Successful businesses use marketing automation to power-up their processes. Companies that integrated it into their workflows experienced an astronomical 451 percent increase in qualified leads, according to Business 2 Community.
But there are many organizations still doubting the potential of marketing automation as they don’t understand how it can help them grow their business. There are many myths surrounding this topic that are preventing businesses from adopting it in their marketing strategy. So let’s get to debunking these myths so you can move towards growth.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the process of using software systems to more effectively nurture business leads by providing valuable and highly engaging experiences throughout the customer journey.
Data from Grand View Research shows that the global marketing automation industry is slated to hit $8.27 billion by 2027, growing at an annual rate of 9.8 percent during the forecast period from 2020 to 2027. From helping businesses generate more revenue and perform repetitive tasks with accuracy to targeting and retaining customers across different channels, marketing automation is your ticket to make your organization thrive.
1. The first big one – you don’t need it
Many firms don’t use automation, stating that they don’t have expertise with this software. 48 percent of these firms claimed that they don’t have proper talent, and 32 percent attributed their choice to not having sufficient financial resources to incorporate it.
But Spiralytics shows that 76 percent of businesses that integrated marketing automation into their processes witnessed revenue generation within the first year itself, and 74 percent of them were able to save more time for other tasks.
From this we see that incorporating marketing automation into your processes is essential for workflow optimization, talent management and resource saving. But where can it help? Let’s look at a few of the tasks it assists with:
- Lead nurturing
- Lead generation
- Metrics and analytics
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Website and content management
- Customer segmentation
- Lead filtering
- Digital advertising
And that’s not it! So, if you find yourself wasting time, money and resources, marketing automation is a surefire way to save these!
2. It is just emails
It is not uncommon for businesses to miss out on opportunities that they can monetize, like marketing automation. A very common reason that many companies choose not to include this technology in their processes is because they’ve heard it’s just for email marketing. Though this is one of the channels businesses can integrate marketing automation into, it is not restricted to this field alone.
As we’ve already seen, marketing automation is more than just sending emails, it is assisting and engaging your prospects throughout the customer journey. You can deploy this approach for various marketing processes including social media, customer management and more.
A boon for brands, marketing automation helps you identify qualified leads, improve your customer acquisition and retention, boost your business revenue, and nurture relationships with your prospects.
A key thing to remember is that through marketing automation, you can personalize customer experiences by producing and presenting them with tailored content based on the actions they take on your website or landing pages.
3. It is only helpful if you’re a large enterprise
Don’t make the mistake in thinking that marketing automation is useful only for large enterprises as these companies have to deal with a large number of orders and an enormous customer base.
While a report by Salesforce shows that 67 percent of large and medium scale enterprises invest heavily in marketing automation, just a fraction of small scale businesses integrate this system into their processes.
An incredible 91 percent of businesses attribute their success to marketing automation, meaning that small companies need to understand that marketing automation is for everyone, regardless of their operations or business size.
Small and medium businesses that incorporated marketing automation witnessed a spike up in sales from existing customers, and 68 percent of marketers claim that adopting this method increased their overall customer engagement.
Marketing automation empowers small businesses by giving them a clear overview of their customer data, increasing their audience engagement, boosting customer lifetime value, aligning their marketing and sales teams better, building ROI substantially, and helping them serve customers more effectively.
4. You can just set and forget your marketing automation workflows
Marketing is all about expanding your reach to your audience, increasing your brand awareness, improving your customer engagement, and boosting your conversions. Automating processes that are repetitive will help you concentrate on other areas that require your attention. However, you need to remember that marketing automation is not a one time affair.
You need to constantly track, measure, and monitor your automation processes to ensure that they’re optimized to reach your marketing goals. HubSpot states that 54 percent of marketers cited that one of the most difficult tasks of marketing automation is finding the right metrics to measure.
The metrics that you should monitor will differ depending on the campaigns that you run. These metrics can be broadly divided into the following categories:
Activity metrics
An activity metric is the portion of activity that your business undertakes. This could include the number of sent emails, new conversions in a month, or website clicks. Before you decide what activity metrics matter for your campaign, you need to ensure that your team is using a marketing automation tool.
Efficiency metrics
Efficiency metrics are those that give you insights if your campaign is progressing as expected. Cost per customer, qualified leads generated through lead nurturing, and sales accepted leads are a few of the metrics that you’ll need to watch out for.
Value metrics
Value metrics inform you if marketing automation is positively impacting your process and bringing results. These metrics lay emphasis on monetization. Revenue generated, close rate on marketing sourced leads, and cost of investment vs. return on investment are few notable value metrics you should keep an eye on.
5. It is impersonal and generic
Given the name “automation”, it may seem like your messaging and workflows will be generic, leading your actions to seem like spam.
While it is true that companies can adopt this technique in a spammy way that uses irrelevant content and approaches, marketing automation has the potential for even deeper personalization than you might realize. Using insights that you gain from customer data is what businesses need to adopt in their marketing automation strategy.
This practice enables brands to present clear, relevant, and authentic content to customers. For this reason, lead generation and nurturing plays a key role in determining the leads that matter for your brand. After all, qualified leads are hard to find. With the help of marketing automation you can empower your business and ensure that only qualified leads make it through your marketing funnel.
6. Automated marketing ends when you convert your customer
Businesses that are unfamiliar with automation may think that once they’ve set up their process and witness customer conversions that it is the end. But this is not true. Businesses cannot thrive by only getting their customers to convert because a good marketing strategy derives value from prolonged customer engagement and loyalty.
This is where customer lifetime value comes into play. Customer lifetime value (CLTV) is the total estimated value of a customer that purchases from your business throughout their lifetime.
The CLTV marketing model when coupled with marketing automation helps you increase sales, better market your business, boost brand loyalty, and save money and time.
Why? Because the cost of acquiring a customer is five times more expensive than retaining an existing one and increasing your customer retention by a mere five percent can boost your profits from an incredible 25 percent to 95 percent.
Marketing automation empowers businesses to benefit from existing customers by giving them insights into customer behavioral patterns that may go unnoticed. By integrating this approach to their existing marketing processes, brands can delve deeper into their customers’ behavioral patterns, and offer more value.
Marketing automation is an incredible tool that influences your business growth positively when done right. As easy as it may sound, it can be challenging to execute if you have little to no experience. Teaming up with a growth marketing agency that has hands on experience with the best marketing automation tools is a smart choice to speed up your business’ growth.
Growth Marketing Genie has a team of experienced professionals that can help you set up your marketing automation strategy from end to end to track, monitor, and optimize your processes and achieve your business goals. To learn more about how we can help you, talk to our team of experts today!
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