What are the benefits of using automation for digital marketing?
Done right, digital marketing takes time. That’s why automation can be so important: it makes critical tasks easier and more streamlined.
What is digital marketing automation?
Simple: it’s the suite of tools and techniques available which enable businesses to schedule, plan and execute digital marketing activity ahead of time, and with minimal resource commitment.
Sounds good, right? It is – and it’s so important that it is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ element for any digital marketing strategy; it’s non-negotiable. Whatever software package a business uses, automation enables a much more structured and simpler set of marketing activities to be undertaken.
The benefits of marketing automation for customer retention alone, for example, are plentiful. Automation enables you to put out far more content – and do so far more consistently – than mere manual marketing would. And that pays dividends.
From scheduling content rationally to responding to social contacts by the bot, automation adds a fluid, responsive element to your marketing activity without making onerous demands on staff time. The benefits of this approach can be broken into five basic brackets.
- Time Efficiencies
Simply put, automation saves time. In turn, of course, this saves money – by allowing businesses to release those efficiencies elsewhere, redirecting staff to other tasks. Most importantly, marketers are at their best devising creative campaigns – and not having to spend time laboriously posting content all day enables them to focus on this more critical element of their work.
By automation repetitive tasks and streamlining data-gathering, automation empowers staff more than ever before – and it makes them more productive in the process. It’s no surprise, then, that automation has been shown to increase sales productivity – and reduce marketing overheads simultaneously. That’s a powerful double-whammy.
- Segmentation
As well as saving staff time, automation offers better data. By automating all their actions through a single dashboard or piece of software, businesses bring together all interaction data in a single place: automation, therefore, brings further benefits of concentrated feedback, since user data is no longer gathered across a range of separate services.
This enables businesses better to segment their audiences, creating more usable and effective profiles for the range of customers and users to whom they provide services – and, of course, for potential prospects. Better data improves both the accuracy and granularity of this segmentation, vastly enhancing the results marketers can achieve.
- Target better-qualified leads/remarketing
In other words, automation enables the creation of better campaigns – because through the enhance datasets it produces marketers can generate more qualified leads. The multi-channel overview of prospect behaviours that automation digital marketing enables ensures that well-tooled campaigns will – because they are better targeted – result in more promising engagements, and better nurturing of prospects through the sales process.
Perhaps this is why businesses employing automation see on average a 10% increase in their sales pipeline contribution. Critically, the success of various channels can be compared – and approaches to particular prospects fine-tuned as a result. This means that marketing messages feed directly and demonstrably through to sales processes. In other words, automation powers that elusive alignment between marketing and sales – all thanks to better data.
- Customer retention/cross-selling
It’s not all about new customers, however – existing customers are better served by digital marketing automation, too. Automation enables more personalised customer journeys, for one: by analysing the troves of data automation can provide, businesses can offer more tailored ads and products for returning users, to improve the usability of the website for clients (and consequently, of course, increase sales).
Likewise, the quality and consistency of other kinds of information existing customers receive will improve: from newsletters to social engagements, automation can offer much better quality content to customers, enhancing and expanding existing relationships. Good content builds a brand’s identity and its rapport with customers; automation facilitates much more reliable execution of this process.
- More effective spend
Finally, all of this contributes to great returns on investment. Business implementing digital marketing automation spend less on labour costs, more on creativity, and see better sales conversion figures. In other words, their marketing budget works harder – and better – for their business.
What is digital marketing automation? It’s a digital marketing success.
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If you’re looking to develop your digital marketing strategy but don’t know where to start then please get in touch with us. We can discuss your business requirements and help develop the right strategy for you. Call us on 024 7683 4780 or send us an email at info@image-plus.co.uk.
