Digital marketing automation can help any business that is experiencing time drains and finds itself overwhelmed with inconsistencies, overspending, customer attentiveness, and customer retention. Automating your business can help in every area as it comes in very diverse forms and areas of specialty. In this article, we’ll discuss what digital marketing automation is, how automation can help your business in its success amidst diverse competition, and some of the top automation tools to consider using for your digital marketing needs.
Automation solutions save time and increase ROI by handling basic marketing tasks. Automation also saves your efforts from being wasted by ensuring that messages are specifically targeted to certain segments of your group of leads. It can also dramatically increase the responsiveness of your brand to customers’ questions and inquiries. Gone are the days when customers had to pick up the phone to schedule an appointment — today, “book now” buttons and chatbots handle frequently asked questions for you.Â
Approximately three-quarters (76%) of businesses currently utilize some form of marketing automation technology as part of their strategy in 2024.
What can Marketing Automations do for your Business?
Automation can handle a number of marketing tasks. Once you have templates designed for each item and segment of your audience, it can:
- Automatically message new leads
- Run email campaigns
- Send reminders
- Run SMS marketing campaigns
- Run behavioral retargeting Â
- Handle lead scoringÂ
- Post to social mediaÂ
This ensures that the information you are providing to leads and customers is customized and relevant to them. An automatic cart abandonment email, for example, is only effective for leads who have added products to their online shopping cart and then navigated away from your page. An automated email can be a great way to help these customers take the final step of completing the purchase, but it will be completely irrelevant and possibly annoying for customers who are just hearing about your brand for the first time. This can damage the user experience of your brand, making it less likely that this lead will want to buy from you in the future.Â
That’s where automation is so helpful — it increases both the quality of the marketing messages and the ease of posting them.Â
SEO Design Chicago can help your SMB choose the automation platform that best meets your needs, allowing you to optimize workflow and save time for higher-level marketing tasks, like strategy and product development.Â
Benefits of Automation Software
There are many content management tools out there with automation options. The problem with these is that they only manage one element of your marketing efforts, like email, blogging, or social media posts.Â
Since most effective marketing strategies in today’s competitive online marketplace are multichannel, you might have four or five individual data sources and management platforms to manage. This makes it difficult to produce useful analytics on the success of your marketing efforts, because you have to manually organize and interpret efforts from different software.
An automation platform built specifically to manage the kinds of customer journeys that your business wants is the solution to this problem. A new lead pipeline will be very different for a B2B environment than for an e-commerce brand, for example. Scaling your business becomes much easier when you have one central location to manage everything.Â
SEO Design Chicago specializes in digital marketing services for over 400 different industries. We can help you choose the right software solution that meets all your advertising needs and contributes to revenue growth.Â
Increase in ROI
On average, companies make $5.44 for every $1 they spend on marketing automation. Automation tools can automate upsells, cross-sells, and follow-ups more specific to the customer funnel and resultant revenue. They also cut down on time spent on these important tasks, helping a business more quickly increase its ROIÂ by decreasing average spending.
Staffing Cost Reduction
When you automate aspects of your day-to-day business processes, there is less need for associates to take on these duties themselves. Various aspects can combine into a single automated task that otherwise would require more staff to accomplish.
Business Effectiveness Boost
Automation allows a business to run more effectively day-to-day, grouping and caring for various determined marketing tasks that otherwise drain resources, time, and energy. It allows a business to more effectively market goods and services.
Clearer Defined Processes
Omni-channel, complex marketing strategies are more possible when managed by a digital marketing automation tool. Processes are better laid out and organized, which assists marketing and sales teams to maintain clearer direction and increased accountability.
More Room for CreativityÂ
When monotonous tasks that don’t inherently require a personal touch to run effectively and efficiently aren’t draining a business, associates can refocus on other aspects that could benefit more from personal touches. Your business can be more unique and creative.
Time-Saving
Automating the things you most desire to run faster, or your business’s most regular actions, saves valuable time. One-click processes take worry and time away from regular actions. For example, you could exchange contrasting databases for an auto-updating reporting system or automated timesheet.
