Do you ever feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to finish all your marketing tasks? You’re not alone. It takes time, intentionality, and consistency to execute an inbound marketing strategy that keeps customers nurtured and engaged. Thankfully, there’s a powerful and effective solution to this lack of time and resources: marketing automation.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the use of technology to complete repetitive marketing tasks you’d otherwise do manually. Marketing teams primarily use automation for email, social media, and ad campaigns. These kinds of tasks require constant attention if you manually take care of them. Add in thousands of contacts all at different points in your customer journey, and you’ve got a lot of marketing tasks on your plate.
Why Do You Need Marketing Automation?
Maybe you’re thinking, “Sure, there’s a lot to do, but we get by just fine without adding marketing automation to everything else.”
Your business may be doing “fine,” but there are major benefits, freedoms, and growth that automation can bring you. Let’s take a look at how marketing automation can cut out busywork and get you refocused on your passion and profit.
Marketing Automation Saves Time and Money
Perhaps the most obvious benefit to marketing automation is the time, money, and labor it can save your team.
As your customer base grows, you’ll have more contacts to engage with. This means more emails, calls, sales, and data to manage, maybe (hopefully!) up into the thousands.
You could spread this work among your current team members, taking valuable time away from their other tasks. You could hire more employees, but then you’d have to pay for multiple salaries, training time, etc. Or, you could use marketing automation to off-load a significant number of tasks, freeing your team up to focus their energies on other growth-generating projects.
This is why marketing automation isn’t just a “nice-to-have” tool for businesses who are serious about growth and customer relationships. In fact, this article from Salesforce shows how marketing automation can increase sales productivity by 14.5% and reduce marketing overhead by 12.2%! The data is clear — marketing automation lessens workload and overhead while increasing productivity.
Marketing Automation Works on All Your Platforms
Luckily, there’s an automation tool for most repetitive tasks in today’s digital marketing world. Here are some of Soulheart’s favorite tools that we use to streamline our processes.
Email automation
Email marketing is an essential part of an effective inbound marketing strategy. We love using email automation because you can tailor your emails to so many different audiences within your database, depending on which form they fill out, how they interact with your website, etc.
To eliminate manually sending emails to each new lead, we use HubSpot’s ingenious email workflow tool to nurture contacts overtime, automatically. When someone fills out a form for a specific service, they’re added to a workflow that sends them emails based on their behaviors. Here’s an example of a workflow where we’ve customized the triggers, how much time passes before the next email, etc.
Social Media automation
Social media is another powerful way to gain organic traffic, but it can be a full-time job to keep up with the algorithms and post consistently. To help with our social media strategy, we use HubSpot’s Social dashboard to schedule posts in bulk, a month in advance, and across all our social media platforms. Here’s a glance at what our Social dashboard looks like, complete with analytics to keep track of post performance.
Ad campaign automation
The next area our team relies on HubSpot’s automation tools for is paid ads. In HubSpot’s Ads dashboard, you can create events to trigger your ads, create target audiences, and make highly customizable campaigns for multiple social platforms. This tool gives you tons of options to use your ads budget wisely so you can reach the right audience at the right times.
Build bridges across platforms
Sometimes you need to connect two different marketing platforms to eliminate busywork. For instance, we needed a way to add contacts to a customer support Slack channel, triggered by a form on our website. To connect WordPress to Slack, we used Zapier, another amazing tool that acts as a liaison between all kinds of platforms, including Gmail, Dropbox, Slack, Facebook Lead Ads, and over 3,000 more.
Find an Expert Guide for Your Marketing Automation Journey
After experiencing the freedom and efficiency that marketing automation has brought to our team, this is one tool we absolutely can’t live without. We’d love to lend our marketing automation expertise to you as you grow your business, too.
Soulheart is a certified HubSpot Solutions Partner who can help you navigate your marketing needs and find the right tools to do the job. That way, you don’t have to go through the trial and error process we did!
Learn more about how our team can help set you up on the best marketing automation platforms out there. We can’t wait to watch your business grow!