With the rise of competition in every single marketplace, it’s never been more important for your business to become more efficient.

With the sheer amount of information that people are being bombarded with, it’s extremely hard to get their attention or even getting them to remember you and your brand after they’ve visited your website.

That’s where marketing automation comes in – marketing automation allows you to get in front of your prospects at all stages of the sales process.

From initially seeing your content on social media to signing up for one of your newsletters, getting a weekly update about new products and services to finally making the decision to make a purchase after they see a remarketing ad of your product on YouTube.

Feel free to get in touch and let us show you what impact marketing automation can make on your business today.

Table of Contents

What is Marketing Automation?

Most businesses know how to get leads, but very few are taking advantage of marketing automation.

Marketing automation is the software that glues your marketing together and allows you to automate tasks that you would have previously done manually, such as:

email marketing

social media marketing

sales force automation (CRM)

analytics

remarketing

Email Marketing

Email marketing automation is part of your lead generation process and allows you to automatically send triggered emails to your subscribers by scheduling them in advance.

It can be used for a variety of different purposes such as bringing in new leads, news notifications (like new products or services) and triggered workflow.

Not only is it good for collecting and nurturing leads, but it also allows you to keep in touch with your subscriber over a very long period of time, from the beginning of the sales journey right to the end (when they purchase one of your products or services).

Depending on the type of form you insert on your website, you have the ability to capture your prospect’s first name and/or last name, email address and telephone number.

With just these basic pieces of information, it allows you to personalise your emails just as if you were sitting down and writing the email on the date it was sent by using their first and/or last name.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing automation allows you to schedule content in advance on the vast majority of social networks.

Since we’re all incredibly busy, we simply don’t have the time to spend hours and hours curating and posting content on social media every day.

That’s why these automation tools are used by most businesses to get their content out there at a time and day of their choosing.

So, what are the other benefits?

Efficiency: by using software automation tools for your social media, it’s actually saving you a lot of time and improves the efficiency of your business and that of your employees, giving them the ability to schedule content a week or a month in advance.
Easy to use: if you can use software like Google Excel, Google Maps and generally know how to post content on social media, using this automation software will be a breeze as they’re not really that technical and probably not that different to adding a hair appointment on your calendar.
Business growth: your business has been built on obtaining leads and converting those leads into sales. Depending on the amount content your business produces, social media automation allows you to educate, entertain, and update new prospects on a daily basis – something that was a lot harder to do before the internet age.

Sales Force Automation (CRM)

Salesforce automation is a software management tool that allows you to control the vast majority of your sales tasks such as territory management, account management, prospecting and follow-up.

To be clear, the software doesn’t allow you to be fully automated but is designed to help your processes run a lot more smoothly.

For example, if you entering a new lead into the software, you have the ability to add an entry to follow them up, chase them for feedback or email them with your price list.

The software will either alert you via a text message or it can email you.

What’s great about this type of software is the fact that all members of staff have access to the prospects in the software – it can be used for a lot more tasks right from customer service to simple emails in the festive season, wishing people a Merry Christmas or Happy New Year, etc.

You even have the capabilities of contacting your prospect for their birthday so you can send them a money-off coupon, special price or simply just wish them a happy birthday.

Most of your prospects will be happy with this type of interaction and it makes the experience of dealing with your company a lot more personalised.

Analytics

Did you know that Google Analytics is actually powered by AI and machine learning and provide you with useful information on your website and it’s fully automated?

You also have the ability to set up custom alerts. For example, if there’s a sudden movement in your conversion rate (either an increase or decrease). You can set up an alert on Google Analytics to email you when this happens.

There are many more options – this just gives you a taste of what is possible.

Remarketing

If you were impressed with the various types of automation above then remarketing automation will leave you astounded.

Whether you are using Google advertising or Facebook, most of the advertising platforms out there allow you to continuously market to someone, even after they have left your website.

This is generally calculated on a cost-per-click basis and these clicks work out to be a lot cheaper in price than clicks you would pay for after the initial interaction.

By placing a cookie on somebody’s browser, you have the ability to collect vital information on the content they are looking at on your website.

From here, you can either show them a different ad or image of the same product, a different related product or, even more impressively, you can do follow-up ads after they have attended one of your webinars or downloaded a worksheet.

These tools work really great on their own, however, the possibilities are endless when they’re used together as part of your marketing mix.

If you’re interested in finding out more about our marketing automation services, please feel free to get in touch.

We’d love to hear from you.