Council Post: Three Ways Marketing Automation Can Help Grow Your Business

By Jared Atchison, co-founder of WPForms, a drag & drop form builder for WordPress that’s being used on over 400,000 websites.

As your business grows, you’ll need to create ways to improve efficiency and accomplish more in less time. Keeping up with your customers’ demands requires extra attention and effort that you can’t put in unless you employ marketing automation. If you have yet to use automation, now is a good time to understand its benefits and how it can help your marketing troubles.

Marketing automation is software that uses predefined rules to perform routine tasks automatically. When done correctly, it can streamline your marketing strategies, improve efficiency and scale your business. 

According to HubSpot, around 68% of businesses rely on marketing automation to reach their objectives. This leaves more room for better results because it’s easier to organize strategies and support growth. Let’s look at a few ways you can use marketing automation to help your business grow and prosper. 

Improve Productivity And Save Time

When you work smarter, you develop ways to accomplish more in less time. Marketing automation takes away the need to repeat manual tasks by doing them for you. 

If you complete the same tasks every day, you lose time working on other, more important tasks. Putting energy into smaller tasks, such as posting to social media, publishing blog posts and sending emails, wastes valuable time you could spend maximizing profit and nurturing leads.

It’s easier to accomplish more with marketing automation because you can concentrate on the parts of your funnel that need more attention. Perhaps you need to put more effort into the bottom of the sales funnel so you can convert more paying customers, for example. Having automated tools in place can give you peace of mind so you know your business is working even when you aren’t. 

Personalize The Customer Experience

Instead of spending hour after hour completing repetitive tasks, you and your team can focus on catering to your customers. You can spend more time understanding your target audience, collecting feedback and personalizing the user experience so you see better results.

You can use marketing automation to target specific customers through different channels, such as email, social media and your website. When you get to know your customers through multiple channels, it’s easier to understand them better and create a personalized customer experience. This encourages customer retention and increased conversions.

When automation nurtures site visitors into leads, it segments them based on different characteristics and criteria. These details of your audience, such as past purchases and buying behavior, give you insight into how to market to them effectively. As a result, they get a personalized experience from your brand while you move a prospect further down the sales funnel.

Reduce Costs

When you can’t handle all the items on your to-do list, you need to hire employees to take over the workload. You need to compensate them for their work, which costs money you could spend elsewhere. Without marketing automation, you could end up hiring more hands than you need.

Marketing automation reduces costs for your business by eliminating the need for several resources. Adopting automation means you don’t need to spend on multiple kinds of software and can streamline processes using fewer resources. 

You can also use marketing automation to manage your data. Using predefined rules, it can update, delete, store and distribute content without requiring manual action. 

Using Marketing Automation For Your Business

Small-business owners need to know what to expect with automation when they first start out. Otherwise, it could create more problems for their business and customers. 

Before tapping into automation, make sure you have a strategy to improve current processes. You can’t boost conversions and increase sales unless you plan how you’re going to use the software to reach your goals. Before purchasing automation tools, know what you plan to do with them first. It’s best to use one or two tools well instead of spreading your efforts thin across multiple applications.

It’s also crucial that the content you automate offers value and insight. People want solutions to their pain points, so what you automate needs to be relevant to your audience. When you consistently put out excellent content, the conversions will follow.

Finally, remember to use segmentation to effectively cater to leads and produce sales. Segmentation makes it possible to personalize your content and create targeted marketing messages that convert. If you fail to cater to your customers’ specific needs, they’ll turn to your competitors and leave you behind.

Over To You

It’s important to take advantage of all opportunities to increase efficiency and produce quality results. From lowering departmental costs to increasing conversions, automation has the power to scale your business and help you prepare for its growth.