Nowadays, the term “marketing automation” should no longer inspire confusion and thought that this applies only to companies like Google or Microsoft. The process of marketing automation can already be considered an integral part for both small business and medium or large. In my opinion, the main idea of marketing automation is to eliminate the routine work of people and replace them with robots so that people can focus on highly intellectual work. But before delving into the structure and benefits, let’s look at what marketing automation is and how it can benefit you.
The definition for automation marketing process from Techopedia is: «Marketing automation is the use of software and web-based services to execute, manage and automate marketing tasks and processes. It replaces manual and repetitive marketing processes [emails, social media, certain website actions] with purpose-built software and applications geared toward performance».
- Marketing intelligence. The use of tracking codes to monitor customer behavior on the Internet is inherent in this process, and further marketers can analyze the information received to create behavioral market segments.
- Business development. This category is used to move potential customers from the very beginning of the sales funnel (customer awareness) to the final part of this funnel (customer willingness to buy). This is done by segmenting and educating on the basis of expressed interests, evaluating or qualifying leads based on conformity and intention, as well as attempting closure based on a combination of behavioral and behavioral measures.
- Workflow automation. This process usually refers to internal ones, such as budgeting, marketing calendar, digital asset management and everything else that large enterprises need to manage large and complex marketing departments.
After reading all of the above categories, the actual question is: «What specific advantages can I get from the implementation of automation?». The main advantages of marketing automation include the following:
- Save money and time. By optimizing activities such as email marketing, collecting customer data, timely response to a particular customer’s action, audience segmentation and analysis of communication channels, your marketer will now bring more benefits and, as a result, money.
- Centralization of efforts. Due to the fact that marketing automation combines all the tools into one, there is a complete centralization of efforts. This allows the marketing department to focus their lead generation, lead processing and campaigning efforts in one place.
- Easy to measure and improve. End-to-end analytics of all processes give you a complete view and transparency of the effectiveness of all stages of your funnel, marketing and exhaust, and as a result are easily amenable to improvements and changes.
- Effective interaction of marketing and sales departments. Marketing automation involves integration with the existing CRM system, which subsequently allows you to receive data in real time and this greatly simplifies the interaction.
- Loyal customers instead of one-time purchases. The processes of heating the lead in AM are implemented in order to tell the buyer about the product or service, which will help push him to make a purchase decision.
- Increasing customer lifetime value. The calculation of this indicator will help you to know exactly which channels bring you the best (profitable) customers. Understanding the effectiveness of each channel to attract customers will help redistribute the costs laid down under the marketing strategy of your business, and therefore save and understand how much money you can spend on attracting or retaining a client.
Conclusions:
- The main benefit of the marketing automation process is the ability to generate more leads.
- Marketing automation will help reduce the burden on a full-time marketer, optimize the work of this marketer and interact with the sales department.
- Due to the introduction of AM, full transparency of business processes will appear, which means that possible options for changing or improving these processes and the work of each employee will become clear.
- By implementing marketing automation, the company will have excellent chances to save the budget for many years to come. Once implemented, AM will save you a budget for many years to come.