Importance of Marketing Automation in Startups
Well, marketing automation is not a new thing nor needs any introduction. New-age digital marketing comes with a host of things to do. SMS marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media promotions, Blogging, Video & podcast marketing, online reputation management and what not? So, let’s talk about why implementing marketing automation is essential for startups and small organizations!
But, let’s first understand what is marketing automation in the first place. Marketing automation is the process of making the marketing process automated across channels by integrating and optimizing them for your company’s goal.
Here are some of the benefits, why even startups should adopt automation in their marketing from their initial stage of team and product development!
Better analytics
Marketing automation is all about merging things together and keeping all the data and campaign goals in one place. Thus, even if you are not active on many channels at the same time, you would be able to get things done and measure results better.
Using multiple channels comes with their own challenges, as marketers and brands would need to go through all the separate platforms to know the overall performance. That would result in complex data output and this isn’t an easy way to measure things for all the campaigns.
Thus, marketing automation would become a helpful thing from the initial stage itself. Further scaling would add more data in a structured manner and no chaos would take place. And with structured data, organizations would be able to make better decisions without any hesitations or assumptions for their next marketing campaigns.
Read now: Importance of Analytics
With refined analytics, A/B testing opportunities also become handy. Thus, measuring performance for your email marketing campaigns or even for ads and influencer affiliate campaigns becomes as easy as the mouse clicks on your PC!
Better sales cycle
Getting sales is the most important thing for any organization. That is the reason why every organization invests their money into marketing in the first place.
CRM integrations coupled with digital support enables salesforce to make the most out of your marketing automation. Lead nurturing is essential for an organization’s sales process, thus marketing automation would help companies to reach their customers with ease and at the right time when they are actively looking for your services and products.
Not only that, with proper CRM integrations, the sales team would be able to gain insights from their customers about when they are trying to reach you, where they dropped the plan of taking your service if they visited your website/application, did they leave the cart abandoned at which steps and more. Features like Geo-fencing and passive activity tracking also helps to send them promo codes and other customized notifications to make them purchase things from you.
Better customer engagement
When we talk about SaaS (Software as a Service) or mobile applications for users, it becomes mandatory to keep the customers engaged and active on the platform to make sure that they end up purchasing paid features or services from you!
Thus, marketing automation helps you build customer relationships and funnels for your predefined goals and expectations. When you put it in the action, customers would get their customized content, notifications, features and many more things from your marketing automation software itself, allowing you to work on the technical side of your business and putting customer engagement on autopilot.
Improved productivity
When automation comes into organizations’ one system, it makes things better for management, team and even for your customers. When it comes to adopting marketing automation — customer journey mapping and content management become easy. Content management is one of the most difficult tasks when you are dealing with various channels and media of content from text to video, marketing automation makes it a bit easier to manage.
Also, automation means better workflows of things. Custom tasks or custom workflows can be managed easily and things can be tracked well within the system. Thus, the overall visibility of tasks and team communications become easy.
Better content distribution across the channels
As content management is difficult, content distribution and managing various content-oriented platforms is even more challenging. While promotional or educational content from the company would go live on one of the designated platforms, one has to make sure that it reaches its defined audience.
Thus, marketing automation would automatically distribute the content for SEO and Social media purposes across the platforms and would help to bring the audience on the source. With such better platform integrations, overall branding and the company’s core marketing structure would improve.
As an organization would be able to pay attention to most of the platforms and its audience at the same time, the brand authority would improve at all the steps.
Scalability
As we are discussing adopting marketing automation for small businesses and startups, when they start scaling, all the existing leads and sales performance reports would be carried forward and made more efficient. Thus, marketing automation would also help to scale marketing operations with just a single access point.
So, marketing automation makes lives easy and efficient, but adoption can become a bit tricky in the initial phase. As you have to make sure that your team is able to adopt the automation in the first place and you have the ability to set your marketing goals and understand the customer trends.
As an organization or management team, you would be the first person to make these adoptions, so getting used to automation from the initial phase would help a lot!
