10 Top Reasons Your Business Should Invest In Marketing Automation

One of our favourite examples, to put things into context, is Amazon. Amazon nurtures your prospects by showing them highly relevant and personalised content that maximises the possibility of converting you into a customer, thus, allowing you to share further, useful and targeted content – resulting in repeat sales. All content shared with you is based on past purchases, browsing patterns and interests. Everything is personal, from your name across the website to one click access and browsing history access. Along with personalisation, Amazon use product recommendations and customer reviews to nurture their prospects and customers.

HubSpot use a great example to explain Marketing Automation – through the growth of a plant. You need fertile soil and seeds for growth, before water and light to nurture your seedlings into blossoming plants. This theory highlights the importance of nurturing your customers, just like your plant, enhancing them to grow larger and faster!

Marketing Automation can benefit your business in many ways. We have put together a list of our top ten benefits for integrating a Marketing Automation system into your marketing activities.

1. Most importantly, it increases your revenue: Marketing Automation is the most cost effective use of resources, meaning you don’t have to employ as many staff and it gives you back the time to concentrate on other aspects of your business. After all, Marketing Automation systems have longer working hours and better work ethic!!

2. Save you valuable time & money: There are less man hours needed, because of less content creation, email preparation and time spent on reports and statistics. Once the initial set up has been carried out, performing repetitive daily tasks are reduced hugely in the long-term. Marketing Automation never stops; it works whilst you’re asleep; carrying out other tasks or even when you’re having some well-deserved time off, so your emails and social media will still be posted.
3. Life cycle of your lead: Marketing Automation systems collect all interactions that an individual has with your business, every action is collated to enable you to build up the bigger picture of what it really takes for a prospect to convert. It looks at multi-channel information, building up different reports based on campaigns, prospects or even channel specific.
4. Contextual marketing: Consumers want more authentic advertising and Contextual marketing is the next step up, from personalisation, reacting to demographics, location, mood and online behaviour to deliver relevant and engaging content. Using Contextual marketing allows integration throughout different steps of your customers’ experience which delivers a consistent message across a user’s buying journey and via cross-channel marketing.
5. Works in synergy with your CRM: Both systems are constantly talking to each other, allowing sales and marketing to work better together like never before. For example, when a particular action is carried out, an email can be automatically sent to the sales team for them to contact a prospect, allowing them to nurture them into the next stage of the sales funnel.
6. Integrated email workflows: User behaviour on search, social and display advertising, can trigger new, personalised and contextual email marketing strategies based on the action of the user, even when a user doesn’t interact! This also helps combat the risk of users categorising your emails as spam and improves relevant messages being sent at the right time.
7. Segmentation: You can easily segment emails. By selecting relevant fields in your system, you can send more targeted emails without lifting out fields from you data whilst giving the users more relevant and customised content.
8. A/B Testing: By testing a various elements via Marketing Automation – whether that be an email subject line or on page content – you can make better marketing decisions based on in depth reporting and statistics. Discover more about split testing in another of our latest blog posts.
9. Semantic SEO: Marketing Automation enables you to discover the different search queries that people are using. Connecting the dots between them can give your marketing team a better understanding of user behaviour and increase value to SEO, e.g. what they typed into their search bar. With these insights, SEO optimisation can be boosted via Meta data. It also allows for clusters of content to be grouped by a topic rather than a specific keyword, ensuring the Marketing Automation is responsive to both language and context too.
10. Virtual Reality (VR): VR and MA can work together when user behaviour, location, etc. ‘triggers’ VR content, taking connection between customer and the brand to the next level, via personalisation. Currently, it’s largely big and/or luxury brands who are utilising this, due to cost-limitations for many markets and marketers.

Some of the best Marketing Automation systems include SharpSpring, Hubspot, Eloqua, Pardot and Marketo.

Although there are many great aspects, there is one issue with Marketing Automation tools. Many businesses invest before having a thought-out, nurturing solution, they buy in a tonne of new data and lose focus on inbound leads. Which is great for prospects in the middle of the sales funnel, but leaves others lost and confused. It is important that your business think of a long term solution to nurture longer and healthier relationships with future customers.

Marketing Automation is ever-growing, and will only continue to get more personalised. People will always search for new brands and experiences, and become more engaged with those who are tailored specifically to their ‘right now’ needs, with relevant and innovative content.

For more information about how you can take your marketing performance to the next level, contact us today at Generate UK. You don’t have to take our word for it, find out what our clients think.