Marketing Automation

If you’re a big fan of repetitive tasks and find technology quite terrifying - marketing automation might not be for you. But if you’re a busy business owner in desperate need of a solution to streamline your marketing efforts and make them much more effective - we have just the thing: our marketing automation service. 

Despite its recent popularity marketing automation isn’t a particularly new instrument, it was first developed back in 1992 but didn’t begin to take off until 2003 when industrialisation gave it the kick start it needed. Now, it’s an essential business tool for companies all over the world and we’re going to tell you why. 

Marketing Automation - What Is It?

A great content strategy is digital marketing fuel, but marketing automation is the souped up turbo engine that really gets things moving. 

At a glance, marketing automation involves using software to manage every aspect of your marketing campaign, including but not restricted to email marketing, social media marketing, ad management and mobile campaigns.

Because let’s face it, marketing is quite repetitive - it’s all about testing what works for your business and what doesn’t. Most businesses don’t have the time or manpower to dedicate to performing these manual tasks. Which is where we come in and streamline your marketing activities for you. 

Any marketer will tell you that there are a lot of elements to consider when creating a marketing strategy - which is why it’s beneficial to utilise marketing automation to gain a deeper understanding of your audience. These insights are crucial to a successful marketing campaign and when this research is being carried out manually - things can be missed. 

Using software to automate your marketing activities allows you to focus on the important details without getting bogged down by the boring bits. It’s a clever tactic which enables businesses to build relationships with prospective customers by utilising highly personalised, valuable content which helps convert prospects into leads, and ultimately into customers. 

Perhaps you’re not sure on the type of content your customer would find valuable or even engaging - we’re experts when it comes to sifting through heaps of data and analytics - why not let us find out for you? We can even provide you with content tailored entirely to your audience. 

One of our favourite things about marketing automation is that it enables you to schedule and automate tasks that can be quite tedious, especially when your schedule is tight. If you don’t have a marketing team, managing your marketing can be overwhelming even more so if there are a plethora of other aspects of the business you need to focus on. But fear not! This clever tech can send out your email marketing, publish your social media posts, blog posts and even manage your ad campaigns.

Marketing automation doesn’t just streamline your marketing efforts - it also measures them. The important information collected by this software provides you with key insights and allows you to work more efficiently, increase your revenue and enhance the power of your marketing. 

The truth is,it’s essential for any modern business. Recent studies have shown that businesses who employ marketing automation software tend to outperform businesses that don’t - research shows that 63% of companies using marketing automation outperformed their competitors. 

As your business grows, there comes a time when you can no longer manage your marketing manually, this is the time to really level up and introduce marketing automation. If you’re not sure where to start - get in touch with us to discuss the right marketing automation software for your business.  

Where You Can Apply Marketing Automation:

Most people are surprised when we tell them that marketing automation has way more applications than rolling out monthly emails. It can be used for social media marketing, lead generation, lead nurturing and providing metrics and analytics - to name but a few. Let’s take a more in-depth look at the various ways marketing automation can be applied:

Chatbots - These were actually the leading automation trend for 2020 and grew even more popular in 2021. They play a crucial role in improving customer service and engagement. By utilising chatbots business owners can interact with customers and ensure their questions are answered without having to physically lift a finger. Now what does this have to do with marketing? Well the insights from these interactions will provide you with a better understanding of the questions your customers are asking. This information can be curated into an engaging piece of valuable content or used to tweak an existing marketing campaign. 

Automated social media marketing - When you automate your social media marketing you can create and schedule posts weeks and months in advance - you can even pinpoint the exact time you want them to be published. Super handy when managing your workload. According to Instapage, automating your social media posts and ads can save you more than 6 hours a week. 

Email Personalisation - Delivering a tailored experience for your audience is so important. Even little details like including the customer's name in the email subject can have a huge impact. There’s plenty of software out there that can collect customer data, organise it and send out automated emails at the optimal time. 

Marketing automation is super effective when managing cross-channel marketing campaigns, with endless apps and social media channels it’s much more efficient to manage the campaigns in the same place to avoid confusion or missed opportunities. 

There are many ways that marketing automation can be applied, but what’s really important is ensuring the automation package suits your needs as a business. We don’t do a one size fits all package here at Geek Unique, just like our name our packages are entirely unique. 

What Marketing Automation Doesn’t Do

Contrary to popular belief marketing automation isn’t a tool for pushing out spam emails, nor can it replace your entire marketing team. Marketing automation encompasses many more channels than just email marketing and with the right content - it won’t be spammy. 