Enhanced Productivity
Automating low-value tasks allows more focus toward higher-value tasks. Focus more deeply on more difficult tasks and leave others to automation. By also helping to track your workflow, automation can reveal your productivity patterns and unproductive behaviors.
Increased Accuracy
Human errors occur less with automation, providing increased accuracy and precision. Collect information without as frequent overlooks or misreads. Documentation is also more accurate, with automation decreasing file loss or missteps through the various business processes.
Quicker Responses
Automation makes pulling reports and audits across the various processes quicker, equating to your business being better able to quickly and perceptively respond to questions, concerns, and requests of shareholders, customers, and associates. This leads to better branding, quality, and reputation by making your business look more capable.
Lower Costs
For all of the aforementioned reasons, automation serves to pay for itself by providing an increase in clarity, creativity, time, productivity, accuracy, and quality. By providing for these increases and freeing up personal company time toward the nuanced service aspects of the business, your business costs less to run, is more customizable, focused, and competitive.
Save Time
Marketing tasks are labor-intensive. Most successful social media campaigns, for example, require daily posting to maintain engagement. Automation can drastically reduce the time you spend on these kinds of tasks by letting you batch-schedule content. Some platforms can even auto-generate content for you and suggest the best times to send emails or post to social media to align with best practices and increase viewership.Â
This frees up time for higher-level tasks, like strategy, content creation, and client calls. It also lets you plan out longer sales and marketing campaigns and measure the efficiency of each stage of a project. If you have a new product launch coming in September, you can design and schedule content to reach customers all summer. Then, you can use integrated reporting tools to see which stage of your marketing campaign generated the most interest and produced the most sales, allowing you to create even more effective campaigns next time.Â
Improve Data Gathering and Reporting
Manually gathering and organizing the data you collect from leads and customers is far too time-consuming. Most businesses use automation programs to use the information from different stages of the customer journey to improve audience segmentation.
This allows you to create far more effective advertising campaigns that deploy along predetermined criteria. Each customer receives the communication most relevant to them based on their expressed preferences and their past interactions with your brand, making them more likely to see your business as a fit for their needs.Â
When properly set up, automation platforms can also help you generate clear, actionable reports from large amounts of data. Perhaps you have thousands of visitors clicking on your e-commerce site every month, but you need to know how many are purchasing, how many are repeat customers, and how many are leaving reviews. Marketing tools like automation software let you easily sort information by your chosen criteria.
Our experienced digital marketing agency can help you select and set up a software program that produces the kinds of reports you’re most interested in.Â
Nurture Leads
Customer relationship management (CRM) is the process of managing customer interactions throughout their journey with your business to improve their opinion of your business and encourage them to make a purchase.Â
CRM software can help you segment the different steps along the buyer’s journey and trigger automatic actions. First-time visitors to your website need different support options than repeat customers, and automation can allow you to release highly targeted communication with your audience.Â
Data and Analytics
How do you know if your marketing efforts are working? You could look at the overall revenue of your business, but that won’t tell you specifically if it’s your social media campaigns, your content strategy, or your email marketing that is bringing new customers into your business. The reporting tools built into automation platforms help you understand your business results and make more informed decisions.Â
Getting Started With Digital Marketing Automation
Before considering which tools are best for your business’s automation, you should establish your workflow and allow your associates the time to prepare for the new implementation. Preparation will increase the likelihood of automation success. The top steps to take before automation implementation includes identifying the right tasks to automate, selecting the appropriate tools and software, team tools and software training, and continuous tools and software effectiveness evaluations.
Identify the Right Tasks
First, you want to identify the most time-consuming, repetitive tasks that are draining your funds and resources. Where can you benefit most from automation?
Select the Right Tools
Select the right tools for you, which focus on automation of the previously identified most time-consuming, repetitive, and draining tasks. Which tools would you benefit the most from?
Team Tools Training
Ensure that your team members have the necessary understanding of the automation tools, their maintenance, applicable operation, and evaluation. How do the tools fit into how they work? Where do they refocus their attention?
