team to work smarter, not harder.

What is Marketing Automation?

“Marketing automation” refers to software platforms that allow repetitive tasks to be handled automatically after human set up. These tasks may include social media management tools, email outreach, sales workflows, monitoring analytics, and other digital marketing efforts. Although the set up of these tasks can take time, the immense benefits help your company streamline processes.

Whether your company is B2B or B2C, marketing automation is becoming increasingly popular. The question is, of course, why use marketing automation in the first place?

Below, you’ll find just seven of the many benefits marketing automation can provide your business.

1. Generate and Nurture More Leads

Some benefits of marketing automation are for the company internally, but many also enhance the customer experience. With automated marketing, your system can learn customers’ expectations and customize the process for each of them.

Marketing automation features the unique ability to automatically nurture, or develop relationships with leads throughout all stages of the sales funnel and serve prospects valuable content based on their behaviors. Because customers are often inundated with messages from your competitors, it’s essential to remain top-of-mind. A recent survey of marketing leaders found 61% use marketing automation to increase lead generation, and 57% do so to nurture leads.

While it may seem impersonal to generate and nurture leads via an automated system, your sales and marketing teams have priorities beyond getting individual customers through the funnel. Human interaction comes later, especially if you’re using marketing automation for B2C work to reach out to other brands directly. That’s why you use automated marketing: To create an intelligent system managed entirely online that helps engage your leads and move them through the sales funnel.

You could use marketing automation to generate leads by creating automated emails to prospective customers, scheduling social media posts for the times your target audience is most likely to see them, and monitor the success of campaigns via automatic data tracking.

Once you’ve hooked some solid leads, marketing automation features the unique ability to nurture those leads automatically. With effective use of a marketing automation platform, you can set up rules, drip email campaigns, and visual workflows that let you monitor things like conversions, alert you when they respond to your emails or social media posts, and more.

2. Customize Marketing

The next step in nurturing your leads—or keeping hold of those who have already converted—is further customizing your marketing to your customers.

Once you’ve gathered new leads, you can segment them into marketing categories based on factors like demographics. The marketing automation process personalizes the connections with these leads and increases engagement.

But, it’s not just demographic information you can use: Behavioral and contact information can also be important. When you have consumers’ details, you can further personalize your messaging. This type of automation could allow you to send out mass emails or texts and include individual customers’ names in your greetings. You could also automate responses to texts, social media messages, and emails from customers, letting them know you’ve received their question or concern and when to expect a response.

This is important because 72% of people surveyed said they wouldn’t engage with messages unless those communications were personalized.

3. Maximize Marketing Spend

Marketing automation isn’t just about driving leads and making sales. A robust digital marketing automation platform will also feature in-depth reporting on a variety of metrics. Being able to back up your marketing efforts with hard-and-fast performance data can help justify your marketing spend and enhance efforts that continue to perform well.

According to The State of Marketing Automation for Agencies, 45% of marketing agencies rely on an automation platform to demonstrate marketing automation ROI. With CRM pipeline visibility, campaign traffic analytics, and email reporting, marketing automation can help you understand how your efforts are performing, where you should continue to invest, and when it’s time to pull the plug on a campaign.

4. Easier to Scale

When you no longer have to manually communicate with consumers as regularly, you’ll find yourself with the ability to reach more of them overall. Marking automation makes it easier to scale because you can contact more people at once, as you don’t have to sift through consumer information to make sure you’re hitting the right people.

For instance, if you want to only contact consumers living in one city, you no longer have to dig through a spreadsheet on your own—your marketing automation system could pull them and send the relevant email for you.

With your sales and marketing teams working more efficiently, your marketing plan can reach more customers who match the profiles of customers on your lead sheet, which should only grow over time.

5. Allow Sales and Marketing to Collaborate

Today’s top business goal is for every aspect to be integrated and collaborative, but things don’t always go smoothly. Sales and marketing should go hand and hand, but the teams are often not on the same page, either due to having slightly different goals or because they’re siloed from one another.

One benefit of automated marketing is it blends the two teams’ processes, using a common goal and system. Having all the information about a project centralized allows all people involved with the process to see previous conversations, check data, and ensure they’re all working toward the same end goal. If executed properly, this collaboration allows your team to close more deals.

6. Better Data to Analyze

Marketing automation allows you to track multiple types of attribution and analytics data from one central location, whereas you may have had to check different data aggregators separately before. This keeps your marketing team from focusing on repetitive administrative functions rather than the profit-generating aspects of their job. The critical data are now available at their fingertips.

7. Be More Efficient

A truly powerful marketing automation platform should efficiently manage your leads from first touch to a closed sale. With the ability to have all of your applications and campaigns in a single location, you can increase collaboration across your team, lower the chances of miscommunication, and reduce the risk of individual leads falling through the cracks.

Additionally, marketing automation integration into social media, Google Ads, blogging, SEO, and email enhances your ability to work smarter rather than harder. You don’t need someone sitting in front of a computer all day, waiting to respond to messages or create new posts. You can now schedule your blog and social media posts and send automatic responses to consumers.

Operational inefficiency is expensive, costing businesses anywhere from 20-30% of their annual revenue. Marketing automation enables you to reduce inefficiencies and minimize time spent on repeatable tasks, freeing you and your marketing team up to do more hands-on and real-time work.

Small businesses can benefit from marketing automation as well. They may have as few as one or two people running the show and automating as much as possible allows SMBs to focus on what needs to happen in person while letting a computer do the work behind the scenes.

Give Marketing Automation a Try with SharpSpring

Those were just a few of the reasons marketing automation may be worth trying out. Plus, here’s one more crucial statistic to cement the idea of giving automation a try: Almost 90% of 130+ agencies stated their marketing automation strategies proved successful.

The benefits of marketing automation give marketing teams the unique ability to strengthen their efforts through digital transformation. By leveraging automation for repetitive tasks, reporting, and top-of-funnel engagement, your time and energy can be used to build your strategies further, create content and engage with high-priority customer needs.

If trying this new method seems overwhelming, no one on your team feels comfortable setting it up, or you don’t want to do it in-house, there are many marketing automation agencies ready to help you—and SharpSpring can help you get started.

Ready to see marketing automation in action?

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