In an increasingly digital world, automation matters more than ever. It’s not enough to simply be able to engage with digital trends; businesses need to use technology and software solutions to drive results, understand their customers, and provide a superior experience to customers and employees alike.
Digital marketing automation is one thing that businesses can invest in that has a significant impact across multiple business units and departments.
What is digital marketing automation?
Digital marketing automation is a combination of automation software and marketing process to help streamline marketing efforts. According to the Digital Marketing Institute, the benefits can be significant for businesses. “Marketing automation promises big things; more leads, conversions and sales, all with less work. Businesses that use automation have seen increased leads and sales, driving a 14% in sales productivity and a 12% reduction in marketing overheads.”
What else can your business except for implementing digital marketing automation?
Top reasons to use digital marketing automation
- Simplify and scale: Modern day marketers have to pay attention to a lot of moving pieces if they’re going to make an impact. Social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, affiliate marketing, search engine marketing, Google AdWords, Facebook paid advertising, live streaming, webinars, and more. Using a digital automation solution can help bring together some of these seemingly disparate pieces and create a full-fledged and consistent marketing message.
- Better reporting: Instead of creating a cool marketing concept and hoping that it catches on or reaches its audience, you can now track the success, reach, and engagement of your campaigns. Digital automation helps you see your results and allows you to better optimize your digital outreach, using more of what’s effective and driving better results.
- Improved audience targeting: Targeting your audience with the right message is important, and digital marketing automation offers you a way to do that more effectively. If you have a product that appeals to both CEOs and small business owners, you can create relevant messaging for each audience and target them appropriately through the digital channels that they are engaged in.
- Improved sales: Customers know they have options when it comes to finding answers. They want to be savvy when they spend their money. Why should they choose your business? Marketing automation gives you a chance to build a relationship with potential customers and educate them on the value of your business. GetResponse notes how much of modern sales is linked to creating these kinds of communications with customers. “It’s a sequence of education and credibility-building content, from webinars to training videos to live events and answering those FAQs. This all needs to happen before you even hint at asking for the order. You need to earn the right. 75% of the sales process is education. Many of these steps can now be automated.” Education customers can lead to more conversions. Plus, automation enables businesses to stay in contact with their target audience, meaning that your business stays on their radar as they consider options. This is true for both B2B and B2C customer groups.
- Better upselling opportunities: Automation is also a way to invite customers to additionally invest in your company. If they’ve already purchased something, marketing automation can help you educate them on what other solutions might be a good fit for them. It can also help you remind them to reorder or regularly asses their needs. This can help drive additional revenue and increase customer loyalty.
- Reduced costs: Marketing automation can help you reduce expenses. It can help free up time that marketers used to spend on manually processing things like social media posts, digital advertising, and more; this can lead to fewer staff members doing the same amount of overall marketing work, which can be a relief for small businesses.
- More focus on creativity: A reduced focus on admin work – like manually tracking retargeting efforts – marketing teams are free to create more compelling, creative campaigns that can create a bigger impact. Plus, companies are able to use prior marketing results and reporting to influence what these campaigns should include, what channels they should be run on, and more.
- Better sales collaboration: Digital marketing automation can improve relationships with sales departments. With digital marketing automation, businesses have access to reporting they can share company-wide and align on goals and strategies across departments based on what’s resonating with customers and working on increasing engagement and sales.
Overall, digital marketing automation can be a huge driver of engagement for businesses and allows for better time management and results-oriented, strategic thinking. If you’re looking for a way to improve your marketing strategy and increase your reach and relevant engagement, digital marketing automation is a way to solve many marketing problems and enable better business results.