Marketing automation involves software that automates marketing tasks, such as emails, social media posting, and CRM integration. The purpose of marketing automation is to make tasks in the short-term easier in order to contribute to long-term success. It can be a huge advantage when used correctly and not relied upon as the sole means for generating leads.

One of the main benefits of marketing automation is the ability to nurture prospects with customized content that moves them through the sales pipeline and converts them to a paying customer.

1. Improving Your Process with Marketing Automation

Once marketing automation begins, your marketing processes will change. You’ll have more time for creating personalized content, refining email campaigns, and building relationships with customers and prospects.

Streamlining your processes will lead to more efficiency, productivity, and customer satisfaction.

Two Ways to Streamline Using Marketing Automation:

Gather Data on Existing Content. It’s important to have water-tight analytical reports of your content performance before you begin using marketing automation. Everything from email open rates to clicks, downloads, and opt-outs need to be documented thoroughly. This data can be used to compare results once your automation begins and will indicate what is and isn’t working.
Identify Opportunities. Once the marketing automation has been up and running for at least two weeks, it’s time to start comparing new analytics with previous results. It won’t take long to find opportunities for improvement. Chances are you’ll probably see improvement in multiple areas within the first few months of automation.

2. Support the Content Strategy

Content is king. If your content isn’t good, nothing else really matters. It’s important to structure your marketing automation process to support your content strategy. The best content is evergreen. It remains relevant and influential for years to come and can be updated on a regular basis to improve accuracy.

Marketing automation should be implemented in a way that helps your content resonate with prospects. This is fairly easy to accomplish if a variety of evergreen content has been created which can be repurposed and updated each year. This allows you to automate the same content in different formats across multiple channels simultaneously.

3. Consistency

It’s hard for smaller businesses to be 100% consistent with their marketing process when they can’t match the resources and manpower of larger corporations. This is where marketing automation shines. Whether you’re automating an email campaign, social media content, or blog posts, it takes one action to schedule a month or a year’s worth of content.

Rather than sitting down to manually schedule daily content, automation allows you to complete bulk scheduling which saves huge amounts of time.

4. Cross-Promotion Opportunities

Cross-promotion is an underutilized, powerful way to enhance brand recognition and credibility. Most companies exercise some form of cross-promotion in their social media strategy by sharing similar content and promotions on various accounts. Besides using social media for cross-promotion, many organizations fail to grasp the benefits of using other media.

Benefits of Cross-Promoting:

Strengthen branding. The more cohesive your content strategy is across different mediums, the stronger your branding will be. Prospects should be able to associate an email, landing page, social media post, and any another other marketing material with your brand.
Increase reach. More prospects can be reached by cross-promoting. This is especially true if you cross-promote through collaboration and your brand is introduced to an entirely new audience. Need ideas for collaboration? Try sponsoring an event, co-writing a newsletter, or working with influencers in your industry.

5. Enhanced Reporting

It’s easy to find simple data, such as demographics, but much harder to find tools that can analyze more significant factors, such as mobile targeting and in-depth conversion data. Good marketing automation programs include top-notch reporting dashboards.

The best way to approach reporting is to customize each report according to your campaign goals. This will also help save time and cut through some of the reporting noise that’s automatically included in most analytical reports.

6. Convert More Leads

91% of marketers say that marketing automation is important to the success of their strategy across multiple channels. A big part of that success is because marketing automation can help convert more leads into customers.

Two Ways Marketing Automation Increases Conversions:

Triggered Campaigns. The ability to send triggered campaigns is one of the most valuable aspects of marketing automation. More than 75% of revenue from email campaigns comes from triggered campaigns. You can’t afford to not run triggered campaigns.
Upselling. Never underestimate the power of upselling when the lead shows interest in a service or product. It’s a great way to easily increase potential revenue while increasing value for your potential customer.

7. Three Main Benefits

There are many benefits of marketing automation, but three hold greater significance and warrant mention.

More prospects in the pipeline – More prospects mean greater potential to generate leads and convert them into customers.
A more productive department – High productivity should go hand-in-hand with high performance and solid strategies.
Higher revenues – This should automatically happen when you have good products or services and marketing automation is successfully implemented in a way that honors the prospect perspective and brand goals.

In the grand scheme of things, marketing automation serves to streamline your entire marketing process while allowing you and your team to spend more time optimizing content, perfecting strategy, and serving happy customers.

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7 Ways Marketing Automation Will Streamline Your Business Processes