You may have noticed that we’ve been talking a lot about marketing automation lately - and while you may be tired of our yapping about the importance of it, it’s important to note that there are several great benefits for using automation as part of your marketing strategy. So that means exactly what you think it means; we’re going to talk even more about marketing automation in this blog post. Specifically, the benefits of marketing automation and the tasks that benefit from automation.
If you’re unfamiliar with the general concept of automation for marketing, we suggest taking a look at our past blogs from this series:
Let’s dive into the good stuff, shall we? After learning about the basics of marketing automation, now’s the time to learn why using it is important. As we highlighted in our first blog of this series titled What is Marketing Automation? [And Why Should You Care?], the following are the main benefits to automating your marketing tasks:
When you’re able to automate tasks, this helps you and your marketing team save time for other important things that need to get done. Know the ol’ saying “time is money?” This is one of those instances where that saying applies perfectly. When you save time through automation, you can focus your attention to doing other things that help your clients thrive in the digital space.
Tracking user engagement becomes a lot easier and convenient when you use automation tools such as the HubSpot CRM. This CRM gives users access to a suite of powerful tools that allow you to track user engagement and manage contacts and leads.
Don’t have the time to manually send out emails each time you want to communicate with your contact list? No worries - an email automation tool (such as HubSpot) can help you create and schedule emails ahead of time. You can also create landing pages with forms, and when people enter their information into those forms, they’ll be added to an email nurturing sequence that automatically sends thank you emails as well as other marketing emails that you’ve set up to send out to contacts over time.
By this point, we’re sure you can agree that there are many awesome benefits for using automation within your marketing strategy. But now the question is: which tasks should you focus on automating? There are plenty of tasks that will benefit from implementing automation, including but not limited to:
As we’ve discussed previously, automation is great for setting up email nurturing sequences for inbound marketing campaigns and more. Simply create your emails, select the contacts you want to send them to, and schedule them out. Now you won’t have to worry about emails falling through the cracks.
High-quality marketing software like HubSpot has all the tools you need in order to create lead generation opportunities. For example, creating a landing page with information about a downloadable resource may pique the interest of your buyer personas. This landing page is the perfect place for you to include a form that captures information from potential leads and adds them to an email nurturing sequence workflow where they’ll be able to download the resource they’re interested in, as well as receive emails from your company that are designed to lead them down the sales funnel, and ultimately, to a purchase.
Long gone are the days when you needed to worry about manually scheduling every. single. social. post. every. single. day. (Believe us, we know how monotonous that gets). Using a social media scheduling software - such as the one within HubSpot - allows users to upload and schedule posts days, weeks, and even months ahead of time across multiple platforms.
Do you get a lot of questions on your website or social media channels? Try using a live chat bot to answer frequently asked questions from your audience. This way, when someone contacts you through the chat feature on Facebook or another platform, they’ll be greeted with automated messages instead of waiting around for a response from a real person. Of course, you always have the option to reach out to them via the chat at a later date, but using a live chat bot can help keep your audience engaged.
It’s no secret that search engine optimization, or SEO, is very important when it comes to your website getting found online. Using software such as SEMrush allows users to schedule SEO audits of a website so that the results are ready when you need them. Automating this process also allows you to save time from manually combing through your website every week or month - the SEO audit tool does all the hard work for you.
Sure, you can keep track of all of your projects in, say, a notebook or a planner. But realistically, how sustainable is that for you and your team? At Greyphin, we’re firm believers in creating a detailed process for each team within the company by using project management software. Our go-to choice is ClickUp, but there are several great options on the market that allow project managers to assign tasks and subtasks to others in the company without having to worry about things falling apart.
Of course, there are plenty of other tasks that can benefit from automation, but the list could go on and on and on. And we know you don’t have time for that, right? Right. However, if you want a quick guide to learning more about marketing automation, be sure to download our Marketing Automation 101 infographic here. And, be sure to contact us if you have any questions about how our team can help you with automating your inbound marketing efforts!