If you are late to the party, marketing automation is a force to reckon with and is the fuel that is driving small and medium-sized agencies and businesses to compete with the top players in the industry. Marketing automation helps a small team to put its marketing strategy on steroids, and use Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions to automate both basic and complex marketing tasks to achieve stellar heights.
There are a number of software tools and cloud solutions that help businesses to automate various marketing functions, right from understanding a target market to capturing lead-related data and nurturing long-term customers. While implementing a thorough marketing strategy used to be expensive and time-consuming, it is now accessible even to the smallest of companies thanks to SaaS subscription models. SaaS solutions provide efficient, affordable, and accessible marketing tools on different subscription models.
Both big and small businesses have begun to use these SaaS marketing tools to automate various marketing functions, and have begun to see exemplary results. Regardless of the size and nature of your business, the axiomatic truth is, you need marketing automation. To explain why marketing automation matters so much for your business, we have listed 7 reasons. Let us take a look at each of them briefly.
Most businesses fail to achieve traction because their marketing strategy is not in touch with the actual realities of the market they are targeting. This is only possible when campaigns are tied around behavioral and demographic variables that are often easy to miss. Marketing automation tools provide rich insights into the market in question and help businesses to design campaigns that are effective.
When you subscribe to a MarTech solution, you will be able to compete with large businesses who probably have better resources to conduct market research. Market research can get quite tedious and expensive for those who do not have the resources to carry out large market research campaigns, Data analytics, combined with marketing automation tools can help you to arrive at marketing predictions that are useful and effective, at a fraction of the cost.
MarTech is increasingly being used to conduct market research by a large number of companies and is encouraging a metrics-driven culture.
New GDPR rules and privacy-related restrictions have severely curtailed most businesses’ ability to capture high-quality leads. Yet, the new developments are positive in nature when assessed objectively. Marketing automation tools can now quickly detect and predict which of your web visitors are going to be hour leads, and which of them will convert to customers. Data analytics and marketing automation tools can be integrated and programmed in such a way that you automate the curation of high-quality leads.
There’re a number of tools already available to help you automate both lead generation, and filtering of those leads. However, partnering with an agency which will help you to integrate data analytics with marketing automation tools will help you curate a list of high-quality leads. After all, communicating with high-quality leads, even if they are fewer in numbers, is a better sales strategy than coming up with a digital marketing strategy that involves targeting an exponentially higher number of users.
Once you have the list of leads generated and curated automatically, you will also need to assess how you should communicate with them. This decision was earlier left to managers or staff who used their own methods (both objective and subjective) to list the preferred distribution channels. Unfortunately, this is not an effective strategy and is mired with loopholes.
Inbound marketing can easily be automated, and a digital marketing strategy should be built around actual facts and figures related to which platforms, social media tools, and channels your target users prefer to use. As such, a strategy that involves marketing automation and data analytics will reveal the cold hard facts about where to reach your target audience, and how best to communicate with them. Use marketing automation to choose the best distribution and communication channels, and to base this choice on insight derived from data analytics.
To engage in successful marketing, you need to understand your target audience at an intimate level. This is only possible when the most minute of their behaviours are statistically analyzed. Automating the process of studying user behavior will help you to group them under various buyer personas. Right from what they tweet to how they respond to certain images or news feeds, you can predict exactly how you should develop your marketing strategy to win them over.
As consumers tend to be a diverse group, you can develop different marketing campaigns for different buyer personas. Understanding personas are closely linked to creating winning digital content as well. Automating the process of collecting information and using data analytics to process this information helps you to arrive at useful insights related to different personas. Use this insight to create a successful agile marketing strategy.
There is a misconception that automation implies lack of personal touch. Any Chief Marketing Technologist (CMT) will tell you that automation, in fact, enhances more personal communication. Automating content distribution and basing content creation on various buyer personas help you to personalize all communication at the micro-level. For example, MarTech products can help you to target communication individually, based on various tastes, quirks, behavioral patterns, personal details, etc.
While content distribution and communication can be automated, you can use your free time and man-hours to enhance customer interactions and build valuable relationships. Creating a more personal approach used to be expensive and required hiring more in-house staff. Automating such a personal approach will reduce the need for hiring more employees, and will help you build more meaningful relationships with your customers.
For most small and medium businesses, marketing is the single most expensive business process. Not only does it cost money, it also requires time and effort, all of which are resources that smaller companies simply cannot afford. Thanks to SaaS marketing solutions, even an independent consultant can access enterprise-grade marketing tools via subscription models. These solutions help businesses of all sizes and statures to save money and time by automating all marketing processes. One no longer needs shy away from nurturing leads or engaging in advanced metrics, thanks to MarTech products.
MarTech helps you to look for leads, communicate with them, establish business relationships, create content for them, and even nurture them automatically, without hiring extra staff. Automating all these marketing processes helps you to save time and money, which you can use to build your core business activities. You may as well bid goodbye to mail servers, responding to each query individually, and to hiring social media foot soldiers.
When you save time and money, you will naturally be able to free up resources to grow your business further. Not only will marketing automation help you scale, it is scalable itself. You can begin with the most basic subscription, and add features or services as your business grows. This way, you will not have to pay for services that you don’t use.
Most MarTech services are plug-and-play and are offered on subscription models. You only need to choose the subscription plan that suits your budget and needs and pay only for that. Such an incremental investment in marketing will help you to take your business further and compete with the largest names in your industry, without spending astronomical figures on marketing or advertising. In short, automating most of your marketing tasks helps you to magnify the presence of your brand, and reach to a larger audience, helping you scale quickly.
Adopt marketing automation now
Certainly, automation helps to quicken processes, streamline existing workflow, and ensure that marketing strategy is actually implemented. Without automation, marketing strategy becomes cumbersome and difficult and expensive to sustain. Marketing automation helps you to understand the market you serve on a minute level. Allowing you to shortlist leads that actually matter, you will be able to see higher conversion rates when it comes to your campaigns.
The Digital Success Summit (DSS) – 2018, which is set to take place shortly, will be the scene of various businesses discussing marketing automation and other technology-related aspects, from the perspective of scaling their businesses. Indus Net Technologies will be present at the summit and will be happy to answer queries regarding automating your marketing strategy and choosing the right tools to do so.
If you wish to automate your existing marketing strategy or come up with a drastically new strategy to facilitate growth hacking, our representatives will be available to assist you. If you can’t make it to the summit, you can also contact us directly, either in person or digitally. Marketing automation has helped thousands of small and medium companies across the world to compete with large businesses and scale quickly. Adopt automation today to scale new heights!
