It goes without saying that Marketing, like Finance, is also the lifeblood of your business. And as the business keeps growing, you will find it exceedingly difficult to maintain one-on-one relationships with all your customers and buyers. Even tools like CRMs and Excel spreadsheets may not be enough to manage everything. Of course, you may argue that your marketing specialists have been hired to take care of that. But with the unstoppable growth of your business, even that may lead to unnecessary delays in responding to inbound leads, nurturing leads over a long time and timely follow ups with prospects. Moreover, you don’t want your staff to waste time on redundant tasks such as transmitting e-mails to prospective and new customers, scheduling social media post and manually publishing content.
That’s exactly when marketing automation makes a grand entry to solve your marketing woes.Learning the concept, therefore, in today’s context, not only becomes mandatorybut yields some very positive results.
If used correctly and appropriately, Marketing Automation gives small and medium businesses the liberty to simultaneously run complex marketing campaigns even though their staff resources may be limited. And that too, with success and through efficient time management. Even larger companies stand to benefit from it to follow up with customers with a high degree of personalisation. The inevitable question that now arises is: Why implement Marketing Automation?
- Enables Multitasking: Marketing automation helps you extract the most and best out of your available and limited staff resources. A trained staff member gets the opportunity to create and execute any complex campaign while also connecting with multiple customers simultaneously which may not be possible through manual processes.
- It’s A Huge Time Saver: By using the right Marketing Automation tools, you not only create a content calendar of posts ahead of time schedules but also plan and multiple campaigns. For instance, you can create a full month’s social media posts in a single day and schedule their automatic posting throughout the period. How is that for a change when you are struggling to post content to engage your followers?
- Hook Up With One And All: Marketing Automation enables you to reach every unique customer personally. It eliminates manual segmentation of customers, which is based on their individual preferences. Moreover, certain marketing automation tools allow the creation of restrictions that separate customers automatically. For instance, an automobile dealership may create a separate customer list for those purchasing a particular brand or model of cars. The solution subsequently sends messages and appropriate promotional material to those specific customers relating to that particular car brand or model. The customer receives messages that is relevant to his specific needs.
- Maintains Consistency: Apply the right Marketing Automation tools and rest assured that consistency will be maintained. For instance, when you manually post on Facebook and/or Twitter, you may diligently do it most of the time. However, on certain days, you may either forget or some other task may get a higher priority. Should you automate your tweets or posts to predetermined schedules, your account remains fresh and updated. Thus, visitors get the feeling that your business is an engaged and active one. On the contrary, an inconsistent or stale account on social media indicates that the business does not suitably manage its communications to customers or doesn’t think it to be important enough. Certainly not a good thing to happen in today’s context.
- Detailed Reporting: With Marketing Automation, you get to keep a track on all email campaigns, social media posts and messages sent out. It provides you with all detailed statistics and graphs which may be constantly analyzed and reviewed for optimization of future campaigns. You will know which campaigns worked and which didn’t. Even better you will specifically know all the interactions a prospect has with all your online properties viz. website, blog, email, social media post, ads etc.
- Cost Saver: You save a lot of money when you resort to Marketing Automation, specially when your business is small and functions on a limited budget. You reduce staff overheads, effort and time when collecting data or creating and distributing messages.
- Brand Presence Created: A trained marketing automation professional will ensure your brand’s presence on a plethora of channels simultaneously. These include website, social media, email, blog and also phone calls. As you maintain a steady and consistent brand image, your customers also identify with your business more efficiently and hook up with you easily. Your visibility is increased and new customers are drawn in.
- User Friendly: Learning Marketing Automation is not difficult. Even for those who are technically disinclined. Most marketing solutions available nowadays are operable without any design or coding experience in order to create swashbuckling campaigns. You get ready-made templates, easily usable editors and information guides that help you smoothly sail through the creation and distributing processes.
- Easier Nurturing: Marketing Automation tools eliminate the need for connecting with individual leads manually, thus reducing the time factor substantially. You get to personally follow up up with a potential and prospective lead as soon as the interaction begins. For instance, a visitor to your business’ website signs up for the newsletter. On receiving his message, the automated system sends out a confirmation and welcome message and, may be, also a special discount coupon for your products. You can also get him to look at your specific web pages based on his preferences.
- Effective Customer Profiles: Your customer profiles get to be more detailed and useful when you implement the right marketing automation solution. It perpetually gathers information that is based on email opens, customer purchases & responses and selective preferences. This data in its totality may be effectively stored for use in future, to reach every individual customer more efficiently and effectively.
Do you have a marketing automation system or planning to implement one? Check out Esanosys’s marketing automation implementation services today.
