Marketing automation: why it's important for business growth

A variety of tools are used to promote a brand. One of them is marketing automation, which ensures competitiveness, the ability to scale, and increase profits. So which processes should be automated? When should this issue be seriously considered? What actions should be taken? We'll try to answer these and other questions.

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What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation means transferring a company's current business processes to digital services. Automation frees employees from routine tasks, handing them over to specialized software. The basic idea is that the system responds to user actions and enables or disables specific interaction scenarios. Automating certain marketing processes saves time and resources. Using specialized software and other technical solutions, marketers have the ability to inform clients en masse via social media, email, and other communication channels.

What are the benefits of marketing automation?

Automation enables company growth. By digitizing repetitive business processes, you can quickly advance your brand.

Marketing automation allows you to:

• Save, as it leads to increased efficiency for you as an entrepreneur and your team, if you have one. Removing the need for routine tasks frees up more time for more complex tasks. Errors are significantly reduced when performing complex calculations or filling out reports, for example.
• Increase profits.Automation drives sales growth as customers are engaged in a regular purchasing process (sales funnel).
• Prevent errorsSoftware used for automation, among other things, generates statistics that reflect changes in business operations. This is a very useful feature, allowing you to track operational efficiency, control revenue and expenses, analyze customer interactions, identify gaps in the event of difficulties, and respond promptly.
• Improve the quality of serviceUsing specialized programs, you can instantly send out a huge number of emails and SMS messages, create invoices, and call clients using a robot. In other words, automation simplifies and speeds up tasks that are difficult or impossible to perform manually.

Let's look at an example of how an online store works:

The ordering process may include other steps depending on the specifics and type of business. For example, a delivery or trucking company manager must calculate a number of factors that determine the final payment for the service.

And the more actions and operations are performed manually, the lower the efficiency of their execution and the greater the likelihood of error.

Read the article to learn about the most important and in-demand marketing skills needed to successfully develop an online business.Digital Marketing Skills You Need in 2021.

Implementing Marketing Automation into Business

Using a single platform to manage your digital marketing strategy greatly simplifies your day-to-day business. However, fine-tuning the process requires a lot of learning, and that takes time. We offer several practical tips to simplify and accelerate the implementation of marketing automation.

1. Define goals

It's worth starting with defining the global task. You need to understand:

What exactly can be automated to reduce time costs and improve operational efficiency; and what strategies will help increase ROI.

Once your goals are defined, it's easier to calculate the budget required for marketing activities. Don't have anyone to develop a marketing strategy? It's worth finding a competent specialist and hiring them to do the job.

2. Study the target audience

What does your target audience want? What do they lack to improve their quality of life? What do they dream of? Before implementing automation, it's essential to develop and study your buyer persona and understand what your business can offer them.

3. Track the customer journey

One of the key factors for successful business performance is satisfying customer needs. When you don't know what's holding a potential customer back from becoming a client, it's time to adjust your marketing strategy. Creating a customer journey map helps automate certain steps to streamline the customer's interactions with your brand.

4. Prepare a content strategy

Content for different stages of the customer journey should be prepared in advance. This makes it easier to select the right marketing tools.

5. We act systematically

Implementing automation requires consistency and a systematic approach. It's important to plan the transition to automation so that there's enough time for testing.

6. Track the results

Workflow status should be monitored regularly (monthly, quarterly, and annually). Analysis allows for rapid response to changing target audience sentiment and adapting automation to consumer demands. This means automation always adapts to business changes and transforms with them.

What processes can be automated?

By implementing marketing automation, you can dramatically simplify your business tasks and accelerate brand development. After all, if you set up your workflows correctly, achieving your desired results will be easy.

Working with the site

You don't have to be a programmer to administer a company's website. You simply need to master a user-friendly CMS system, such as WordPress. All actions are performed through the admin panel. This content management system is accessible to any user. Once you master the simple platform, you can fill your website with content and modify its structure.

Read our article to learn how to improve conversion rates.15 Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic.

Newsletters

Sending hundreds or even hundreds of emails, SMS, and push messages manually is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, there's no information on whether the customer received the message, opened it, or clicked on the link. Without information on customer actions, it's impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts. Automating marketing processes with ESP platforms (GetResponse, UniSender, Mailchimp) simplifies the task and provides the ability to track results.

Sending SMS messages and emails to clients

Thanks to the software's capabilities for bulk messaging, sending SMS messages and emails is easy. The block editor allows you to create email templates, upload your customer database, and send messages to all contacts with a single click.

Email Strategy: Email Chains

An email chain (a series of SMS or email messages) is typically prepared for significant news events (e.g., Black Friday) or for product promotion. You develop a possible scenario for the client's behavior and actions, design the email chain, enter it into the ESP platform's system, and it responds algorithmically to a specific client action depending on how they responded to the previous message.

It's crucial that the platform generates analytics. Based on this, you can refine your marketing strategy.

Advertising campaigns

Launching targeted digital advertising helps develop your brand. For example, retargeting attracts potential customers and reminds audiences of products they previously viewed on your website.websiteBut launching ads on different platforms takes a lot of time.

Using specialized programs, you can easily manage multiple accounts and publish advertising content on several social networks simultaneously.

For example, the social media management tool Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Using the Altcraft Marketing platform, you can select platforms (or configure them manually) and synchronize audiences for retargeting.

To learn more about this topic, read our article.12 Best Mobile Apps for Digital Marketing.

Social media posts

Social media requires constant presence and prompt response. Automation can help you achieve this, eliminating the need to manually publish posts. This is especially convenient if you need to post a large volume of content across multiple communication channels. Using specialized software allows you to schedule posts at convenient times. Read more about whether social media will become paid.follow the link.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is incredibly popular. According to DataReportal, the number of active mobile users at the beginning of 2021 was 5.2 billion. Therefore, it makes sense to automate push notifications in your mobile app right away. After all, it's an inexpensive and highly effective channel for communicating with your customer base, allowing you to save on SMS.

For example, you can use the push notification editor offered by the Altcraft Marketing CDP platform. Users can create notification templates for different operating systems. Using MobilePush or WebPush, you can notify your audience about promotions, inform them about discounts and bonuses, and share news. Using push notifications allows you to establish communication with your customers, direct their attention toward completing a target action, and thus help increase sales.

When is it worth setting up marketing automation?

Your business requires marketing automation if:

• the number of new applications has decreased, despite the active work of managers;
• it is not possible to provide an individual approach to each client;
• customers do not return to you after purchasing a product or ordering a service;
• a lot of time-consuming tasks accumulate;
• managers often make mistakes, etc.

Almost any business process can be automated. The more operations your software handles, the more time you have to focus on customer service, improving service quality, and growing your business through increased sales.