Marketing automation allows you to work more efficiently, giving your team the time to work on strategies and new campaigns. After all, marketing automation won’t create your campaigns for you - well not yet anyway. 

Marketing automation is crucial to your marketing mix but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can sit back and relax. As with any marketing strategy you will need to constantly analyse and amend your marketing campaigns to work out what’s working, and what isn’t. Alternatively you can utilise our reporting services and we can fill you in on how your marketing campaign is faring and what needs to be improved. 

A common misconception is that only the marketing team benefits from this tool. But that simply isn’t the case - your sales team will too! It makes their lives considerably easier by prioritising leads more effectively which ultimately improves the chances of conversion.  

Marketing Automation - What Are The Benefits?

First and foremost - free time. By assigning the more monotonous tasks to be automated - you’ll be saving yourself time and resources, which can be better spent elsewhere. 

In order to make your marketing campaigns more effective, you need time to analyse the data from previous campaigns which can be used to develop new campaigns and strategies. 

With audience attention spans decreasing it’s crucial that a marketing team spends more time on creative thinking and developing their marketing strategies. The time spent on enhancing these further will enable your marketing campaigns to cut-through the noise and engage with existing audiences and prospective clients. 

Audience behaviour is another interesting aspect of marketing. Marketing automation allows you to understand your audience better by providing a more detailed picture. A picture that wouldn’t be as rich if you were to use manual methods. Marketing automation enables you to track your audiences interactions with your campaigns, giving you a deeper understanding of where they are on the customer journey. These findings can then be applied to future marketing campaigns.

Once you know where your prospective customer is on their journey, you can customise your marketing and ads to achieve the desired results e.g a sale, booking or enquiry. 

Which brings us to the next benefit of using this incredible software - managing your leads. The data captured through marketing automation can be utilised to ascertain audience progress, or rather their readiness to buy your products or services. Understanding the customer lifecycle for your business is vital, pre-defined and measured outcomes can be used to develop new campaigns or tweak existing ones. After using marketing automation software a whopping 80% of marketers saw an increase in leads. 

Automating the priority of your leads through automatic scoring and qualifying will not only improve the quality but the likelihood of conversions too. This can be done by studying the data gathered from website visits, social media activity and direct marketing, which in turn can be used to develop broader marketing campaigns such as personalised emails, trigger-based marketing messages and targeted ads. If this all sounds like a lot of work, you can of course leave it to us - we can provide you with regular reports outlining progress, key insights and recommendations. 

Recent studies discovered that 61% of businesses that opted to use marketing automation stated that the implementation process was difficult - we’d have to agree. This software is easy to use but requires an expert when it comes to integration. Why not leave the techy parts to us and enjoy the time you’ll have free’d up by no longer having to perform manual marketing tasks.

How To Tell If You Need Marketing Automation

There are several questions which can help you determine whether marketing automation is right for you:

  • Can you find, track and engage with your potential customers online? 
  • If a list of customers was placed in front of you - would you be able to rank them based on their likelihood to use your services or buy your products?
  • Are you able to manage your leads and filter them based on the level of engagement and interest they have with your brand?
  • Are you able to identify the amount your individual marketing campaigns are contributing to your revenue?

No? If you used marketing automation, you would be able to do all of the above and much more. 

Why Businesses Need Marketing Automation

Because the best marketing teams use it. Why? It improves the accuracy of your marketing campaigns and provides your sales team with hot leads, and ultimately it allows you to achieve a much better ROI. A recent study from Lenskold discovered that 78% of successful marketers say that automation is most responsible for improving their revenue contribution. 

How do they do it? By using the right tools, tools that offer a deeper understanding of how their campaigns perform. Tools which enable them to demonstrate how effective their campaigns are and offer insights on where to make the necessary edits.

In the constantly evolving digital landscape we now find ourselves in - marketing automation is now par for the course if you want to set yourself apart from the competition. Your audience engages with your business across a whole host of different channels, which means that marketing automation is now more of a requirement than an option. To thrive in the era of new tech, automation is key to driving your business forward. 

Marketing automation is the pinnacle of a successful marketing department, and can be used by small businesses all the way up to multinational brands. At Geek Unique we’ve helped swarms of businesses enhance the effectiveness of their marketing activities by introducing them to the game changer that is marketing automation. We’ve worked with one man bands all the way up to household names - because even the biggest brands need a helping hand.