10 marketing tasks you can automate today to drive ROI

Marketing automation has come a long way, especially with the rise of AI. It is no longer just a convenience, it has become a valuable asset that empowers your team to scale marketing operations efficiently and maximize ROI. For digital marketers and CMOs, automation can streamline a wide array of repetitive tasks and manual work. It can free up a lot of valuable time that your team can then invest in more strategic work. In this blog post, we share 10 marketing tasks you can automate today to drive ROI for your organization.

1. Lead scoring and qualification

Manually scoring and qualifying leads is a time-consuming job. With labor costs these days, this can get expensive. On top of that, it is error-prone. Automated lead scoring helps prioritize leads based on engagement, demographic data, and fit with your buyer personas. By setting up scoring models in your CRM or marketing automation platform, you ensure only the most qualified leads are passed to sales. This accelerates your conversion rates and reduces wasted effort on unqualified prospects in your sales team.

ROI Impact: Sales teams receive higher-quality leads. This results in reduced the sales cycles and higher conversion rates, by focusing on prospects with genuine interest and high potential.

2. Email marketing sequences

Personalized email nurturing sequences play a big role in guiding leads down the funnel. But sending individual follow-up emails is time-consuming and are always highly inconsistent. Sending that many emails at the right moment manually without making any errors is simply Mission Impossible. With automation, you can create drip campaigns (or lead nurture workflows) that send relevant content at optimal intervals based on your lead’s actions. This is a great way to stay top-of-mind without spending time on manual follow-ups.

ROI Impact: Automated email sequences yield higher engagement rates and nurture leads more effectively. This can increase email-driven conversions by 50% or more.

3. Social media posting and monitoring

Keeping up with social media content can be overwhelming, especially if you have a small team that manages multiple platforms. Scheduling tools allow you to automate posts across channels, ensuring consistent brand visibility and engagement. Additionally, automation can monitor brand mentions, keywords, and relevant conversations. This enables your team to seize opportunities for interaction with your target audience.

ROI Impact: By automating posting and monitoring, you increase engagement rates and free up social media managers to focus on creative strategy. This will result in enhanced brand loyalty and increased inbound traffic.

4. Personalized website content

Creating personalized experiences on your website can really improve engagement and can lea to quicker conversions. Think about recommendations for relevant content, product information, or case studies. Marketing automation tools can display content based on a visitor’s history, behavior, or persona. That makes every interaction a lot more relevant, which increases the chances of them becoming a paying customer.

ROI Impact: Personalization leads to longer site visits and higher conversion rates, as visitors get to see content that speaks directly to their needs. This can boost lead quality and conversion rates by up to 50%.

5. Ad retargeting

Retargeting site visitors manually is next to impossible. Automated ad retargeting keeps your brand top-of-mind for potential leads who’ve shown interest but didn’t convert. You can automate display ads to follow visitors on other platforms, reminding them of your brand and nudging them back to your company’s website.

ROI Impact: Retargeted ads can increase click-through rates (CTR) by as much as 10x and deliver a higher return on ad spend by focusing on visitors who have already shown interest in your services.

6. Event and webinar follow-up

If your organization hosts regular webinars or events, automated follow-up emails ensure attendees receive all the practical information and resources they need, before or after the event. You can send a series of reminder emails with practical details before the event. And you can automatically send thank-you notes, event recordings, and additional resources without missing a beat, helping keep leads warm after the event.

ROI Impact: Automated follow-up emails improve lead nurturing, as leads who receive timely follow-ups are more likely to re-engage and advance down your sales funnel.

7. Data entry and contact updates

Manually updating contact information in your CRM is a very tedious job that nobody really likes to do. But it is also extremely prone to human error. We have seen some pretty wild stuff in CRM, with properties being abused for shady purposes. Automating data entry and contact updates allows your CRM to pull new information from forms, emails, and other sources to maintain up-to-date, accurate records. This can include syncing email signatures, LinkedIn profiles, or form submissions.

ROI Impact: Accurate data reduces the risk of targeting errors and improves the effectiveness of lead segmentation and communication. This leads to better campaign results and a much cleaner database with correct data.

8. Assigning leads to sales reps

Matching leads with the right sales reps within your company ensures timely follow-ups. This matching can be done based on many different factores, like territory, expertise, or availability. Automating lead routing based on set criteria, like company size, location, or product interest, helps improve response times and increases the likelihood of conversion.

ROI Impact: Faster, more targeted lead assignment cuts down on response time. This has been shown to improve lead conversion rates by as much as 9x when reps follow up within five minutes. That is a huge positive impact on your organization!

9. Content distribution

After you create valuable content, automating its distribution across different channels helps maximize its reach. Every organization uses different channels like their own website, emails, social media, or even apps and online communities. Feeding these channels with content manually takes a lot of time, and it’s mostly just copy paste work anyway. By scheduling or automating content sharing, you make sure that your content is consistently seen by your audience with almost no manual effort.

ROI Impact: Regular and systematic content distribution helps increase brand visibility and traffic. This drives a greater volume of qualified leads and supporting SEO efforts with consistent engagement across channels.

10. Reporting and analytics

Compiling reports manually is time-consuming, and most people don’t even like reporting and analytics anyway. Yet it’s such an important step in the whole marketing process. Automation tools like dashboards and report scheduling can consolidate data from various sources to provide real-time insights without requiring constant manual updating. Automated reporting tools allow you to set KPIs, monitor them automatically, and get detailed reports at set intervals, right in your inbox if you want.

ROI Impact: Automated reporting saves time, reduces human error, and enables faster, data-driven decision-making. It leads to increased effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing strategies.

Of course there are many more tasks you could be automating with a state-of-the-art marketing automation platform like Hubspot or Salesforce to name just 2 big ones. Just start where it makes the most sense for you, and start freeing up time and avoiding human errors. You will quickly start seeing the potential ROI of these platforms. You’d be amazed to see how much growth some companies manage to get from these platforms. It does take some effort, but I promise you, it is totally worth it. 

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