Today’s marketers surely have a lot on their plate! Constantly keeping up with the ever-changing customers’ behavior, dealing with the rise of multi-channel selling, producing leads, and increasing sales in the shortest possible time are just the things to begin with.
Then, how are marketers supposed to thrive under such constraints?
Thanks to the internet, there are marketing automation tools as a lifesaver to support their efforts.
Marketing automation tools make the marketer’s job a little more painless by reducing repetitive and time-consuming tasks. And in some cases, even eliminating them.
Because of its significant impacts and roles, automation has now quickly become a critical element of successful marketing campaigns in this digital era.
Now, the question is, how does it benefit your business?
Let’s find out!
What Exactly Is an Automation Tool?
Before we get into the nitty-gritty, we have to make sure that we’re on the same page about the definition of marketing automation tools. What is it exactly?
A marketing automation tool is a software or web-based service that allows you to plan, execute, and measure your marketing campaigns automatically. This way, it’d be much easier for you to streamline your marketing tasks and workflows.
In other words, a marketing automation tool helps key marketing channels to operate faster and measure the performance much simpler.
In an industry that continues to grow and becomes more complex, automation tools help you save time, energy, and money by simplifying your tasks. So, it should come as no surprise that at least 79% of savvy companies have been investing in automation tools for years.
How Marketing Automation Tools Help Your Business
Beyond just simplifying your tasks and increasing your productivity, marketing automation tools can also bring you more effective and even better marketing results.
More than 80% of marketers see increased leads after they use marketing automation tools, while 77% of them also see an increase in conversions.
To help you more insights on how marketing automation tools take your campaigns to the next level, we’ve listed the essential reasons for you.
Time and Cost-Saving Marketing Strategy
Through the use of marketing automation tools, you’re able to save yourself time and money while running a marketing campaign.
The study found that a great use of marketing automation tools improved business productivity by an average of 20%.
You don’t have to spend hours even a day to manually input data entry work. You don’t also need to reply to customer emails one by one either. The marketing automation tool does it all for you. This way, you can focus on more important tasks that require more attention.
The beauty of automation is that it doesn’t require you to hire or train additional staff that can give you an extra cost. Above all else, marketing automation is an affordable tool you can easily invest in.
There are a bunch of companies that offer you free versions or trials. This is a precious resource for small and medium-sized businesses with a shoestring budget.
Real-time Data and Reports
A successful business always makes sure to monitor and keep track of their marketing campaigns’ performance and continuously measure them so that they can be optimized for better results in the future.
Marketing automation tools provide you with live reporting and real-time data, making it easier for you to glean reliable insights on what’s going on in the market, including your target customers’ preferences and behavior.
You’ll get the data on how many people open your emails, how many viewers watch your explainer videos, and how many visitors engage with your website content.
With those real-time data and reports, you’ll understand how well your marketing campaigns are performing at achieving your goals. It’s easy to track which areas you need to double down or cut down, allowing you to make small changes to improve future campaigns based on what you learn.
The in-depth reports and analytics also help you to easily make data-driven decisions to open up new opportunities and track their progress hassle-free.
Improve Your ROI Faster
Marketing automation tools allow you to source more pipelines from your marketing campaigns, have more productive sales reps, and experience better revenue attainment.
Most marketing automation tools focus on efficiency and effectiveness. It means that it can bring you a better ROI faster by increasing the number of leads you generate. The more leads you generate, the higher your chances to skyrocket your sales.
Not only does marketing automation tools help you improve your ROI, but it also makes it much easier for you to measure the ROI of your overall marketing campaigns itself.
Most marketers with marketing automation claim that they’re getting better at measuring their marketing campaigns’ ROI compared to marketers who haven’t tapped into the marketing automation bandwagon. Take a look at the chart below.
Almost a half (48%) of marketers admit that marketing automation tools always play such a significant role in proving their marketing ROI. This number is bigger than those marketers who don’t incorporate marketing automation into their campaigns (35%).
High-Level of Personalization
Marketing automation tools understand your specific audiences’ behavior and activity, allowing you to achieve a higher level of personalization. This way, you can create relatable content (including marketing emails) that resonate with your target audiences.
Here, personalization is critical when it comes to the lead nurturing process. Your target audiences don’t simply engage with impersonal, so far-away content. They need more personalization to build a more personal, meaningful connection with you.
So, instead of sending out a generic email blast to thousands of contacts and crossing your fingers – hoping some of them would be interested in clicking it and taking action, you can use automation tools to add more personalization that brings more value to your audiences.
Using a Compatible Content Management System
You can always select a scalable content management system like WordPress, HubSpot CMS, Contentful or others to manage your organic traffic and run outbound marketing campaign.
You can always use plugins or integrations to run marketing campaigns and engage your audience.
Wrapping Up
Marketing automation tools allow you to reap all the benefits of your marketing strategy much easier and, of course, cheaper. If used rightly, automation tools will certainly get you more sales that can help grow your business in the shortest time possible.
With a lot of marketing automation tools out there, the key is to choose the ones that match your business’ needs, preferences, and budgets. Also, you can always put some tools in any combination to suit your needs.
Author
Andre Oentoro is the founder of Breadnbeyond, an award-winning explainer video company. He helps businesses increase conversion rates, close more sales, and get positive ROI from explainer videos (in that order).