Marketing Automation: Grow Your Business

Marketing a business is a critical component of not only raising brand awareness and providing information on products and services, but it is also one of the most important contributors to winning new business. However, between the strategy and the execution, a successful approach to marketing can take up time and resources, especially for someone who might not have a marketing background. Tasks such as sending emails, making promotional materials, and more, require time and effort that a lot of business owners don’t have the capacity for, nor do their employees.

Instead, streamlining and automating the marketing lifecycle can give back some of that time to focus on other important tasks crucial to the success of the overall business, such as building and managing customer relationships, ensuring better service, and driving sales. Digital marketing automation can help drive business growth through prospects, sales, customer satisfaction, and advocacy, but there are factors that companies need to take into consideration when implementing their marketing plans.

The role of an automated process

Marketing automation helps companies with their marketing initiatives and efforts by streamlining everyday, tedious processes. For example, companies no longer need to carve out time in their days to send follow-up emails to clients and prospective customers. Instead, automated outreach can send pre-crafted emails at a set time after initial outreach. Email marketing is still the most efficient way to reach out and interact with both current and prospective customers. With automated email outreach, businesses can increase productivity and generate leads in less time. This allows for greater opportunities to personalize the experience for each customer as well as catch up on other important business tasks that have been put off.

For small businesses especially, digital marketing automation is crucial for optimizing processes. With limited time, resources, budgets, and employees, often business owners are playing multiple roles within the company. Automating the marketing lifecycle can eliminate these tedious tasks without decreasing the outreach and effectiveness of marketing efforts.

For companies thinking about automation but not quite sure where or when to begin, here are some factors to consider:

• Prioritize and send messages to highly targeted audiences, including both existing and prospective customers automatically
• Continue to nurture and connect with leads and prospects
• Remain relevant to customers and maintain or even increase your touchpoints
• Emphasis on personalized communication, especially when mass communication is required in outreach
• Optimize opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling
• Capabilities to manage the success of marketing campaigns

Dynamics of marketing automation

Marketing strategies are made up of campaigns in order to promote businesses and reach prospects. Within the campaigns, there are breakdowns on what companies will do moving forward with their initiative. Factors such as how they will reach their customers and potential customers, what they will do to reach these audiences, and why they are doing it. When it comes to choosing the right campaign and what to do, a common first step is choosing between digital or traditional methods of outreach.

As new tools and technologies are continually evolving, digital marketing outreach has become a primary source of marketing initiatives. Everything from email campaigns to social media campaigns, all require effort in getting the word out there about businesses. Emails especially are considered the key player in strategy when it comes to digital marketing automation. As emails provide direct outreach to targeted individuals, it can help drive communication and grow businesses. When considering digital marketing automation, there are two ways which emails specifically can be optimized for outreach strategies and initiatives:

Blast or one-time emails

Blast or one-time emails can be sent to pre-existing contacts already in communication with a company. These emails could include anything from sales announcements to new services provided. Automation tactics with these email outreach strategies can help with scheduling in advance the communication expected to go out, eliminating the need to plan a day around this message while also hitting all the targeted audiences without the need to copy and paste a message over and over again.

Drip campaigns

Drip campaigns are multiple emails that are time-based and used to hit touchpoints along a workflow. These could include anything from education material such as how-to’s to show expertise in a field or provide more targeted information in order to help guide customers on the next steps. Automation tactics with these emails include scheduling a pipeline of information for guided emails as the process continues. Marketing initiatives for these campaigns can and should allow for resources to be built out in an order where automation can take into consideration what outreach method goes next and can share this information with target audiences without the need of someone to manually send. These kinds of emails can be sent every day, every week, every month, or whenever companies see fit to distribute the necessary information.

Self-manage vs. co-manage efforts

When it comes to marketing automation, sometimes it is necessary to ask for a little help. As business owners have a lot on their plate to begin with, software tools aren’t the only option when it comes to marketing efforts, and that is okay. This is where seeking out a co-managed solution, like an agency, can actually be more efficient and effective for businesses. However, when deciding between self-managed and co-managed marketing solutions best suited for a business it is important to consider these factors:

• Time available to contribute to marketing campaign management
• Budget
• Experience creating marketing materials, such as emails and social campaigns
• Understanding of audience engagement strategies

By understanding the needs, previous experience, and workload capacity that is available for a business’s marketing efforts, it can help decide which approach will be the most efficient and effective all around from cost to time to ROI. Many times utilizing co-managed marketing strategies will be the more successful approach, especially if the majority of these factors are on the lower side.

For companies implementing digital marketing automation, there are many benefits such as a decrease in stress and time commitment with an increase in outreach and productivity. On top of benefits, successful marketing automation can and will include necessary components for a company such as goal metrics, a defined targeted audience, educational materials, workflow structure, ongoing optimization, overall reporting and analytics, and so much more. With these factors, digital marketing automation can engage customers, ensuring customer experience, and overall drive the growth of a business.

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