Marketing Automation and You: When Your Business Grows Itself
Marketing, if not properly managed, has the habit of guzzling resources without giving anything back.
Businesses understand that marketing leads to further sales, but stumble at the notion of sustainable gain. This results in short term and ineffective thinking.
A business director may launch several dozen marketing campaigns at once with a very spray and pray mentality. As soon as they’re launched, a new one is already in the works to take its place. The logic is that, eventually, the rule of numbers sees at least some of those campaigns working.
As you may already guess, this can be pretty wasteful.
Marketing campaigns include lots of data and variables, which means a lot of numbers to crunch. In order to sift through and effectively manage that data, you’ll need a lot of heads and hands. The problem with that is that the more people you have in the chain, the greater the chance of a mistake.
As the old saying goes, too many cooks spoil the broth. It’s true! So, how can automation help?
Automated Marketing helps things run like clockwork
Automated marketing attempts to streamline and improve the process.
From the moment the customer sees your marketing to the moment they make a sale, automated marketing carries the motions all the way through with minimal input and oversight. This is achieved by setting a standard procedure that defines how a customer’s experience with your company’s marketing plays out. By streamlining and standardising the process, you get more consistency and reliability.
Consider it like learning how to cook one recipe very well, compared to constantly dabbling in a new recipe every day.
As customers go along the process, they activate a series of triggers. Depending on the trigger they activate, they get moved down one path of the chain or another.
Eventually, from this, more reliable and accurate data about your customers’ behaviour and interactions with your company is achieved. This, in turn, is applied to future marketing campaigns for improved results.
Why Automated Marketing?
The main benefit of automated marketing is that it provides sustained growth. It’s not enough simply to have lots of advertising. If nothing else, it’s just inefficient. Truly effective marketing is not just acquiring consumer interest but maintaining consumer loyalty.
You don’t just want a customer to visit your website. You want them to keep coming back and to prefer your brand over any other.
Achieve this and you can greatly increase the maximum gain from each individual customer. Someone who buys a service gives you profit for the day. Someone who subscribes to that service gives you profit for as long as the subscription lasts.
Now, part of this will be down to the value of your product. That’s unavoidable. But another part is knowing what sort of customers you typically attract, how those customers behave, and how they respond to certain communications.
Younger customers, for example, respond very well to social media. Older customers prefer more traditional TV or radio ads. Knowing how to use both effectively is key to securing their loyalty as customers.
Automated marketing allows you to monitor all the above and creates easy pathways that direct customers from start to finish.
By carefully monitoring the customer’s journey you will be able to pick up on their behaviour.
What to monitor:
- Did the campaign work well?
- At what point did customers choose to visit the site?
- Where is the biggest the most drop off?
- At what stage was a sale secured?
- How did all that compare to previous campaigns?
And because the process is streamlined and standardised, you have a great control group to compare the data with. You tinker with the process, see the effects, and judge whether it improves or handicaps your larger marketing goals. This is then all used to reform and develop your company’s interaction with the consumer.
With this comes a greater return of investment (ROI), greater database enrichment, improved understanding of customer dynamics, and much less loss in time, energy and money.
A Campaign That Runs Itself
Any company intending long term success will use automated marketing. There are just too many benefits not to. Your ROI increases, your gathering increases, your customer retention increases, and your long-term profit increases. Further, for all its gain, it’s remarkably cheap and easy to set up. You save not only money but also time and energy.
Relying on quick and thoughtless schemes is unhelpful to actual growth. It leads to sloppy thinking, sloppy practice, and sloppy results. If you really want to get competitive, you must always be thinking of what the customer will do after they make their initial process.
With automated marketing, this is much, much easier.
If you would like to know more about Marketing Automation and how it could help your business grow, contact us here, we’re sure we can help:
