Marketing automation is something that gets discussed a lot in the modern era of marketing. It often gets touted as a magical solution, but while it is not quite that, it is an incredibly useful and valuable tool that can be used to take your marketing team to new levels. These days content is king and having a platform to deliver the right content at the right time is becoming a necessity. In this part of our series on content management, we are going to look at 5 reasons why you should invest in marketing automation.
- Efficiency
This is the cornerstone of marketing automation. It is more than a piece of software, it really becomes a member of your marketing team because of its ability to manage and execute so many fundamental tasks. This makes it incredibly powerful for small to mid-sized businesses who may not have the powerhouse marketing departments of a Fortune-500, because it allows them to focus on strategy and content creation, rather than continually managing mundane tasks.
- Dynamic Content and Personalized Messaging
In the age of content and short attention spans, it is imperative to deliver exactly the right thing at the right time to your audience, wherever they may be in your sales funnel. As the effectiveness of cold calling and mass advertising decrease, it is important to be able to connect with people on a personal level. Marketing automation gives you the ability to segment your contacts and create workflows that allow you to deliver personalized, dynamic content to exactly the right people at the right time.
- Track, Measure, Improve
Increasingly marketers are being asked to justify every expense and cut costs wherever they can. Marketing automation platforms give you access to a full range of marketing and sales reports that show everything from web traffic, to sales closings, to leads generated from campaigns. They also store a wealth of raw data that can be run though more sophisticated analytics programs for further analysis. With these reports it is easy to show case success, reduce failure and help eliminate some of the guesswork in marketing.
- Customer Retention/Upselling
We are all familiar with Amazon’s “People who bought product X also bought…” feature, and if your company offers multiple products or services, marketing automation gives you the power to do this as well with your own contacts. As you build up your databases you can create workflows and personas to automatically trigger communications with your current customers to showcase other solutions that will help them in their journey to success.
- Team Alignment
In any company of any size, it is important for teams to be able to work together efficiently and productively, with the fewest redundancies. Many marketing automation platforms now come with full CRM capabilities which allow for seamless communication between the marketing and sales teams. Many platforms also come with the ability to integrate customer experience management modules to cover all aspects of the customer’s journey with your company.
As we have said, a marketing automation platform is much more than a piece of software for your company. It is more like a new member of the team that can automate mundane tasks, integrate teams, and track success, all while freeing up your people to do what they do best. Want to learn more about what marketing automation can do for you? Check out our Content and Case Studies.
Phil Palmieri is the founder, CEO and President of IPS. He has over 20 years experience in the printing and promotional products industry, as well as an MS in Data Analytics. Phil is SharpSpring Advanced User Certified.