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Marketers and business leaders are looking more and more at marketing automation platforms as a catalyst for business growth, and rightfully so. Marketing automation however is often only associated with email campaigns. Don’t get me wrong: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with automating emails, on the contrary. But at the same time, so much potential remains untapped. So in this blog post, we’re shedding some light on different types of automation that may work wonders for your organization.
Indeed, let’s start by kicking in an open door: automated emails. Email is still a very important part of any organizations marketing activities, because it allows you to deliver highly personalized 1 to 1 messages.
This type of automation is very useful for nurturing existing leads with highly targeted content and keeping prospects engaged. But there are many different things you can do with emails. For example, you can send cart abandonment emails when someone was shopping on your webshop. Or you could send automated emails when someone asks for a demo or a test account. Another example is a series of automated emails when onboarding a new client or when a client renews a contract with your organization.
Throughout the whole customer journey, there are several ways you can automat email to support the different processes in your organization.
Today social media plays a significant role in marketing, offering platforms to showcase expertise, engage with prospects, and build brand awareness. Social media marketing automation tools enable businesses to schedule posts across different channels, monitor conversations, and analyze performance metrics. And all this is possible from a single dashboard. By automating routine tasks like content scheduling or social listening, marketing teams can focus their efforts on creating great content and engaging with their audience effectively.
We keep on saying that no business can survive without leads: they are needed for sales. Managing leads effectively can be quite challenging, and it’s crucial to drive conversions for your business. With the right automation platform you can streamline the process. It allows you to capture leads from many different sources, like forms on websites, ads, landing pages and social media. Your automation software also enables you to automatically assign leads to the right sales person based on predefined criteria. You could also use your automation platform to automatically update information about contacts based on specific triggers. These tools often include lead scoring capabilities that allow you to prioritize leads based on behavior or demographic data.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are crucial for sales and marketing operations these days. They allow businesses to manage interactions with prospects and customers efficiently throughout the customer journey. Ideally your marketing automation platform integrates seamlessly with your CRM so you can gather all data in one single place, track interactions and created targeted campaigns based on actual data and insights. This approach helps you approach client engagement consistently and ensure a better collaboration between different teams in your organization.
With tools like Hubspot or Salesforce, you can pretty much get your CRM and automation tools in 1 single platform so everything is very well integrated out of the box. But if you are using different tools, there is a good chance you can find decent integrations as well.
If you read our blog from time to time, you know that we attach a lot of importance to content marketing. It helps establish credibility, educate prospects, build trust and drive traffic to your website. With automation you can streamline the whole process of creating and distributing your content on different channels. It allows you to schedule content on different channels from 1 single place. You can also set up dashboards with data from different channels, allowing you to measure results, get insights from your content marketing efforts and adjust your strategy based on data. All of these things empower your marketing team to focus on the right things and to run better campaigns.
Perhaps it’s not the sexiest part of marketing, but it’s so important to measure results and gather relevant data. A good marketing automation platform will do exactly that. If all the necessary integrations are in place, it will gather data from other sources too, like social media or apps. You can then build dashboards and reports tailored to your organization’s needs. You could even go as far as creating different dashboards for different types of stakeholders and offer them tailored reports for their specific role. And you only need to set up everything once: after that you can have it all sent to the right stakeholders both inside and outside your organization at regular intervals. No more digging in analytics tools that are not that user friendly. With automation, you can just find it in your mailbox in easy to read formats.
So you see, there is much more that you can automate than just some emails. There are many different ways to automate your marketing processes and seriously reduce the amount of manual and repetitive work. If you look at all the different ways to automate work, you will soon understand that the price of your automation software is a lot lower than having to hire someone to do all of that work manually. Whether you’re in HR, software development, or other business services, integrating automation into your marketing strategy can pave the way for sustained success and a healthy ROI.
Looking to automate your marketing? Download our marketing automation guide and get started the right way!