Tools Evaluation/Adaptation
Now, you should evaluate how the tools you use help achieve your unique goals and adapt. Is the tool of choice adequately achieving your goals? If not, consider a different approach or tool and continue evaluation and adaptation based upon results.
Marketing Automation Platforms
Businesses can use marketing automation software to manage multiple campaigns from one dashboard. This reduces the amount of time spent checking multiple accounts or manually setting up marketing and sales campaigns.Â
The number of software options can be mind-boggling. You want to choose a platform that allows you to manage all your campaigns and reporting from one system, but you don’t want to purchase more services than you will actually use. SEO Design Chicago has over ten years of experience helping small and medium businesses (SMB) grow their revenue through effective digital marketing strategies. We can help you identify which automation program will fit your business and provide the best return on investment.
Hubspot
Hubspot continues to hold its position as the top marketing automation platform that helps streamline complex marketing tasks. Used by 38% of marketers, HubSpot is an all-in-one platform that provides everything from web hosting and email marketing services to customer relationship management. It also provides sophisticated data management and reporting tools.Â
Marketo
Offered by Adobe, Marketo is on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence integration. It provides useful lead-nurturing tools across multiple channels, like audience profiling and email design tools. It also has a useful chatbot scheduler to help customers book appointments with your business without the need for a call. We recommend Marketo for larger businesses that like all the bells and whistles.Â
Salesforce
Salesforce is a classic account-based marketing tool that has adapted well to the digital era. Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) offers some sophisticated data-gathering and management tools. Its analytics dashboard is a helpful way to manage audience profiles and advertising campaigns.Â
Oracle Eloqua
Oracle Eloqua provides client monitoring through all stages of the buying process, leans toward B2B and B2C marketers, and provides the ability to plan out automated campaigns during personalization. There are numerous third-party services integrations for streamlining.
Pardot
Pardot provides B2B automation from Salesforce, account-based solutions, and supports B2B analytics. Other functions include email marketing, lead scoring, CRM integration, and lead nurturing. You can also easily track website interactions and build lead scores that predict future trends.
Customer.io
Customer.io boasts high flexibility and strengthens a business’s relationship with customers by attuning messaging and contact to times of highest engagement. It allows you to automate emails based upon certain customer behaviors and enjoy a tool suited to businesses new to automation.
Exponea
Exponea enables users to unify and centralize customer data from multiple sources, both online and offline. You can also adapt content for third-party understanding and utilization toward custom analytics, marketing campaigns, and others.
LeadSquared
LeadSquared’s design focuses on moving leads faster through the customer funnel and is also a cloud-based CRM. Users can obtain leads via online campaigns, website inbound email, and chat as well as set conditions, triggers, and actions to their drip marketing automation.
SalesFusion
SalesFusion offers an all-in-one solution of comprehensive and flexible features to automate campaign creation, lead collection, and more. There is also a standalone Marketing Automation module offered, with tools for lead nurturing, media planning, and marketing analytics.
Ontraport
Another viable all-in-one solution, Ontraport’s design is for small businesses and entrepreneurs alike with tools for lead generation, nurturing, scoring, task management, and email marketing. It offers a range of e-commerce solutions for upselling, cross-selling, credit card payments and credit card abandonment
Outreach
This CRM tool is popular among business owners who like an all-in-one visual overview of their marketing processes. This platform is an effective way to nurture leads along the pipeline.Â
MailChimp
As a classic email design platform, most of us have probably used the free version at some point or another. The paid options are good options for SMBs to increase customer engagement through personalized emails.
AI-Powered Marketing Strategy
Platforms are quickly adapting machine learning to handle marketing needs even more quickly. Many companies already use AI-driven marketing automation to speed up market research, generate eye-catching images for online content, and quickly handle data reporting.Â
Rather than needing to adopt AI platforms yourself, we predict that these tools will become integrated into existing email marketing platforms, CRMs, and other major marketing automation systems.Â
FAQ:
- What is digital marketing automation?
- How does automation help increase ROI?
- What is the first step of using marketing automation?
- How can marketing automation help lower costs?
- What are the best automation tools?
Schedule a free call with SEO Design Chicago today to learn how we can boost your marketing strategy with automation services!Â
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