Nowadays, marketing automation has become a buzz phrase that sales and marketing people use to refer to a software that does their marketing for them. From the outside looking in, it seems like an approach that takes away the need for personal interactions or carefully crafted messages for different types of leads or clients. As a result, businesses are often confused and fearful as to how effective marketing automation is especially when marketers make it seem like a one-size-fits-all approach. Well, lucky for you, ETech 7's here to set the record straight!
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We’re glad you asked. Imagine your business in a phase wherein it is rapidly expanding. You spend a majority of your time planning your next moves, predicting risks, conceptualizing different marketing approaches, and onboarding more and more talent. Sounds crazy stressful, right? IT IS.
Now imagine your business in a phase wherein it is rapidly expanding. You sip your coffee and scan the front page of your favorite news site without feeling any hint of pressure or stress – sounds impossible? Not at all. That’s what marketing automation can do. Contrary to mainstream belief, core business functions do not fall by the wayside when you automate your marketing efforts – it streamlines it.
According to HubSpot, marketing automation is primarily designed to help businesses prioritize and execute marketing tasks in a more organized and efficient way. The main purpose of marketing automation is to eliminate redundant tasks while providing an effective and efficient tool for marketers to focus on more pressing matters.
However, businesses should realize that it is of utmost importance to determine the purpose of their marketing automation first as it is easy to say that you use it but are you using it correctly?
"As a business starts to grow, maintaining relationships with each and every one of your clients seem more and more of an arduous task." -Emil Isanov
Your marketing campaigns will also change from being geared towards 500 to 1000 people to a more robust 50,000 to 100,000 people and your current five-man marketing team will be pulling out their hairs in frustration and stress in answering all client inquiries, updating the database, and nurturing new leads...
Hubspot put together a great lead nurturing class that features marketing automation front and center. Check out the video below:
Despite what many people assume, marketing automation is NOT a one-size-fits-all approach. Marketing automation is a multi-faceted approach that connects different marketing channels including social media, email marketing, and content marketing. It is NOT impersonal and it is NOT spam. Simply put, marketing automation makes it easier for a company to tailor their marketing approaches to a diverse clientele. Automating your marketing efforts allows you to spend more time in crafting campaigns that work, personalizing messages, and gathering data from campaigns would allow better client segmentation and content customization.
It is beneficial to determine the why first before the how. If you know why you need automated marketing efforts then it is easier to determine how you are going to do it. In this day and age, it is important to customize your marketing efforts depending on what type of customer you’re dealing with as it makes the customer feel wanted. What better way to customize your content and raise your revenue than by using a software that allows you to do all these things AND more?