Marketing Automation Can Boost Productivity And Improve Performance
With huge technological advancements happening all around us, now's the perfect time for businesses to take advantage. Marketing automation has the potential to help businesses gain a competitive edge by freeing up time so your team can work on other projects. It could even be argued that marketing automation is no longer a luxury but a necessity for many UK businesses.
This transformative technology automates repetitive tasks, allowing businesses to streamline their operations, nurture leads and ultimately, boost their bottom line. Below, we'll delve into the many ways marketing automation can help businesses grow more efficiently.
Efficiency and Time-Saving
Marketing automation takes over mundane and repetitive tasks such as sending reports, posting on social media, and managing ongoing projects. By automating these tasks, you can use your time to work on other tasks which require more care and attention, such as lead generation.
Instead of manually collating data for internal reporting, you could use Google's Looker Studio to automatically generate and send an overview at set intervals. Similarly, Hootsuite is great if you want to batch-schedule much of your social media content, so you won't forget to post when something comes up at the last minute.
This is great not only for business owners wanting to streamline their operations but also for employees wanting greater control over their tasks, freeing up time so they can stay on top of more pressing matters, without letting things slip.
Lead Nurturing and Conversion
Lead management is key if you want to maintain a healthy pipeline of new business, which is essential no matter the size of your business. However, it's easy for older leads to be forgotten about when something new enters the frame, especially if there are multiple stakeholders involved in the lead generation and nurturing process.
You can use workflow apps, such as Monday or Asana, to help take some of the burden, ensuring that nothing gets lost along the way. If you've been assigned something that hasn't been addressed for some time, you should receive reminders that it's overdue, making it easier for you to manage all of your leads, not just the newer, shinier ones.
If you're a customer-facing business, you can set up automated flow emails to make your customer journey process easier and less demanding. You can set triggers for specific emails to be set, such as a user subscribing to a newsletter or when they've not purchased for a specific amount of time. Typically, these leads would be lost, but with automation, your team can retain their interest without putting in too much ongoing work.
Data-Driven Insights
Automation can also be used to improve your business intelligence and provide you with a better understanding of how your business is performing beyond just the core financial metrics. You can use these marketing tools to provide you with a daily update of which businesses have visited your website, which you can then funnel into a remarketing campaign, as well as the latest analytics data.
By tracking which businesses have been exploring your website, you'll be able to better understand what type of traffic your marketing activity has been attracting, as well as what they've been doing on the website, allowing you to gauge their intention to convert. You can then pass these leads over to your sales team so they can get things moving.
What's more, you can set up Google Analytics reporting so you receive the latest insights into how your website is performing. While this will require some initial work to set the reports up and running, you should be able to access these automated snippets directly from your inbox. This gives you easy access to the information you need to make decisions confidently instead of relying on old or incomplete data.
Cost Reduction
You can even use marketing automation tools to improve your marketing performance and the efficiency of your activity. Many major marketing platforms now use AI and machine learning to handle much of the heavy lifting to help you get the most value for your budget, although this will likely still require some user input.
For example, you can set your digital ads to 'dynamic' if you want Google to decide when and where they should be shown. Instead of doing all this work manually, you can pass this responsibility to the Google algorithm and the huge amounts of data it has access to. Using past data as a benchmark can help you save budget in specific areas.
From an operations perspective, businesses can cut costs by automating repetitive tasks that would have otherwise required someone to complete them manually. For small businesses, this is essential and means that business owners can have much greater control over their operations, allowing their teams to operate with much more flexibility and freedom to work on more pressing matters.
Help is Available
Marketing automation has the potential to change how marketers and business owners operate moving forward. It will improve workplace efficiency by allowing staff to focus on more pressing tasks, leaving the mundane, repetitive tasks to the automated tools.
For business owners, this can help keep staff costs down, preventing their team from being bogged down by time-consuming tasks that can be easily automated. And while certain things can't be automated, they can be taken off your plate by working with experts.
If you'd like to discuss how we can help ease the burden on your team and give you greater flexibility when it comes to marketing, get in touch. We're offering our time to any business wanting to take their marketing to the next level without putting extra stress on your current team.
To book a free one-hour consultation, submit an online form or give us a call on 01492 463209.