Why should businesses invest in marketing automation

Marketing automation

A rapidly evolving and digitally savvy consumer base is pushing enterprises to invest continuously on empowering their workforce with the right digital solutions to cater to growing consumer interests. A major portion of these investments goes into automating various facets of customer-facing operations and turn them into more data-driven and efficient revenue streams. One such key operational department is marketing and marketing automation is now a hotbed for technology innovations be it any industrial sector we take as a reference.

In fact industry watchdog and leading research firm Forrester predicts that by 2023, the global spending on marketing automation tools will surpass the figure of USD 25 billion with a projected annual growth rate of 14 percent every year. Leaders across industries are realizing the value that marketing automation can bring about in their bottom line profit improvement strategies. From cost reduction to faster closure of high-value leads, the possibilities are immense. Here’s a closer look at 5 tangible benefits for enterprises to enjoy if they have plans on investing in marketing automation. 

Create content and sit back

Until the time Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes so advanced to create compelling original content, the human element of creativity is a must have in your marketing team. Be it a catchy headline or a blog or a visual infographic or video, creative content is a key pillar that establishes your businesses identity from competitors. That said, content creation and content marketing are two extremely different verticals in today’s internet-controlled market conditions.

While the story needs to be created by your workforce, the effort needed to propagate the story in the form of multiple marketing collateral is no longer a tedious and time-consuming manual effort. With intelligent marketing automation, you just create the content and let the automation tools do their magic. From scheduling favorable time slots for email campaigns to tracking analytics of social media engagement, today’s marketing automation tools can holistically manage almost every marketing channel that your business can utilize to reach out to potential customers. This also means that you can pay attention to more operational and value driving activities in your business rather than having to engage resources in tedious marketing data entry and monitoring jobs. 

Generate quality leads with Marketing automation

Thanks to the proliferation of the internet and smartphones, the number of leads that come to your CRM system has increased multifold. But how many of these leads are relevant to your business or what percentage of these leads are likely to transition into a revenue making deals for you? The number might be very low. By bringing on-board powerful AI enabled marketing automation tools, it becomes easier for businesses to target the right customer persona and hence generate quality leads that have higher chances of conversion than regular ones.

Using features such as lead scoring, behavioral analysis, spending pattern analytics, demographic and seasonal insights, marketing automation platforms can create the most accurate 360-degree view of your ideal customer and help in filtering quality leads from your inbound and outbound marketing channels. 

Offer personalized customer experiences

The large gamut of data that today’s enterprise systems generate from customer interactions offer you a huge plethora of personalization options in your customer reach initiatives for further business deals. This personalization is brought about by powerful marketing automation tools that consume data from multiple customer touch points and provide insights on how to create the most personalized marketing message and campaign for every category of consumers.

From things as simple as sending an automated email campaign to a customer when they are most likely to read it, to suggesting a purchase along with a product or service that a customer has already invested in. Besides, marketing automation tools can become virtual assistants to customers by querying customers for their interests and recommending the best deals to them based on their budgets, history of purchases and much more. The more personal your outlook to a customer is, the greater will be their loyalty for your business. 

Stay connected and relevant to dynamic consumer demands

Very often businesses make the mistake of using their marketing prowess to just acquire new customers. Marketing as a function is aimed primarily at both acquiring new customers as well as nurturing and growing relationships with existing customers. The needs of consumers change constantly. This is evident from the product roll-out timelines of popular consumer brands like Apple, Samsung, etc. who have annual events announcing their latest devices with improved capabilities than the preceding versions.

Due to time and manpower constraints, several businesses do not invest in the relationship nurturing aspect and in the long run, end up with a smaller customer base to sell products and services. This is a scenario you can easily handle with marketing automation. Modern day marketing automation tools have powerful analytics capability that provides you with insights about a user’s behavior and usage history of your products or services. These insights can be used to target them with up-selling and cross-selling opportunities depending on their behavior as well as market conditions.

Offering discounts to aid and fasten purchasing decisions, recommending seasonal upgrades, maintenance schedule reminders, feedback surveys, etc. are all highly engaging activities to take to your customer after they have made a transaction with you. This gives you the advantage of staying connected with customers always as well as become relevant in today’s highly dynamic market conditions. 

Measure and track performance with Marketing automation

Every marketing activity or campaign needs to be monitored and measured for its performance and this is a vital indicator on the ROI they bring to an organization. Today, marketing automation platforms have in-built performance metering and analytical features that give marketers accurate reports about how well a campaign has performed with its targeted audience.

These reports could be simple parameters such as the open and click rates of an email campaign to fully fledged reports on social media activity as several impressions, leads generated through a campaign, several new leads brought into the CRM from a campaign and so on. The list is endless, and it becomes a key parameter by which marketing teams are evaluated by decision makers and leaders within an organization. By measuring the impact of a campaign, decisions such as budgetary allocation for the next campaign, target audience list modifications, campaign context, and content changes, etc. can be made to improve ROI considerably in future campaigns.

We have covered 5 reasons as to why investing in marketing automation is vital for enterprises in 2019. From building a robust sales pipeline to growing bottom line revenue, marketing automation can create a significant impact on the way today’s businesses perform in highly challenging markets. Studies have shown that marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity as well. Thus, it becomes a great enabler for your sales team as well. The possibilities are limitless and with the right technical advisory, you are one step closer to becoming the most preferred brand among your customers.

Author Bio: Tony believes in building technology around processes, rather than building processes around technology. At Fingent, he specializes in custom software development, especially in analyzing processes, refining it and then building technology around it. He works with clients on a daily basis to understand and analyze their operational structure, discover (and not invent) key improvement areas and come up with technology solutions to deliver an efficient process.