Marketing is always an integral part of any modern business, driven by the need to let your potential customers know that you have something to offer them, and they could benefit from it. Over the years, traditional communication approaches like television ads, billboards, newspaper advertising, etc., have risen and then been pushed into the backdrop as new marketing approaches take centre stage. Today, digital strategies have largely taken over due to the rising global digital economy.
From email campaigns to social media communities, and intelligent ways of serving ads across a bouquet of digital channels occupy the mind of the modern marketer. Investments are increasing exponentially in the digital marketing space. As a result, brands expect their marketing efforts to be accelerated and scaled up at the same time. This is where the need to adopt a marketing automation strategy becomes essential to any business.
What Is Marketing Automation?
In simple words, marketing automation focuses on building automated marketing initiatives driven and managed by intelligent software solutions that work based on data captured across the consumer landscape. It can cater to all fundamental areas of marketing that an enterprise adopts today — like the generation of leads, brand building, and campaign management.
Most organizations rely on channels like emails, social media, and paid media channels to push out marketing content and grab the attention of potential customers. They get access to customer information from their CRM systems that are populated with data from sales teams as well as directly from different digital channels of interactions.
With marketing automation, marketing teams no longer need to manually select customers from the CRM, run experimental campaigns, nurture leads, and await their maturity into deals. This entire cycle can be automated with better ROI.
Let us explore why marketing automation strategies need to be in place for organizations to scale their business today:
Precise Data-Driven Targeting
By adopting a marketing automation strategy, you are inherently accepting the need to follow a data-driven operational model for marketing initiatives. Without that it is always possible that employees may make biased or uncalculated guesses from CRM data to pick targets for marketing campaigns.
With marketing automation, prospective targets are autonomously selected by the system based on actual data about their interests, past transactional history, spending power, etc. This allows the marketing team to increase the chances of their campaigns becoming successful in converting leads to deals.
Achieving Consistency Across Channels
When different team members handle different marketing channels like email, social media, paid media, etc., there are very high chances of inconsistency in reaching out to prospects, especially if an enterprise manages all operations manually. For example, employees across groups may mistakenly select the same prospect for two different promotional campaigns via email and social media for the same product or service.
Imagine the potential of receiving a promotion of about a 5% discount on the product through an email and then receiving another promotion of about a 15% discount on the same product via a social media ad. This can spiral into a chain of events that can damage the reputation of the brand.
With marketing automation, every channel, content, and target customer list is automatically evaluated and validated for the type of messages to be sent, the content to be used, the medium of interaction, and much more. This helps bring consistency and ensures that customers are always provided with a seamless omnichannel marketing experience.
Saving Time
Manually filtering contacts from the CRM based on targeting guidelines, sending messages to each prospect across different channels, checking for responses, and calculating conversions — the effort needed here is tremendously high. In a highly competitive environment, this would result in your business losing a significant amount of time virtually doing nothing but preparatory work.
With marketing automation, however, marketers can save a ton of time and effort in segmenting data, picking the right content, and scheduling it for deployment across customer channels at the right time. Employees can use their time for more productive in-person engagements rather than wasting it on sorting heaps of data for days.
Easier and More Robust Reporting
Marketing automation allows for precise and more data-centric targeting of campaigns. This also entails observing responses from potential customers and evaluating the ROI based on conversions like the transition to sales, feedback about content performance, open rates of emails, etc.
In combination with integrated analytics, marketing platforms can not only create insightful reports for decision-makers but also help everyone, from content creators to campaign specialists, understand the true pulse of customers. This way, they can tailor their skills to create campaigns that have higher chances of success.
The Bottom Line
Marketing automation solutions are estimated to have a market size of over $13.71 billion by 2030. As the competition heats up, brands need to ensure that they are able to optimize and spend their marketing budgets wisely with guaranteed returns. This is possible only if they have the right marketing automation strategies in place with access to exceptional tools and products in the marketing automation space like Sciera.
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