What is marketing automation and what are its benefits?

Benefits of Marketing Automation:

Automating marketing activities allows the marketing department to be more efficient. With marketing automation, you can plan and schedule social media posts, create multiple campaigns to send scheduled personalized emails to any number of customers, set up automated responses on social media platforms like Facebook or on your website chat, publish a blog or create a landing page, all within the same software. This allows your team to focus on working on more strategic projects and have more time for creative work, such as planning and brainstorming for upcoming campaigns and projects.

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Having aligned marketing and sales departments is essential for any organization, and automation software can help bridge the gap between the two. For example, with lead generation, your marketing team can offer higher quality leads to the sales department, and sales representatives can also work together on an automated lead scoring model. When a lead is qualified by marketing or meets the score, it becomes easier to transfer to sales, facilitating information visualization. Additionally, this shared information visualization leads to total transparency in the process.

Marketing automation can also make your team more effective by tracking your leads and retargeting website visitors who do not convert, personalizing the information or site display to the visitor's needs or preferences. This is known as content marketing.

Every action should be measured to be improved. Analyzing without having all the data can be a frustrating process, but with a platform that gathers all the information in one place, this process becomes easier. Having a clearer picture of a strategy will help you see the complications and friction points. With accurate and optimized reports, you can see where things are going wrong, but what can you analyze? Customers with low engagement in nurturing emails, the number of visitors on your site and which pages are being viewed last before leaving, and the views that social media posts are getting are some examples.

By monitoring all channels, you can analyze statistics and graphs from multiple campaigns and use this data to know which campaign worked better. You can also automatically organize and share these reports with other teams or team members.

Data is the new oil, you may have heard that phrase. The goal of any company is to turn leads into sales, and one of the best ways to do this is by providing each lead with relevant information based on their needs and interests. But how to do it? Obviously, by knowing what their needs and interests are through data.

The more data is stored in the marketing automation software through social media campaigns, forms, behaviors on your site, or purchases made, the more personalized content you can create. For example, if a person was reading an article on your site about changes in space decoration for 2023, you can create a nurturing email that invites them to a webinar on the latest trending furniture that your sales team is organizing.

Thanks to this data, your leads receive personalized messages, and if they continue in the process, they can be led to make a purchase and convert. Remember, consumers are looking for personalized experiences that make them feel special. This translates into subtle sales tactics that attract instead of pressure them to buy.

Finally, perhaps the most effective way to leverage personalization is with your most valuable asset: your existing customers. Start conducting cross-selling and/or upselling campaigns, share new products or services they may be interested in, or, if your business model permits it, provide a discounted renewal rate to ensure customer loyalty.

Utilize automation to segment your audience and send relevant messages to each of those segments. Use personalization at a larger scale to nurture leads.