No matter what you do for your customers, getting the word out about your products and services is essential. It’s not only important for capturing new clients, but also for getting clients to return.
Marketing is a very resource-intensive and challenging endeavor for a business. Achieving marketing goals requires a great deal of research, planning, coordination, and precision in execution.
You can’t cheat your way through good marketing, but there are ways to make it more efficient. Let’s talk about marketing automation, how it works, and how it can be a game changer for your business!
First Things First: What is Marketing Automation?
The key to making any process more efficient is to streamline the components of that process. The industrial revolution changed the world by doing this. Instead of doing tasks individually with simpler, manual tools, machines helped speed up the process by many orders of magnitude.
Marketing automation utilizes software that accomplishes this same goal. This software can perform simple and menial tasks much faster than marketers can do manually with simpler tools. This saves a great deal of time that your team can spend on more challenging aspects of marketing and business operations.
Some examples of marketing automation include customer interaction tracking on websites and automated ad placement.
Another important example is workflow automation, where marketers can automate parts of their daily workflow such as calendars, asset creation, budgeting, and more. Automation can make things a lot easier for you and your team!
What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?
There are a number of ways that marketing automation can benefit you and your business.
Marketing automation can help solve everyday problems that slow your team down. Enhancing your team’s productivity with automation can help you focus on what matters most to you. When dealing with customers on a larger scale, it becomes more difficult to tend to their needs on a personal level.
This can make you and your business seem disconnected from your audience. However, with marketing automation, your team can spend more energy focusing on your clients, leading to increased customer loyalty!
According to Oracle, lead quantity increases by 80% for businesses that leverage marketing automation.
How Your Customers Benefit from Marketing Automation
Although marketing automation happens in the backend, your customers can tell when you have an efficient process. Being efficient helps you appear more professional, and your clients will appreciate that you have a solid handle on things to focus on their needs.
With less focus on menial tasks and more energy put toward your audience, you can create more relevant content. You can also provide seamless and personalized experiences for customers across platforms!
Customers also benefit from reduced repetition, meaning that asking for your help won’t be a chore on their part. You’ll also be able to respond to their needs faster, resulting in a much more positive experience for your clients.
Finding the Right Marketing Automation Platform for You
Now that you know the benefits of marketing automation, it’s time to consider what marketing automation platform is right for you and your business. The answer won’t be the same for everyone, as each business has its own needs and objectives.
You’ll want to consider aspects like user interface, features, integrations, customer support, documentation and learning resources, userbase, price, setup, and other factors that matter to you!
User interface, features, and integrations are some of the most important aspects to consider from that list.
It’s important that the platform be easy to use to help save your team time when using and learning how to use the system. You don’t want to waste time dealing with time-consuming elements of the platform, as that will defeat the purpose of marketing automation. Instead, pick something that meshes well with your team’s style!
Some key features to look for are ones that can help you automate your content creation process, schedule posts, and optimize existing content. It’s possible to use multiple tools in cooperation to accomplish these tasks. However, in many cases, it can be simpler to use a platform that solves multiple problems at once.
If you didn’t know, you’re about to be in the know!…
Tailwind CoPilot is a marketing automation tool that provides you with an easy-to-follow marketing plan that simplifies marketing for you in a way that is personalized to your specific business marketing needs.
Tailwind CoPilot guides you through every step of the way while keeping you on point with current marketing best practices and lightening the load of knowing the next best place to concentrate your marketing efforts. Check it out and get started for free today!
How to Start Implementing Your Marketing Automation Plan
Once you’ve found the perfect platform for your team, it’s time to begin putting together a plan and putting it into action! Here are some questions you may want to ask yourself:
· What are your goals for marketing automation?
· Who on your team will take part in managing marketing automation?
· What parts of your marketing can be automated?
Set Goals
It’s important to set goals for marketing automation instead of automating processes just for the sake of it. Think about what you hope to achieve by automating parts of your business. Consider what kind of results you expect from automating those processes.
For example, you may want to automate the process of creating and distributing email campaigns, a feature that’s made possible with Tailwind. Another goal might be to automate parts of creating social media content.
Setting clear goals like this can help you be more meaningful and productive in automating your marketing process. This will make your automation more effective and will reduce the cost as well!
Implementation
Now that you’ve set clear goals, consider how you plan to implement the automation that you’re interested in. It may not be the best idea to make the switch immediately to automate as much as possible. Instead, start slowly integrating automation into your content plans and be prepared for the shift in the workflow. A fantastic way to incorporate automation into your content plan is through scheduling.
Tailwind’s content scheduling feature makes it possible to easily schedule content for Instagram and Pinterest. Scheduling makes it easy to create and plan content releases all at once to reduce your workload later on!
Measure and Track
Before implementing marketing automation, think about what metrics matter most to you. They won’t be the same for everyone! If your chosen platform tracks the metrics that you need, make sure you set up tracking.
If not, you may want to consider using a different platform or incorporating a new tracking tool. In addition to tracking your typical marketing metrics like page views and conversions, consider tracking metrics related to your team’s performance. These may include hours spent on certain projects and the amount of time they use certain applications.
How Will You Use Marketing Automation?
Now you know what marketing automation is, how it works, and how to implement it with your business. The only thing that remains now is how you’ll do it! Don’t forget to pay close attention to your goals and your team’s strengths and weaknesses.
Have a plan to incorporate marketing automation into your business. Over time, you’ll start to see results. Your team will be able to focus more on what matters to your business, and your customers will notice as well!
In fact, Nucleus Research found that businesses achieved an ROI of $5.44 per dollar spent over the first three years of using marketing automation.
With Tailwind, planning and implementing marketing automation into your business is easier than ever.
Best of all, you can get started using it for free! Tailwind is packed with features that empower brands to create, schedule, share, and measure content performance all in one place. Try Tailwind today and see how it can benefit your brand!
