Recent advancements in digital marketing have improved content management and distribution, increasing visibility for firms.This article discusses marketing automation and its favorable influence on organizations’ marketing activities.
Digital marketing utilizes numerous methods, including websites, blogs, email marketing, and social media, to reach the target audience and convert them into customers.However, controlling the amount of activities and targeting every audience is a difficult challenge.As a result, marketing automation has become a critical component in this situation.
But what is marketing automation?
Marketing automation helps companies reach, relate to, sell and retain customers in a personalized way and on a large scale , managing all strategies in an automated way. This way, marketers are able to reach many more leads (website or blog visitors, for example, who have purchasing potential) and convert them into customers, so that this entire process occurs with more agility and information security.
Marketing automation uses software and other technologies so that this large-scale reach occurs, thus reducing manual work, which is generally based on daily repetitions, therefore reducing the time spent on each action. Reaching a large volume of customers without appropriate tools would require a very high volume of professionals, which would make it unfeasible for companies to operate due to the high cost.
Despite this, such specialized software does not exclude the need for a good marketing team to know how to take advantage of these tools through marketing strategies designed for their customers. Automation only makes this process faster and brings more competitiveness to the company.
Among the activities that can be optimized with automation are:
- Manage blogs and websites;
- Posts (text, photos and videos) on social networks and
- company pages, optimized for the defined target audience/ persona ;
- Creation of email marketing campaigns to capture more leads for the platforms;
- Creation of landing pages ;
- Production of materials such as e-books, infographics,
- webinars and spreadsheets for the sales sector;
- Creation of calls-to-action;
- Creation of forms for specific actions;
- Measuring results on platforms such as Google Analytics , among others.
These are the main processes carried out by digital marketing, but they are not the only ones; Therefore, automation comes to help manage these various activities, bringing more speed, efficiency and effectiveness.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
By greatly facilitating the management of a large volume of activities, marketing automation has been gaining ground not only in large companies but especially in small and medium-sized ones that have more limited resources (people, financial and time). Let’s look at some of its main benefits:
Lead nurturing
One of the first actions performed by the digital marketing team is to establish a strong and relevant source of leads.Automation plays a crucial part in nurturing leads who are not yet ready to make a purchase.
By providing customized material at their stage of the purchasing path, they can eventually become customers.As a result, these solutions will offer even more optimized material to leads at this point, guiding them to the precise moment of purchase.
Helps the sales team work
As communication between digital marketing and the sales sector must be sharp, software capable of concentrating all lead information in one place greatly facilitates this “marketing-sales” partnership . This way, sellers have in hand who the potential buyers are, their demands, characteristics and those who are still in the nurturing phase, which facilitates the final approach to the sale.
Customer loyalty
Even after managing to take the lead to make a purchase with the sales department, retaining them is also an important task so that they continue to invest in your company and pass on this experience to their acquaintances. With post-sales automation, it is possible to constantly send, first-hand, attractive offers to your customers through email marketing, for example.
Reduction in CAC – customer acquisition cost
CAC is a metric that indicates how much was spent to gain a new customer for the company. With automation, it is possible to win and nurture leads, through mass automated campaigns, reaching many more customers without spending a single extra cent. Obviously this reduces the cost of acquiring new customers.
Furthermore, the time invested in taking care of each process manually, analyzing profile by profile of your future customers, is a huge waste of resources and energy if it weren’t for automation, as the team could be focused on other strategies to generate direct profit.
