Marketing is a vital part of any business. You can have the most advanced, cost-effective and innovative product out on the market. However, if your target audience is unaware of you, then your business will never be able to utilize its full potential.
In its core, marketing’s primary goal is to reach the company’s potential customers and spread the word about the company. Today, the competition in practically any sector has reached a cutthroat level, with “survival of the fittest” as the main rule. Add to that the fact that data management becomes more and more difficult with each year, as a result of market globalization, which has secondary effects on even small businesses nowadays.
So, naturally, marketers strive to compete for the place under the sun and keep their brands right at the top of consumers’ minds. In order to outperform the rivals, your marketing strategy needs to be flawless like clockwork, and the most efficient way to achieve it is to utilize automated technology.
What Exactly Is Marketing Automation?
Simply put, marketing automation is a technological solution that serves the goal of streamlining, simplifying and increasing the effectiveness of related activities such as lead qualification processing, campaign performance analysis and so on.
Automation is all about simplifying business processes and letting you focus and allocate resources on the important matters. Marketing automation, in particular, simplifies some routine tasks while at the same time improving most of the core functions. This solution has allowed numerous businesses worldwide to better connect and establish long-lasting relationships with their audience while doing so in the most time and cost-efficient manner possible.
6 Benefits of Marketing Automation Software
Here we’ve highlighted six crucial advantages that marketing automation for any type of business. It doesn’t matter if you are in B2B or B2C sector, or whether your organization relies on word of mouth or web ads as primary means of bringing in a new customer, you can still set up business automation that will be advantageous to your company.
Generate high-quality leads
Creating advertising campaigns and attracting audience to your business is only half the battle. After all, what’s good it does without reaching an audience that is actually interested in purchasing your products or services? Right off the bat, one of the most influential advantages of automation systems is its capacity to attain a potential customer at the right point in the sales funnel. Meaning that you can better target your audience, based on the actionable data:
- Have a customer expressed interest in a newsletter?
- Does he or she browse through your corporate blog on a weekly basis?
- Have they engaged with your brand on social media platforms?
All this information and more can be accounted for and used by automating software tools. Your lead list is no longer just an archive of email addresses, but rather a prioritized account of potential prospects.
Simplify leads nurturing
If we are talking about benefits of marketing automation software, then we have to mention the simplification of the entire process. Lead generation and nurturing should go hand in hand in your marketing strategy. Even with a well-structured list of high-quality leads, you still need effective means to convert them into sales. And that’s where automation software comes in handy. It can greatly assist you in nurturing both new and old leads.
The process itself is very time-consuming and tedious, but having technology like Salesforce email integration can significantly simplify it. You no longer need to personalize each email and engage immediately, when a lead takes action. Advanced features of marketing automation software will do most work for you when triggered.
In addition to all that, turning to automated marketing can significantly reduce lead conversion time. Some companies see an improvement of up to 75% in this particular KPI.
Avoid human errors
This is the benefit of all automating software tools – the moment you take some task from human hands, you significantly reduce a possibility of human error. That doesn’t mean that a mistake cannot occur at all, even advanced Salesforce marketing solutions would still require someone to control and supervise their performance. But software doesn’t tend to misspell names or put wrong address or send an email to a wrong person. Such little errors can easily lead to a disaster, resulting in all your efforts being in vain.
Reduce costs & accelerate growth
Putting aside manual work has other advantages beyond reducing the probability of human error. In the past every step had to be done by the human worker, therefore marketing departments were larger. But with more and more software features being able to perform crucial tasks, there is no need to overstaff the department. This means that your company can save resources on the marketing budget and allocate them in other areas.
Track & analyze performance
Now, all this talk of marketing automation tools is great. But how can it actually be measured? Well, this is yet another benefit of business automation. By getting advanced solutions, such as Salesforce automation, you will gain insights into campaigns performance via measurable data. There are countless Salesforce automation benefits that you can employ in your buisness, from streamlining communication to utilizing predictive analytics and AI platforms.
Analytics tools for marketing automation software allow you not only to monitor the general effectiveness of your individual campaigns but also to analyze them against specific parameters. With such system, your business can examine how well marketing campaigns showed themselves in specific regions, or what the effect on customer retention was. Basically, any measurable criterion can be viewed in the form of interactive reports and dashboards.
Fuse marketing with sales
Benefits of marketing automation software go beyond its native department. Sales and marketing are two areas of business that tend to overlap a lot. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that marketing automation software can carry some benefits to the sales department. With real-time data syncing between the two teams, your salespeople can utilize many benefits of automation software. Like advantages of better lead generation and nurturing, which in turn allows your sales team to contact a potential prospect at the right time.
So despite the name, marketing automation does not only enhance your marketing department performance, but also your sales team can greatly benefit from it.
Marketing Automation for Small Business by OMI
These are only a few universal benefits that can be achieved with marketing automation software. With solutions like Salesforce automation and 366 Degrees, your company can gain advance data management capabilities, structured and prioritized customer profiles. Deploying efficient automation software that will be integrated with your customer relationship management platform is a step that can put you above the competition and facilitate business growth. At OMI we specialize in providing custom marketing automation solutions for a variety of CRMs that are both feature-rich and cost-effective.