Why You Should Be Using Tools for Marketing Automation
Nobody would argue the importance of staying in front of your customers or clients. After all, we’ve all heard the phrase “out of sight, out of mind.” There’s also no doubt that staying in constant communication can be challenging.
It’s time-consuming and requires a strategy – it isn’t enough to just fly by the seat of your pants these days. You need to know exactly what you want to say and how you want your audience to react to it. This is where tools for marketing automation come in.
What Marketing Automation Tools are Out There?
When most people hear the term “marketing automation,” the first thing they think of is email automation, which makes it as good of a place as any to start! Email marketing is still very much alive and well! It also provides a great return on investment – $42 for every $1 you spend on average.
When you set up email automation, you can segment your audience into different lists, allowing you to send the right messages to the right people. While it may take you some time up front to get the messaging together, it’ll save you time from sending out individual emails in the long run.
Another helpful automation tool is a social media scheduler. These allow you to schedule weeks or months of social media at a time so you don’t have to stress about doing it every day. Once you pull together an editorial calendar for the month, you simply drop your content in, schedule it, and let it do its job!
Customer relationship management (CRM) software can also help you create a strong marketing automation strategy. When you have all of your client contact information in one place and know where they are in your funnels, you can better market to them and incorporate them into your automated emails, etc.
How Marketing Automation Can Help Your Business
Marketing automation obviously works as a great touchpoint but it’s much more than just that. It has a number of benefits for a variety of teams within your organization.
- Align the marketing and sales teams. When sales and marketing work together, they can easily bring in more business and help each other understand the customer base better. Combining your CRM with other automation tools strengthens collaboration.
- Improve conversion rates. When you set up marketing automation campaigns, you know what each of your customers is receiving and how well it’s being received. Using analytics tracking, you can tweak pieces of your campaigns to better target your audience and improve conversions.
- Easily scale your marketing efforts. As your company grows, you’ll need your processes and marketing automation to grow with it. Using marketing automation tools, you can much more efficiently scale your campaigns up by creating additional funnels or adding multiple new leads to existing campaigns.
Ultimately, marketing automation tools can save your business time and money while improving collaboration on your team. It’s a great way to continue to nurture your leads without spending hours and hours manually reaching out.
Working With Your Marketing Automation Plan
One very important thing to note about marketing automation is that it does require maintenance and follow-up. Sure, it’s a set it and forget tactic to a point, but you still need to be engaging with it regularly.
What is the data showing? Are your leads responding well to the campaigns that exist? Are you contacting your prospects and ensuring that everyone gets funneled into the correct places? Automation can be a very powerful tool, but only when used as a supplement to your other marketing strategies and top-notch customer service.
Pink Dog Digital works with a number of marketing automation tools for email, online reputation management, social media, and more. If you’re ready to offload some of the marketing work so you can focus more fully on your business, our team can help.
Give us a call today at 410-696-3305 or contact us online for more information.