If you’re someone who works in the marketing realm, you probably hear about marketing automation all the time. Although the term may seem intimidating, learning about it and integrating it into your marketing strategy will make your life much easier! Follow GROWL’s guide to marketing automation 101 to learn more about what marketing automation is, what it can be used for, and why you should use it.
What Is Marketing Automation?
To put it simply, marketing automation means creating processes that automate routine marketing activities. Marketing automation makes it so marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing and posting on social media. This gives marketers the opportunity to focus more energy on tasks that require a human touch. Not only does marketing automation make processes more efficient, but it also provides a more personalized experience for customers.
What Can It Be Used For?
Generating leads and keeping customers engaged throughout their journey should remain a top-of-mind priority for marketers. As business professionals, we all know that every day we are faced with massive amounts of data, but we struggle to effectively put it to use in a timely manner. Marketing automation allows marketers to increase revenue, maximize efficiency, and create a personalized experience for your customers. Let’s explore a few different marketing channels and how they can be automated, shall we?
1 EMAIL
Email is a good place to start with marketing automation. When you get a new lead, a great way to make conversions could be setting up an automation that sends them a welcome email, thanking them for their interest and offering them a discount code. If they use the code to make a purchase, you know you’ve successfully converted them. However, if they open the email but don’t click on the offer or view your site, maybe they need more information or a bigger discount. Using marketing automation, you can send specific follow-up emails to the recipients based on what they did or didn’t do with your email. Doing this is a great way to increase the amount of engagement you get from your leads or contact list!
2 SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media has blown up over the years, making it impossible for marketers to manually post on various platforms consistently. When it comes to social media, scheduling posts is the best use of marketing automation. Instead of taking time out of every day to write copy for a social media post, you can spend a few hours creating a month’s worth of posts! Then, you can schedule them for specific days, times, and channels of your liking. After scheduling the posts, it’s important to monitor your social accounts for any engagement that might require a personalized response.
It’s very useful to implement good marketing automation software that analyzes your audience and tracks metrics like impressions and engagements rather than trying to do this manually. Many automation tools can also track reviews, keywords, and mentions to learn how your audience is talking about your brand. Discovering these conversations and being able to engage with them will assist you in connecting with your audience!
3 STREAMLINED PROCESSES
Using marketing automation can allow your whole company to come together with streamlined processes that keep your customers at the center. As a team, build processes that will reduce customer effort at every stage of the journey and work together to provide an excellent customer experience from every touchpoint beyond the customer purchase. Effective marketing automation gets rid of the need for complicated hand-off procedures because everything will automatically save to your central data storage. Marketing automation is not only efficient, but it helps to build long-term relationships between the customer and the business.
Why You Should Start Using Marketing Automation
Marketing automation can help you automate a variety of different marketing activities, which we learned earlier. It can help you save time, generate more leads, and nurture your leads more effectively. Marketing automation is a very powerful tool, so in order to make it work, it’s important to understand all its components. GROWL is a certified agency partner of HubSpot, which has compiled some of their top resources that will help you understand those components for your company to make marketing automation work.
If you’re tired of manually sending out emails, social media posts, or text messages, it’s time to start using marketing automation. Improve your work life and your customer’s overall experience with marketing automation.
Interested in learning more about marketing automation 101? Contact the GROWL team today!