In the age of AI and digital transformation, every aspect of a business is going through a tremendous transformation, and marketing is no exception. There is a lot of buzz that is being created by changing marketing trends, and marketing automation tops all of them.
As per Grand View Research, the value of the marketing automation industry can go up to 7.63 billion dollars by 2025.
We are in the early months of 2019, and we feel there is no better time to start early and adopt marketing automation in your strategies to reap benefits from it.
Now, let’s understand what marketing automation is?
Marketing Automation is a collective term used for any platform, solution, process, or tool that helps in streamlining, automating, and measuring marketing tasks to increase execution efficiency and better growth.
Marketing automation includes everything from email automation to social media post scheduling to chatbots. Right now marketing automation is in a nascent stage, and that is why this is the perfect time to master it.
Why is marketing automation important?
Time, it saves you a lot of time. This single most reason is enough to make marketing automation an important trend in the marketing niche.
Investment in marketing automation can help you save your time and increase your revenues. The saved time and increased revenue can be utilized to make better marketing strategies and invest in modern digital marketing hacks and tactics.
Is marketing automation all hype?
Like every new trend, marketing automation is generating a lot of interest among business owners, content creators, managers, and everyone involved in the marketing ecosystem.
Many of them feel that marketing automation is all about sending automated emails via MailChimp or it is just about scheduling posts via Hootsuite. What many fail to realize is that it is much beyond that!
Not only does Marketing Automation, helps you automate the mundane tasks, but it also helps you in personalizing and enhancing the customer experience.
You can identify the various buying stages of your consumer, get in-depth analytics of their purchase behavior, and nurture them in a way to become a customer and an advocate.
There are more than 5000+ marketing tools available today and a lot of platforms that make marketing automation a lot easier for you. It is no hype at all but a fast-shaping reality. The faster marketers realize it, the better.
If as an organization, you are yet to experience the boon of marketing automation, we list down benefits of implementing it in your organization.
#It saves time-
Time is the most important resource we all possess, and more than 70% of the companies in a recent survey said that saving time has been the most necessary boon of marketing automation.
As said earlier in the blog, most of your marketing efforts can be automated and it is not limited to just social media campaigns, email marketing campaigns, and PPC campaigns, you can do a lot of pre-strategizing and planning through it.
By leveraging marketing automation to automate repetitive tasks, marketers can focus on major tasks like creating great content and drafting innovative marketing strategies that can amplify the brand value of their organizations.
#Precise measuring metrics-
Peter Drucker once said, what cannot be measured cannot be managed. Marketing automation tools come with proper analytics and metrics to measure the impact of each marketing campaign.
Measuring what you are doing is very important in this data-driven world as assumptions don’t work anymore; decisions should be backed by reliable data.
Many premium marketing automation solutions can even determine future campaign performances based on previous data using AI and machine learning. No one better than marketers can understand how important it is to understand which marketing initiatives work and which won’t. It saves a lot of time and resources helping in generating better ROI.
#Chances of errors become less-
When you automate repetitive tasks, it helps you define a process for your marketing campaign. With a set process, chances of errors become less as it gets difficult to overlook anything. Having analytics and real-time reporting also helps you make precise and accurate decisions.
You will gain better insights on improving the marketing funnel and how to engage your customers better making your marketing campaigns more effective.
Also, automation reduces decision fatigue as it processes large chunks of data faster, and helps you analyze it more quickly.
#Reduced costs-
Now, you may say that marketing automation is an added cost, but that is when you look at it on the surface. Even an investment of 1000 dollars in marketing automation can give you three times returns.
You need a small team of efficient digital marketers and empower them with great marketing automation tools. Your whole marketing efforts would be more channelized and impactful.
The need for hiring a large number of marketing employees would be nullified as most of the work would be automated hence reducing your hiring costs.
Once you automate a particular set of tasks for upcoming weeks, your team can rejuvenate, revitalize, and set themselves up for taking new projects.
#A better relationship between marketing and sales team-
It is a common problem in a lot of firms where sales blame marketing for not bringing enough leads and marketing blames sales for leaking their leads.
Marketing automation can make both teams come closer and clear their differences.
And if you ask me, how would it happen? Here comes the. “Law of Large Numbers”. It says the more prospects a marketing team reaches, the more pipelines they create, giving the sales team more opportunities to close.
Marketing automation helps marketers in saving time and efforts which they can redirect in getting more leads making it a win-win situation for everyone.
These are just five benefits of marketing automation which are only 5% of the value it provides. There is a lot more to it; you need to explore it as an organization.
Marketing automation is way beyond email marketing or introductory CRM platforms.
It is about more productive hours, better results, marketing and sales team in harmony, and overall a healthy eco-system that produces enough value for everyone to survive and evolve.
