Marketing undoubtedly is one of the core aspects for any business irrespective of its size and the vertical it operators into. Though a business may have a super-cool service model or product, everything is pointless if its audience is unaware of the same. Yes, as Seth Godin puts, “marketing is a contest for people’s attention”. Without a robust plan, a business would simply drift towards a disaster.

With the rising levels of competition in the business landscape, marketing to has become a challenging task. Marketing experts across the globe are trying their best to keep up with changing marketing tools, dynamics and frequently changing demands of customers.

This is why there is a steep rise in the number of marketing professionals resorting to emerging marketing technologies and marketing automation is one such marketing trend that is catching up the pace.

1. Marketing then vs now:

Marketing practices have evolved greatly from billboards to printed advertising and are now more of digital practice. Digital marketing brings in a new set of advantages and challenges for marketers. For a business to stay ahead of the curve, marketers ought to overcome these challenges and leverage the advantages to gain an edge.

One of the biggest benefits is the ability to learn and understand your customers in a much better manner than before followed by establishing long-term and stronger customer relationships with your customers by providing them with personalized content.

This is the place marketing automation comes into the picture. Yes,CRM marketing automation is proving out to be a boon when it comes to CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

Here’s how marketing automation is here to transform the way businesses market:

2. Personalization

Personalization unarguably is one of the critical aspects when it comes to lead nurturing. After all, who wouldn’t prefer a personalized birthday card or anniversary wish from their favorite brand? Marketing automation helps streamline the process of sharing the right type of marketing content to the right audiences and at the right time.

Marketing automation tools help marketers capture critical data such as emails or newsletters that a customer clicks and/or opens, posts or content that receive decent engagement on search patterns, website visits, social media handles, etc. Marketing automation along with a good CRM software can help marketers achieve these.

3. Drives leads

Marketing automation can greatly assist a business drive its marketing ROI and success. Since we know lead generation is a critical factor for a company’s growth. Automating the various steps that take place between the marketing and sales departments while allowing them to focus more on nurturing the leads. And not to forget, lead nurturing leads to increased prospects and increased prospects means more business/customers.

Also, marketing automation helps get detailed insights and picture into the behavior of potential leads or customers. For example, tracking user behaviors such as a user’s website browsing or usage patterns with the help of a robust social CRM software armed with exceptional marketing automation capabilities can greatly help a marketing department identify as well as understand his/her preferences and/or interests.

The result is targeted and customized follow-up, as well as marketing campaign, developed using intelligent insights obtained through marketing automation tools.

4. Smart marketing (marketing)

Though big data is the talk of the town these days, only a handful of businesses know the secret sauce to leverage it at its optimal.

Here, marketing automation could enable a business to harness the power of big data more effortlessly and effectively by assisting in collecting actionable marketing intelligence at the click of a button.

For example, a robust marketing automation tool can offer a centralized dashboard or hub to help track intelligent analytics and generate insightful reports. Marketing automation software is a great tool to measure and track marketing campaigns along with predicting customer behaviors and much more from a single window.

One of the greatest advantages of marketing automation is that it assists a marketer to gather and manage comprehensive profiles of prospects. Lastly yet importantly, marketing professionals can A/B test marketing plans to track and identify the best technique that works.

5. Drives ROI

Marketing automation is not only helpful in saving time, but also in saving money. It helps curb the labor cost, which can be further invested in other mission-critical tasks thereby, contributing to an organization’s bottom-line.

Marketing automation would free up an organization’s marketing budget and its team allowing channelizing the money in other critical tasks, be it your annual marketing budget or a dream marketing campaign budget. Long story short, marketing automation assures positive ROI when leveraged effectively.

Conclusion

Marketing automation helps a business enjoy the aforementioned benefits along with many others. If you want to drive your marketing efforts to the next big level, then marketing automation is the perfect pick for you.

Further, pairing it with a good CRM software would assist you to uncover detailed insights on user behaviors including site visits, browsing patterns, preferences/interests, etc. A marketing and sales team when armed with robust CRM software that is equipped with excellent marketing automation capabilities can work great when it comes to driving customer experience and sales.

Helpful Resources:

1. 16 Best (free) AMP – (Accelerated Mobile Pages) WordPress Plugins

2. Do Human Translators Have a Reason to Be Afraid of Advancing Technologies

3. Artificial Intelligence And Its Demands To The Programmers

4. Artificial intelligence (AI): Friend or Foe to Future Designers?

5. E-commerce Chatbots: 13 Ways to Increase Sales, Conversions & Retention