Why Every Marketer Should Believe That 2015 is the Year for Marketing Automation

It’s that time. When fireworks and parties around the globe ringing in 2015 sparked countless well-intended New Year’s Resolutions. May we suggest one for your business? This year, it’s time to invest in marketing automation. Doing so can significantly improve your business in a variety of ways.

What is marketing automation?

First, let’s start with a definition. HubSpot, a leader in the field and our partner, states that the goal of marketing automation software is:

“to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted customers”

In other words, it helps nurture your leads from the time they first learn about your company until after they have become your customers. Helpful tools like automated emails and content delivery schedules allow you to stay in touch with your leads throughout their movement down the sales funnel, making sure they’re well taken care of even after having purchased your product.

Why do you need marketing automation?

A tool that helps convert interested consumers into customers sounds great. But what are the specific benefits to your marketing and sales effort? As it turns out, they’re plentiful:

Marketing automation saves time.

Instead of having to send emails and post social media promotions or blog articles at specific times and dates, you can schedule an entire campaign or month’s worth of content in one single effort. That’s a significant time-saver.

Marketing automation increases cohesion.

By setting up an entire campaign’s worth of emails or other content, you can ensure that your entire campaign makes sense together. Think about it this way: if you create your marketing emails spontaneously as you send them, you may inadvertently repeat information and phrases while leaving out important information you thought you included previously. Setting it all up at once allows you to ensure the cohesion of your entire campaign.

Marketing automation nurtures leads.

Two major goals of your marketing and sales efforts are likely creating leads and getting customers. But how do you get from one to the other? By nurturing your leads. Marketing automation helps guide them through the sales funnel to ensure that they gain more relevant and specific information as they edge closer to the sale.

Marketing automation increases ROI.

Saving time by itself should increase your return on investment, but marketing automation offers more benefits. Forrester research indicates that marketing-automated lead nurturing lowers the cost per lead by 33 percent, while conversion rates of qualified marketing leads increase by 53 percent.

In short, marketing automation can significantly help your business in a variety of ways. It allows you to focus on other aspects of your job without neglecting your leads. Make 2015 the year that you finally start automating your processes!