Why marketing automation is critical for your business in 2020

It’s 2020 – it almost sounds futuristic – and thanks to evolved marketing techniques, we have enabled the most effective and creative projects to come to life, but not without the help of a little automation.

Majority of communication we receive today in the form of a notification, email, text or even call is done through automation and systems. Marketing Automation tools are projected to grow rapidly, reaching $25.1 billion annually in value by 2023. But if automation is something you haven’t heard of or if your business has not yet adopted some level of automation, here are four major benefits of having your marketing program automated in 2020:

1. TIME

We are all time poor and I can’t imagine it’s going to change anytime soon. Time is valuable and we only have so many hours in a day to do what we need to do – so how do we make those hours count?

Most businesses in their infancy start a marketing program by responding to each enquiry individually, but as your business grows the reality is, it’s just not feasible. To get started, review your marketing process and see where most of your time is dedicated. Once you have identified your time sucker, research tools that can alleviate it. For example, you can implement an email marketing tool such as Mailchimp or Active Campaign to send and manage your weekly or monthly newsletter. This will allow you to be more efficient and spend your time on things that can’t be automated (such as face-to-face meetings).

2. EFFICIENCY AND ENGAGEMENT

An efficient team makes for an efficient business, which in turn delivers more revenue. Closely related to time, the more efficient your marketing processes are, the more time your staff can spend on other valuable work that often gets pushed to the ‘tomorrow’ pile.

Your customers will also thank you for efficient marketing processes. Everyone has had a poor experience with a brand that was purely let down by its lack (or abundance) of marketing. Efficient marketing creates audiences that are highly engaged as they are receiving content or information when they want and how they want – thanks to automation.

3. INTEGRATION

Digital transformation and integration are words we hear frequently thrown around in the digital world. But the impact of a tool which allows you to integrate every facet of your business into one centralised system is truly life changing for a marketer. It’s great to have a lot of data, but when you are pulling it from 10 different tools and aren’t sure if there is a correlation between the two, it can leave in you in a pile of numbers that mean nothing.

By integrating your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program with your marketing, sales, projects or HR/people systems, you create a well-oiled machine that talks to each other and draws conclusions you might not even realise exist. If the tools you are using don’t have a natural integration, there are applications such as Zapier that provide integration software to make this possible.

4. REPORTING

We all know that reporting and data are just as valuable (or even more valuable) than the marketing systems we use to generate the results. However, it can be extremely time consuming collating and presenting the data in a digestible format.

‘Automation’ as its name alludes will automatically compile reports, tables and graphs in real-time, giving you accurate data to present with the click of a button. Initially you will need to invest time into setting up the reports you require, but moving forward, all you need to do is visit your reporting dashboard to find your data.

If you are manually compiling your data into Excel spreadsheets each week, and then creating Excel graphs to present them visually, consider some tools and CRMs that can assist with this. A few good examples are HubSpot (free CRM), Klipfolio, Marketo, Cyfe, and many more – just do some research and undergo free trials.

Understandably, automation, systems and implementation can be quite daunting – especially to those business that feel they aren’t quite ready. For large scale marketing plans, automation should be in your pipeline, but for those starting out, adopting small levels of automation can make your life much easier.

If you are unsure what systems can provide the level of automation you need for your business, reach out to our digital marketing team at info@elevatecom.com.au.