Marketing automation software allows marketers to streamline various tasks, boost their overall efficiency, draw key insights and drive ROI. If you aren’t already utilizing marketing automation software, it’s time to start. Here's five ways marketing automation can make your life easier and maximize your effectiveness:
1. Save Time and Money
Perhaps the greatest benefit of marketing automation software is its ability to save time. In marketing, saving time will empower you to do more with a limited staff and budget. Utilizing an automation platform can help you optimize your lead nurturing process, boost efficiency and ultimately drive greater return for your marketing calories spent.
Every marketer knows how tedious and time-consuming it is to segment lists by hand, publish individual social messages or send hundreds of emails to prospects. Marketing automation makes menial but necessary responsibilities like these significantly easier to manage, allowing you to focus your time and attention on bigger-picture initiatives that will significantly impact your bottom line.
2. Easily Share Personalized Content
One of the most effective ways that marketing automation software can save you time and money is by serving personalized marketing content to leads at critical junctures in their buyer's journey.
Curating content for users based on their actions and engagement level is far more powerful than simply blasting everyone with an irrelevant and untimely offer. Using marketing automation software, you can easily nurture Leads through the buyer's journey and rely on automated triggers to serve up relevant and timely content offerings based on a Lead's demonstrated engagement behavior. Leveraging automation to nurture Leads will allow you to maintain a high level of personalization as you scale.
Rather than manually combing through your database for Leads that share common traits, segmenting Leads into lists and then curating personalized content for each segment, you can streamline the segmentation and nurture process within your chosen platform. HubSpot’s Smart Content feature allows you to quickly define targeted lists based on lifecycle stage, geographic location, referral site, device type or custom criteria and then serve personalized content to this hyper-targeted audience as they visit your site. This level of data granularity and automation removes the heavy lifting from personalization, so you can drive ROI by reallocating marketing resources to initiatives that will have the biggest impact on revenue (like honing your content and conversion optimization strategy).
3. Perform Closed-Loop Reporting
Most marketing automation platforms offer CRM integrations that allow users to create a closed-loop reporting system. Closed-loop reporting means digitally syncing your marketing automation and CRM platform so that the data captured by each platform is automatically aggregated and shared. This type of platform integration lends to greater funnel visibility and operational efficiency while also opening the door to more sophisticated data tracking and reporting opportunities.
By collecting and combining data in a single source, you'll gain a more holistic view of your marketing and sales funnel and be empowered to make smarter, data-driven decisions.
4. Achieve Marketing and Sales Alignment
Savvy inbound marketers know that collaboration is a vital part of driving long-term growth. But achieving marketing and sales alignment is no simple feat. Marketing automation software can help you bridge the gap between your teams and promote universal buy-in on growth initiatives. The transparency provided by closed-loop reporting increases marketing and sales accountability and promotes greater cross-departmental communication and alignment.
5. Execute A/B Testing
Many marketing automation platforms offer sophisticated A/B testing options that don't require you to export or migrate data for easy manipulation. To make matters even easier, with closed-loop reporting, the data you collect from your A/B tests will be directly funneled into your marketing automation platform to inform recommendations and nurture strategies.
As with any tool, the benefit you reap is proportional to the effort you put in. Your marketing automation platform should give you a wealth of insight to leverage in your marketing strategy, but it's important to set aside time to use it to maximum effect. Test and experiment with different platform features to optimize your site and improve conversion rates.
Need help choosing a marketing automation solution that's right for your business? Access our webinar to learn the ins and outs of marketing automation.
