The Evolution of Marketing Automation: the Right Path to Business Scaling

Automation software will continue to benefit users in the coming years of digital transformation. Usually nowadays, with the help of a single platform you can schedule or automate everyday actions like email marketing, social media posts, ad management, reports/analytics and lead nurturing or scoring. All of these features allow you to offer and provide the higher level of service your business needs to succeed. Finding the right tool for marketing automation can be difficult if you do not understand your business process well enough.

If you are unsure whether to go through with marketing automation or want to find out more, continue reading this blog post or get in touch with our Nativo Marketing team to begin automating your systems.

Efficient Team Efforts

As you may know, a marketer’s work is almost nonstop. From lead generation and focusing on revenue growth, automation allows more free time to focus on more efficient or important tasks integral to the business. An article on Hubspot assures that, “when marketing automation is thoughtfully integrated, it creates a fertile ground for healthy, long term relationships with your customers”.  

Managing social media for your business can be incredibly time consuming, but if done correctly, automating can facilitate this process. By scheduling social media posts, for example, you won’t have to stress on generating content. It can be difficult to post on a daily basis but with the help of automated social media marketing you can schedule posts ahead and overtime potentially reduce staffing costs. Saving snippets of content regularly used when communicating with clients can further help with customer assistance, canning responses for future use. 

One Place, One Platform

A marketing automation tool has many functions in one and always tries to make tedious tasks much easier to accomplish. Using a social media scheduling tool like Odoo Social Marketing or Hootsuite is a great way to take the stress and monotony out of social media management. You can send and schedule posts for main social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn with these website platforms. 

Automation software makes your team’s tasks easier because they are all in one place. Not only can they schedule social media posts, but they can also automate and carry out email nurture campaigns to communicate with leads at the appropriate time in the buyer’s journey or use SMS to notify any offers. A marketing automation tool can facilitate the means of communication with your customers but that’s not all they can do. We’ll dive into this a lot more in the next few sections. 

Increase Conversion Rate

More Time to Focus On Productive Tasks

The ability to have more free time for further planning allows your team to manage your incoming leads in a better way. Not only does automation provide more free time, but it also provides a single platform to track and communicate with incoming leads, and even those who didn’t convert. All this information is stored as data, time of entry, birthday, interest, demographic, place of birth, etc. Storing this information can help you create campaigns for your leads down the line.

If you continue using marketing automation, your team’s efforts will become more effective in increasing lead conversions from marketing leads to sales leads. As you nurture your leads down your sales funnel, you should be sending them high quality content (SMS or email for example) at the appropriate time in their buyer’s journey. This way you can “warm” your leads up to purchasing. 

Having spare time to work on lead generation and other aspects of your business like testing different content on your homepage to compare results as testing to find better ways to convert visitors while trusting that your automations are taking care of the grand scheme of your business. 

Targeting and Retargeting Leads

If your lead didn’t convert, you can use automation to retarget your customer. Retargeting is for customers who already visited your site, by means of targeted ads or creating campaigns for these specific leads that require more nurturing. 

Retargeting leads creates a higher CRO or conversion-rate-optimization. An article by Ben Cotton on Hubspot defines CRO as “the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, like completing a web form, signing up for a service, or purchasing a product”. A high CRO on your site means your site is functioning successfully in capturing and converting leads. For example, having a shareable calendar link integration on your site allows your leads to book you directly in your calendar, securing a lead much easier. Using these types of tools can help you schedule your time in a much more efficient and organized way.

Reporting Analytics – Data for Smart Decision Making

Use Data to Your Advantage

With more time to plan ahead, your team can better analyze a promising marketing strategy for conversions. You can use automation software to track your leads and keep data stored for future campaign planning. Data such as demographics and behavioral criteria can determine how you distribute and assign your leads to your employees, if applicable.

Marketing automation platforms facilitate the making of reports highlighting new insights and any complications, so you can see an overview of how things are going. Useful data like this includes seeing where your lead may have opted out from an email campaign or during the sales process. This can help you premeditate any errors so future customers are given a thoughtful user experience. 

Using Google Data Studio you can create a custom dashboard focusing on the KPIs and data most relevant to you and your business. This will allow you to be more productive with your time as you’ll be guaranteed data to analyze and make better business decisions. Your chosen CRM software will allow you to create these reports on a weekly and monthly basis. 

A Personalized Marketing Strategy

Prioritize Tasks and Automate What’s Most Necessary 

One of the great benefits of automation is the ability to personalize your business actions using the CRM software. By using a Customer Relationship Management Software you can define all the touchpoints or actions your client makes down your sales funnel and prioritize which tasks can most benefit from automation. 

When a customer or prospect has carried out a pre-determined action, you can alert your team with push notifications and setting up triggers that lead the way down the sales funnel.

Each action your prospect or customer takes is data stored for your marketing strategy and can be used to create workflows that reach specific goals. Odoo Marketing Automation for example, allows the use of “If/Else” actions, which allows you to trigger specific actions depending on certain conditions. Let’s say a customer has purchased an item and this is the condition that fires an email campaign. You could automate the emails needed to nurture that client down the customer journey by setting up this “If/Else” condition. 

Lead Scoring

Set Up Notifications and Reach Out At the Right Moment

If you have a marketing team, automation allows you to set up lead scoring, to notify your sales team when your qualified lead becomes a sales lead (from a warm lead to hot lead in other terms).

Once your team is notified by the automation software, your marketing and sales team will be on the same page, knowing when to reach out to customers at the appropriate time. 

Lead Nurture

Pave the Way for Your Customers with Automation

Implementing marketing automation allows you to develop and reinforce relationships with incoming and existing clients. By establishing drip email campaigns, meaning scheduling emails overtime, you can maintain a consistent communication with clients to lead/nurture them down the sales funnel and track their success. 

Automation software provides many options to strengthen the nurture process. With the available data, you can segment your low quality leads according to their goals and interests, leading them through personalized email nurture campaigns to convert them to sales leads. Assigning leads to your sales representatives can make it easier for your team to provide follow ups to prospects, which is very important. 

Don’t Over Automate or Else

As you can see, automation can make processes much easier, but you should always consider the personal touch needed in customer support. Not everything should be automated. Make sure to consider when a real person should take control and intervene in the automation process. 

Aligning both the marketing and sales departments will allow your company to grow, having less manual processes to consider and having the responsibility on a single person. 

Chatbots

You can personalize your customer support strategy by using chat widgets. Artificial intelligence has become very popular in marketing for lead nurturing. However, they can sometimes be inaccurate if leads ask for specific information.

You could set up an artificial intelligence bot to respond to customer service queries but have an actual team member take over the conversation. The human touch to automation is what sets the difference for exceptional customer service. 

Automate Your Processes with a Website Platform

Although it is possible to implement many different systems to achieve automation, it is far easier to use an all-in-one solution like Odoo or GoHighLevel. 

Marketing automation allows your business to run in a more organized and smooth manner, so you can spend time doing things more integral to its growth. These important processes like social media posting, email marketing and ads marketing can be automated so you can explore more productive ways to exploit your business. These systems allow you to simplify your processes, saving you time and enabling you to see your business in a more comprehensive way.

If your business lacks the implementation of automation strategies, reach out to the Nativo Marketing team to see what best practices can benefit your project or business.