Marketing automation encompasses all the techniques for automating your campaigns and digital processes. Like any automation, the goal is to reduce the time assigned to boring tasks to focus on creative tasks. Optimization of daily work particularly relevant for marketing teams. While there are a few pitfalls to avoid, the benefits of effective automation are many.
HOW DOES MARKETING AUTOMATION WORK?
We have already told you about marketing automation and its ability to generate more leads for your business. Because that is the ultimate goal of these practices: to convert your inbound marketing strategy based on the production of high value-added content into potential customers for the sales teams. The marketing automation method is simple, less loss between the different stages of the conversion tunnel.
With marketing automation, you will be able to set up actions adjusted to the Internet user and the profile that you have been able to establish thanks to the analysis of his behavior. The technical possibilities to do so are such that you can individualize the monitoring of your web visitors. This would be very positive for your image, as well as for your processes.
NO MARKETING AUTOMATION WITHOUT A STRATEGY!
Defining a good strategy includes defining objectives, means and indicators. We must therefore not forget that marketing automation is a tool in a more global strategy. Which implies that excellent automatisms are not enough. A high-quality content strategy is an indispensable element, through which marketing automation becomes effective.
In the same way, a good segmentation of your audience base is essential to the smooth running of your processes. You won’t get any benefit from your automation if it sends the same content to a business executive as it does to an individual. In addition, you will not be able to learn more about the specificities of your targets, and will not be able to personalize either content or processes.
The quality of your marketing automation is also dependent on your accuracy of analysis. In marketing as elsewhere, it’s about being in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing. Without the synchronization of these three elements, you risk losing the power of your content and missing your target. For example, trying to sell too early means taking the risk of rushing your interlocutor. Sell too late, and a competitor will have already secured the signature. To position yourself at the right time, think of the Buyer’s Journey !
Making the link between your content, your website, your landing pages and your CRM software is one of the missions of your marketing automation solution like Dynamics 365 for Marketing. It also allows you to calibrate your lead nurturing according to the progress of your relationship with him.
It is also necessary to know how to analyze the quality of its diagrams. For this, the various reporting tools are a valuable aid. With real-time statistics and data, there are real possibilities for constant improvement of the marketing automation system.
MARKETING AUTOMATION AT THE SERVICE OF YOUR COMPANY AND YOUR EMPLOYEES
We have identified 5 major benefits that marketing automation brings to your business.
#1 Save time
Whether for your marketing or sales teams, setting up automatic processes is a considerable time saver. Programming an emailing campaign will be much faster, for example, since you only program it once but its action can last over time.
#2 Productivity gain
This is the direct result of saving time. You no longer spend two days on the tedious tasks of a marketing campaign, but only half a day setting up these tasks for automation. You can therefore use the day and a half remaining to further push the quality of your content, or to work on your distribution channels. A way to perform better.
#3 Gain in comfort
In addition to freeing up a significant amount of time to move forward more calmly on other tasks, marketing automation will indeed make nurturing work much more stimulating. By eliminating daunting tasks that can be sources of inattentive errors, the quality of creative tasks will rise in equal proportion to the satisfaction of your employees with respect to their work. On the other hand, they may take your time to thank you for choosing this type of tool!
#4 Gain in commercial efficiency
Marketing automation will allow you to collect a lot of information on the behavior of your contacts. The scoring methods will therefore be more effective and relevant, and you will be able to better adapt the actions to be taken with each target. From then on, you will be able to send the sales team more interesting leads to convert , but also more personalized tools to do it well.
#5 Gain in database quality
You can use the information collected with your marketing automation solution to enrich your database. A solution like ClickDimensions, for example, is perfectly connectable to Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales, in order to naturally link the results of your automation to your contact files. Centralization is the major advantage of this system , which avoids any loss of data, but also unifies processing around unique entities to avoid the creation of duplicates.
If marketing automation makes it possible to collect new information on prospects, it is necessary to be able to share this information with a suitable CRM software to take advantage of it. We therefore offer a CRM comparison to bring new elements to your thinking.