Marketing automation increases productivity by taking on repetitive manual administration tasks – such as updating your CRM and sending emails – but how significant are these benefits in terms of sales output and how does marketing automation translate into bigger revenues? In this article, we look at the time saving benefits of marketing automation and how these cascade directly into more profits for your business.
A marketing automation platform, such as HubSpot, brings all your marketing activities together into a single hub that you access via a centralised user dashboard. Rather than engaging with lead nurturing, email marketing, social media marketing, Google Ads and so on as separate activities with their own discrete software platforms and budgets, marketing automation makes it easier to approach marketing as a strategy.
It gives you clearer visibility over your marketing spend and the activities you engage in, without having to juggle multiple platforms. Each activity also updates within the platform, saving you administration time, and avoiding the issue of having your vital sales data dispersed across isolated platforms, spreadsheets, and email accounts.
It is easier to find information about individual marketing activities, and to track interrelations between approaches. Ultimately, it becomes easier to understand how different tactics contribute to nurturing particular leads, to see what works well, and where improvements can be made.
With transparency and knowledge come power – the power to control your marketing budget more tightly, to analyse your data and make targeted changes to improve your ROI. This can reduce your cost of sales, letting you stretch your budget further than before. But the centralisation that comes with marketing automation also lets you create more sales: using your time to select the most effective engagement strategies for different buyer personas and organising your data to reveal new sales opportunities that let you strike more deals at the most opportune times.
At its most basic, a marketing automation platform is a content scheduling tool and auto updating method, something you can use to schedule emails and social media updates in advance, log new contact details into your CRM, and run reports about page visits and shares for blog posts. However, the true value of a marketing automation goes further than this, with many of the best platforms on the market offering tantalising opportunities for content optimisation.
With content optimisation, you use data about engagement, keyword saturation, market relevance and other factors to fine tune your content over time for more personalised outreach to your target personas.
You don’t have to spend hours in meetings dissecting each blog post to guess what’s working and what’s not. Marketing automation gives you precise insight into how your content is translating into customer engagement, and in which ways.
It sets you free to focus your time and resources on the content strategies that actually work, with each change making your content more relevant and meaningful to your target buyers.
The more personalised your content is to each recipient, and the more actionable it is in their circumstances, the better chance you have of engagement. You can use the wealth of data and insight about your customers to hone your services and messages to address specific requirements and sales objections, shortening your sales cycle and making it easier for you to close deals.
At JDR, we help small businesses deploy the best and most cost-effective marketing solutions to help them achieve their goals, saving time and money, and closing more deals through online sales. To learn more, please get in touch with one of our marketing specialists today on 01332 215152.
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