What is Marketing Automation?

Managing a huge company is tough. The different process, that must be done manually take up a lot of time, precious time that could have been utilised in a variety of different activities to drive the business forward. The most crucial activity out of all the varied activities a company partakes in is Marketing. A lot of the repetitive tasks performed by the marketing department such as sending out emails, social media posts and other website actions need to be automated in order to save time. This is where Marketing Automation comes in. It refers to a software that exists solely with the view to help your company automate repetitive tasks better.

Why your company needs Marketing Automation?

The biggest reason why your company needs Marketing Automation is because it saves a lot of time that is usually wasted on completing repetitive activities. Apart from saving time, Marketing Automation provides the following benefits to your company:

  • Marketing Automation lets you incorporate all your marketing efforts into one single process that will help your brand have a unified tone.
  • The biggest benefit of Marketing Automation is that it provides tailor made experiences to your user, based on the relevant information. This is more likely to convert your leads into potential customers.
  • Gathering proper information about customers, that are not necessarily sales driven can be a tedious task. Marketing Automation makes it easy to gather insight and specific information to improve future communications and campaigns.
  • Marketing Automation undoubtedly saves time by streamlining traditionally manual processes thus reducing the cost incurred in performing certain activities.

Marketing Automation is not rocket science, but the process takes effort and lots of it. If you are planning to prepare your company for Marketing Automation, here are some things you must remember:

  • Get the company’s Goals and Objectives straightened out:
    Every company has a set of Goals and Objectives it wants to fulfill. The stakeholders and the people working for your company should understand the business goals your company is trying to achieve. Without having a proper measurement and understanding of the Goals, Marketing Automation will fail to work.
  • Determine your company’s system record:
    A system of record is the most important platform when it comes to reporting. It is important for your company to have a smooth integration between your systems to ensure they are running properly to ensure that the flow of data is smooth, quick and reliable.
  • Get the main players on board:
    According to the size of your company, having the stakeholders of the company present in the room for discussion when making a Marketing Automation decision will ensure that the procedure covers all the sectors of the company effectively and can strategically solve all the problems of the company.
  • Make sure you are not exhausting all your content:
    Marketing Automation runs on content. Very often it has been seen that Marketing Automation in its early stages work very well but soon lose track when the company starts running out of white paper and blog posts to provide for. Content should never be ‘one size fits all,’ it should be well crafted to cater to the relevant needs of your targeted audience.
  • Make a test run on a small database of your company first:
    New concepts are exciting. Companies cannot wait to roll out their strategies and new technology as soon as it’s ready. However, this could be a fatal error as you are unleashing your new marketing campaign upon your customers without running tests on smaller samples. Not doing a test run has a higher chance of making your Marketing Automation efforts to slide down the drain.

Marketing Automation is known to be the hub of the 21st-century marketing team, allowing you to capture and reach better leads, scale your campaigns and better demonstrate ROI.