Every day, we talk to marketing professionals and business owners. We talk about sales and marketing automation: what it is; what software is out there; and challenges faced with marketing automation.
But why do businesses choose to use automation as part of their sales and marketing strategy?
In this article, we’re going summarise the most common reasons why businesses choose marketing automation. And explain why they choose Airbase to help them put the strategy into practice.
If you can see why others do it, maybe it’ll help you decide if it’s right for you too.
Believe it or not, automation isn’t just people being lazy. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. By implementing automated processes it does speed up repetitive human processes. But better still, the time you save in doing so opens up greater opportunities for growing your business.
Here are four things questions you can consider to help decide whether marketing automation is right for you:
1) Are you struggling to grow your business or find new clients?
Do you struggle to guarantee a constant stream of clients? Or do you find it difficult to launch tactical marketing campaigns? Believe us, you’re not alone.
You can target a specific audience without throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. Through automation, you can target sometimes thousands or even millions of potential customers in an instant. You can target by interests, locations and more, at the click of a button.
For both B2B and B2C (business-to-business and business-to-consumer) businesses, automation can work across many sales and marketing channels. If you use social media, direct mail, email, SMS, online chat… you’re in luck!
2) Do you find yourself lacking time and resources?
Other common reasons leading to the need for automation is the lack of time and cost of growing a team. If you’re a small or medium-sized business, it’s likely your to-do list is never-ending, and you won’t have an army of people to get through it.
Sales and marketing automation can do the job of umpteen people, in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
Or it can help ensure the people you do have actually do what they need to, when they need to do it, consistently and reliably.
3) Are you spending time on tedious and repetitive tasks?
Do you spend a large amount of time inputting data into spreadsheets? Manually sending out emails? Or answering the same questions to customers all day long?
A great place to start is to list all the tasks you and your team do each day.
Then consider how much of it is repetitive and how important human involvement is in the process. It could be an email you send out once a month filled with your latest blog posts. Or it could be a task of updating your stock list every day. Whatever the tasks, keep track of what you do and how much time it takes to complete.
4) Are you wanting more predictable and consistent sales from loyal clients?
Turning potential clients into new clients is one thing.
But how can you predict and guarantee what they will do next? By planning and implementing marketing automation tactics, you can start understanding trends.
Do you know when people buy from you? How long until they see results? When do they go for a more expensive purchase? Or when do they bid you farewell?
A marketing automation specialist will help you identify these trends. And with their guidance, you can decide what communications will work best and at what point.
The result is clients becoming more profitable, staying with you longer, spending more money and referring more business to you. Automatically.
And if we had one top tip…
Are you in the early stages of launching your business and have big plans for the coming years? Then you should think about executing marketing automation tactics sooner rather than later.
That way when you’re rolling in million-dollar customers, you’ll have more time on your hands. That’s more time to focus on strategy and less time on those tedious, time-consuming tasks.
And if you’re lucky enough to already have the customers you need, why not hire a specialist to see how much time and money you could be saving?
At this point, you’ll be well versed in your customer journey, so it may just be a case of automating it!
What could marketing automation do for your business?
We believe that you only get the right answer when you’ve asked the right question. You may not even know what can be automated, and you’ll be amazed by the possibilities out there. Here at Airbase, we have all the right answers and we’re waiting to share them!
Speak to us and share more about your business to discover how we can help your business thrive!
