By Arina Smith
Anyone who runs a business, or works in one, exactly knows how tiresome marketing activities can be.
From pitching your product to hundreds of consumers to regularly monitoring your new social media campaign, marketing can really be a drain not just on your resources but on your time. And as your business scales your marketing needs undoubtedly rise exponentially. However, traditional marketing has grown stale over the years. With the advent of the digital age, it has morphed in leaps and bounds.
Marketing automation is not the future anymore, it’s the present. It’s right here with us. Little wonder, presently, over 67% of marketers are taking advantage of a marketing automation platform. In the next couple of years, a further 21% of marketing leaders intend to join the train, according toSalesforce’s 2017 “State of Marketing.”
Clearly, if you’ve not considered automating your marketing, you’re way behind. It’s time to upgrade. But first, let’s understand what marketing automation truly is.
What do we mean by Marketing Automation?
The terminology of marketing automation has been bandied about so much that its meaning seems to have been lost in transit. To put it simply, marketing automation is using software and tools to make your marketing campaigns easier and faster.
Think of marketing channels such as emails, social media, blog posts, web pages. With an automated marketing system, you can have all these channels running concurrently and easily. As a result, marketing automation software enables strategic, creative campaigns to generate results.
This aids you to make progress in critical benchmarks such as lead generation, nurturing, scoring, customer retention, ROI measurement, etc. That is why, whether you run a small business or a business with multiple locations, using all-in-one marketing automation tools like Adplorer may be the best decision for your business’s success.
Benefits of Marketing Automation:
Marketing automation has huge benefits. Here are 5 key benefits of automation:
- Saves time: It makes marketing faster and easier.
- Saves resources: With automation, the personnel and resources required to drive each marketing campaign are greatly reduced.
- Consistency: With a marketing automation tool, you can relax knowing your audience will receive a consistent experience.
- Personalization: For instance, adding a client’s email to an email blast – something which is near impossible with manual marketing strategies – can make the client feel special and more attached to your product.
- Marketing automation ensures that you are up to date on key performance indicators. This will provide critical information for business decisions.
Marketing Automation Software:
When it comes to automation, there is a truckload of software out there. For starters, it is important to differentiate between a Customer Relation Management (CRM) Software and a Marketing Automation Software. Although often used interchangeably, they are not interchangeable at all. CRM software focuses mostly on contacts and is often used for sales. The software keeps a track of personal information like addresses, phone numbers, names, and sometimes behavior patterns. The leading CRM software is Microsoft dynamics CRM.
Conversely, marketing automation software does more than save contacts. Marketing Automation Softwares helps you track important variables in the user’s journey like what are some of the things that have been downloaded, brand pages where interactions have taken place, emails have been opened, links have been followed, and issues that help you predict, forecast and project future behaviors.
While awesome on their own, CRM and marketing automation software are even more useful when combined. Imagine the incredible things you can do with Microsoft dynamics CRM + marketing automation.
Conclusion:
Traditional marketing has lost its bite. In a business world where “survival of the fittest” rings true, it is absolutely crucial that you learn to evolve. Marketing is not one arm of your business; marketing is actually your business. You can’t hire enough people to do all the work. So, do as Neil Patel says: “Don’t delegate. Automate.”
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