Over the past few years, technology has become more and more advanced, and we continue to find more ways to leverage that tech to make our lives easier. These days, smart homes that anticipate your whims and automate tedious processes are becoming more and more common, but you can also leverage technology to automate your business! Routine marketing tasks can be tedious, but using technology in order to handle day to day tasks is both efficient and convenient. Let’s talk about how marketing automation can keep you moving forward and take some of the work off of your plate.
Over the past few years, technology has become more and more advanced, and we continue to find more ways to leverage that tech to make our lives easier. These days, smart homes that anticipate your whims and automate tedious processes are becoming more and more common, but you can also leverage technology to automate your business! Routine marketing tasks can be tedious, but using technology in order to handle day to day tasks is both efficient and convenient. Let’s talk about how marketing automation can keep you moving forward and take some of the work off of your plate.
What Is Marketing Automation?
The name might seem self-explanatory, but what do we actually mean when we’re talking about automating your marketing efforts?
Unfortunately, using marketing automation tools doesn’t mean you don’t have to put in work to grow your business. We all wish it was as easy as buying a piece of software and pressing a button to increase profits, but there is a lot of nuance to adding in this technology. In fact, most companies will benefit from partnering with a marketing automation agency that can do all the heavy lifting for them.
So if this automation process is so difficult to get right, why should you even bother? Well, making processes automatic essentially takes the base that you’ve already built and allows you to scale it up to a larger level.
Let’s make one thing clear: automating your marketing won’t generate leads or organically boost your SEO. These marketing automation tools are a valuable resource, but they can only work with the existing base you’re working with.
As a company grows in size, their marketing efforts need to grow with it, and a quality marketing automation agency can take a company’s existing brand promotion infrastructure and take it to a whole new level,
Types Of Marketing Automation
So let’s get into the ways that automation can actually help your business. We covered what marketing automation actually is, but how do you take that knowledge and put it to work for your own individual company?
Let’s break automation into two different categories, as there are two main ways that a marketing automation agency would put this technology to work for your business.
Traditional Marketing Automation
There’s one key avenue that traditional marketing automation revolves around, and that is company outreach through emails.
While many businesses may be content creating a great email and sending it off to a user list, there are actually a whole suite of tools you can use to your advantage to better serve your customer base and drastically increase conversions.
Traditional automation refers to triggering email actions based on customer action taken or time delays. For example, if you’ve sent an email out to a customer and they open the email without clicking a link, your automation software can track that and send out a follow up email at a later date to seal the deal.
Once you’ve built up an adequate user base of customer emails, marketing in this manner becomes one of the most cost-effective methods of advertising by far. While there is time and money spent crafting the perfect email, you’re essentially able to market to a huge number of people without the ongoing costs of a typical social media campaign or other forms of advertisement.
Because email marketing is so powerful, any tool that can enhance the utility of this avenue is also incredibly worthwhile. Employing automation tactics gives valuable data and can take care of some of the time-consuming factors like email follow-ups that are difficult to keep track of with a sufficiently large user base.
Inbound Marketing Automation
While traditional automation is certainly a powerful tool in and of itself, there are limits to what it can accomplish. After all, relying solely on outreach from the company doesn’t address the marketing needs of when these customers come to you.
Inbound automation refers to dynamic adjustment of content in order to vastly improve the odds of a sale. This marketing is focused around the utilization of all the information we know about a customer in order to maximize the chances that we’ll see the desired result.
So, what does that mean in practice? If your company sells products online, or even if they are trying to do something with more indirect effects on profit like building out an email list, visitors to the website will be going through a process as they navigate through the pages. This journey starts with the initial brand awareness and carries on to customer retention after a sale, and is referred to as a marketing funnel. Inbound automation is all about making the information the customer needs to make a decision easily accessible – exactly when they need it most.
The areas where this automation can be applied are incredibly varied, and range from offering discounts when a customer navigates off of a page, to offering an easy avenue for support if they seem to be struggling to make a decision.
For a company of any appreciable size, it’s impossible to keep track of every single customer that comes across the site, and automation picks up the slack and fills in the gaps.
The Keys To Successful Marketing Automation
We’ll leave you with couple of pointers to keep in mind as you start to consider how automation could take your marketing to the next level.
First, consider the fact that marketing automation can’t give you what you don’t already have. If you don’t have a way to generate traffic to your site or a significant email user base to pull from, all the fancy software tricks in the world won’t make much of a difference. Simply put, these tools will enhance a solid marketing effort but they won’t do the work for you.
And last but not least, it’s important to center marketing around the person as a whole. With the various avenues available for marketing, it’s easy to fragment a customer across a number of different platforms and campaigns. While there’s definitely a certain science behind marketing and automating the process, it’s always important to recognize that each customer is a whole person with their own individual wants and needs. When you focus marketing outreach with this idea in mind and put yourself in your customers’ shoes, it’s much easier to identify opportunities for automation and produce more effective advertising overall.
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