No business will ever survive without marketing. After all, what’s the point of having a business without anyone knowing it exists? Unfortunately, efficient marketing also requires a lot of time, effort, and teamwork一resources that you would rather spend on more important tasks as a sales representative. The good part is, the answer is actually easy. The solution is marketing automation.

What Is Marketing Automation?

As the term implies, marketing automation is the method of using software to automatically perform marketing-related tasks for you. Depending on what type of program you’re using, marketing automation platforms usually perform their tasks by waiting for particular triggers that you have set beforehand. For instance, you can set up a welcome email to be sent every time an online visitor signs up for your website’s newsletter. 

It is even possible to set up a chain of automated events. Following our example, you can send a welcome email containing a link that the recipient can click on. You can then set a notification trigger every time this link is accessed and indicate that you want to include the number of clicks this link got in your monthly report. 

Imagine being able to create this domino effect without employee interaction.

Which Businesses Can Benefit from Marketing Automation?

Here’s the deal: as long as a business requires marketing, it can benefit from marketing automation. And who doesn’t need marketing? Even a marketing company needs marketing.

However, this doesn’t mean that you should just carelessly sign up for any automation software. There are numerous platforms specifically designed for certain industries. It will prove more beneficial to use one tailormade for your particular needs and preferences. 

What Is Worth Automating?

Here are a  few marketing tasks we believe worthwhile to automate:

Social Media

One of the best things we love about social media is that it’s free. There are platforms that offer paid features and premium accounts, sure, but anyone can sign up for a free account anytime at no cost. 

Efficient social media marketing takes a lot of time and effort, though. Consistent and strategic timing is required to keep your online followers engaged. 

Maintaining one social media account is one thing, but pushing out regular posts on set hours and days for multiple accounts is another. 

Hence, instead of spending hours logging in each day just to post on each of your social media accounts manually, you can create and schedule your posts ahead of time and just wait to see fresh content on all your pages daily. 

There are even graphic design programs that can reformat a single social media post and make it more applicable to other platforms. The resize feature of Canva is a good example. It will allow you to create a Facebook post that you can later resize to fit Instagram or Tiktok in a single click.

Customer Engagement

Technology has yet to develop a program that automates responses to social media post comments. However, there are social media platforms that allow you to send an automated reply for direct messages.

You can also add an AI-integrated chat feature to your website. It will allow you to formulate responses to frequently asked questions related to your products and services. In fact, you can go one step further and strategically create an automated sales funnel by dropping add-to-cart or check-out links into your chat responses.

Email 

Here’s another form of customer engagement: sending out emails. We still remember how hard it was to manually input email addresses, sending out 50 at a time following the limitations set by email companies. We weren’t able to complain back then because it was definitely more convenient and affordable to do compared to sending out promotional mail to people. 

But those dark days are over. There are numerous email marketing platforms that allow you to send out emails with just a click. Depending on your chosen plan or program, you might not even need to input email addresses anymore since you can automate lead capturing as well (more on this in a bit). 

Just like your social media posts, most email marketing services allow you to schedule the sending of emails in advance. You can even set triggers on events that need an email to be sent, similar to our previous “welcome message” example above. 

Lead Management

Did you know that you can automate the whole lead conversion cycle? From lead generation, tracking, qualifying, and assigning to sales teams, there are automation features and services that allow you to minimize human intervention in these tasks as much as possible. You will never have to manually type in lead information into a spreadsheet ever again.

Analytics

Are you having trouble sorting through massive amounts of marketing data? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. The truth is, the bulk of marketing data these days has already surpassed our human capacity to process. Using marketing automation tools is imperative to go through all this collected information and create data-driven reports in a timely manner. 

How to Focus on Sales

The marketing automation solutions we have mentioned above are not the only automated services available out there. We have simply featured the ones that we have found most beneficial to business owners regardless of their industry and scale. 

Now, can you imagine how much time and resources you’ll save even with these tips alone? It will certainly free up enough for you to finally shift your focus towards your sales goals. You can finally set up that POS financing system you’ve been meaning to do. Or how about refining and drafting that sales proposal that’s bound to increase your company’s annual revenue? 

Don’t forget that there are automation tools designed to boost sales as well一something you should definitely be on the lookout for as you’re hunting for your preferred marketing automation programs.

To Sum up

Marketing automation can save you from the time and effort it takes to perform repetitive yet crucial marketing tasks, especially if you’re a sales representative or a small business owner striving to juggle everything on his own. Do yourself a favor and put as much of these chores on autopilot as possible. 

In this way, you’ll be able to focus on the things that really matter. Your brand, your numbers, and your future.