Startups tend to have two many areas of concern that they prioritize their attention around: growth and budget. Most business owners and startup leaders are focused around how to grow their brand awareness quickly in order to grow sales and revenue that will allow them to continue to invest in their business and have a successful future. One of the main concerns of startups is that they may not have the budget to acquire and implement tech solutions, like marketing automation, that can help grow business.
What is marketing automation?
According to Salesforce, “Marketing automation is the technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically. With marketing automation, businesses can target customers with automated messages across email, web, social, and text. Messages are sent automatically, according to sets of instructions called workflows. Workflows may be defined by templates, custom-built from scratch, or modified mid-campaign to achieve better results. Marketing and sales departments use marketing automation to automate online marketing campaigns and sales activities to both increase revenue and maximize efficiency. When automation is used effectively to handle repetitive tasks, employees are free to tackle higher-order problems, and human error is reduced.”
It has helped to evolve the customer experience and marketing workflow for organizations in every industry and many startups consider it a way to gain a competitive advantage and a worthwhile business investment.
Marketing automation might not make sense for every startup right out of the gate, but it can absolutely be a critical tool that helps move the needle on brand growth and overall company success.
The marketing automation stats startups need to know
- Organizations that deploy marketing automation see their marketing organizations are increasing revenue by over 7% via technology implementation alone.
- 75% of companies report ROI from their marketing personalization efforts, which marketing automation solutions enhance and support for more effective outreach.
- Some businesses report an ROI as high as 5-8x their initial investment, noting that personalization leads to a 67% transaction value, 300% conversion rate, and 7% annual revenue increase.
- Oracle notes that only 10% of businesses report using marketing technology to enhance their customer experience; adopting a marketing automation solution could help to set your business apart from competitors while allowing your brand to build better relationships with your customers.
- With a multi-channel marketing automation tool, you avoid the risks of disparate marketing technology stack solutions. Instead of several pieces of specialist software – who may or may not allow businesses to aggregate and analyze total date, you can have one single solution that makes everything more streamlined. This leads to greater employee efficiency and more accurate data.
- A marketing automation solution offers analysis into what isn’t working in your marketing plan – that means your business doesn’t waste budget on ineffectual efforts that don’t move the needle on sales, revenue, or business growth.
- In addition to being a powerful data analysis tool, marketing automation technology helps streamline the overall functionality of marketing and help marketing efforts align more holistically with sales goals. Modern marketers still spend up to a third of their workday manually completing tasks that could be handled more efficiently – and accurately – by a centralized marketing hub. This means the nearly 250 hours a marketing professional would normally spend on things like creating campaign messaging, assets, and execution could be redirected to strategy, competitive research, and other essential marketing activities that directly impact business decisions and, ultimately, help sales work more effectively as well.
If you’re still wondering if your startup should take the plunge and invest in marketing automation, Forbes says yes: “Startups have an overabundance of information and tools at their fingertips. Ignoring what’s on offer, though, can mean missing out on something hugely beneficial. Marketing automation is often a prime example. The time and money saved on certain tasks are vital for busy and resource-strapped startups. There are many reasons why you should look at automation as a boost for your startup’s marketing efforts.”
The value of a marketing automation tool is in both its significant campaign streamlining capabilities and its ability to analyze sets of customer behavior, preferences and other data points to offer predictive suggestions about what will engage and convert your target audience. In a competitive business landscape, this technology is should be strongly considered by marketing professionals and business leaders as an increasingly necessary tool for offering a superior customer communication experience and offering marketing teams the best data and analysis possible to make crucial business decisions.
To make the most of your business, marketing automation can be a vital solution to making sense of data that you need to understand your target audience and grow your business. It can also help you make the most of limited resources and staff. Considering you’ll be up against potentially big businesses as your competitors in any field, automation can help you stay competitive and remain a viable option for customers.
