Guest Post By: Marsha Waters
Entrepreneurs can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on fancy logos and branding materials.
Still, unless they take an active approach to marketing and promoting their business, even the most innovative companies can fall flat on their faces.
And, although you may think that marketing your business is complicated and hard to do, marketing automation software, tools, and resources make promoting your business online more straightforward than ever before!
When we talk about marketing automation, we’re talking about software tools or technologies explicitly designed to help businesses better manage their marketing efforts across multiple channels by automating and simplifying repetitive tasks.
In other words, tools like Buffer, Hubspot, Marketo, and others can make marketing your business about as easy as can be.
Let’s examine a few of the most prominent benefits of marketing automation.
Lead Generation
For any business to succeed, you need a steady stream of new, potential customers for your sales team to sell to.
This process of attracting new and prospective clients or customers is also known as lead generation.
Essentially, a lead is an individual who has already shown some interest in either your business or its products and services, which means that they’re already more likely to purchase from you than somebody who has never before heard of your company.
For instance, email marketing automation platforms like MailChimp make it easy to create and edit lead capture forms, which can be placed on website pages, social media accounts, and in your emails.
These forms will allow you to automatically collect and aggregate information about your leads so that you or your sales team can contact at a later time.
Growth And Scalability
A steady stream of customers is great, but if you want to grow and scale your business, you’re also going to need some help managing your customer and client relationship.
Platforms like Hubspot make it easier than ever for businesses and managers to automate customer relationships, conversation, tasks, and more.
These automated tools allow you to focus on going after new clients or audiences to grow your business while also maintaining and nurturing your prospective, lead, and existing customer communications.
Knowing Your Customers
Another massive benefit of using marketing automation tools is that you’ll gain a better and more in-depth idea about who your customers are.
Most automated marketing tools provide some form of basic analytics or insights, which will allow you to learn information about your target audiences, such as their age, gender, location, or other valuable information.
In turn, you’ll make better, more informed decisions regarding marketing and promoting your business online.
Better Customer Service
Today, customers are pickier than ever before, meaning that successful businesses need to have good customer service available at all times.
It’s also more common than ever before for brands and businesses to have customers located in different time zones, continents, or hemispheres of the globe.
Fortunately, automated software, such as chatbots, make it easy for businesses to automate their customer service, even during downtime.
Building Better Business With Marketing Automation
Whether you own a small, one-person business or a much larger corporation with offices in multiple locations, marketing automation can offer a ton of valuable benefits to you and your customers.
No matter what type of automation tools or software we’re talking about, marketing automation makes it easier to generate and nurture leads, manage your customer or client relationships, learn about your target audience demographics, and even provide your customer with around-the-clock, 24/7 customer service!
And what could be better than that?