It can be exhausting to keep up with the evolving marketing industry. Especially for a start-up where the resources are limited and the time is of significant importance too. With new strategies, algorithms, social media techniques, and other emerging opportunities arising in the world of marketing, start-ups have to look into other avenues to keep up with the industry and times. Corporations have the budgets to hire in-house digital marketing teams that manage and monitor their online presence; but often, start-ups do not have the luxury to hire such teams and have to be able to run the ship tight.
This is where marketing tech comes into play. In this article, we will discuss the 5 ways in which marketing automation can help the start-ups grow faster. Marketing tech comes with a catch. People choose small businesses because of their human element and if the start-up relies too heavily on automation, it may lose its human touch. If you take a look at the bigger picture, investing in marketing automation will help the start-up streamline their operations and help the companies grow faster.
Competitive edge
As said earlier, corporations have the advantage of being able to afford marketing teams and have several personnel deployed to execute and monitor their marketing campaigns. Start-ups are the smaller fish in the ocean trying to outswim the bigger ones. They have to play smart or else they would get swallowed up in the process.
According to Start up Grind, nearly half of the start-up owners manage the marketing efforts on their own. Apart from this, the start-up CEOs are also the CFOs and CMOs. Marketing automation helps them out here by offering easy to use tech that has the sophistication to keep up with the marketing trends.
If you don’t have an expertise in lead generation or nurturing, there are various companies out there who provide these services and would do your job for you. Usually, during the onboarding process of these services, you can specify the parameters on which the decisions are made. This saves you hours and days of manual labor and work. This way, as a start-up owner, you can focus on the other aspects of the business.
Valuable database
Marketing automation tools help you collect valuable data for your database. The information gathered during marketing goes far beyond customers and potential customers. This knowledge helps you devise better and more informed marketing strategies based on the behavior of your visitors.
Automation helps you determine which style of language works with the audience, what tone of words works best with certain audience segments, and what audience segments are more likely to make a purchase on your website. It also helps determine the time on which the customers are most likely to shop.
Moreover, this data also helps you understand at what point the customers fall off during their journey. Automating this process is like employing a full-time marketing agency but it is, in-fact, relatively cheaper and a lot less time-consuming.
Turning leads into sales
If you’re operating a start-up it is highly likely that you do not have the time to nurture your leads. Nurturing the leads is a crucial business development process and it requires much more than touching base or checking in. Nurturing your lead towards a sale involves steering your lead towards your desired goal or objective.
According to MarTech Today, nurtured leads show a 20% increase in sales in comparison to the non-nurtured leads. Marketing automation can help you manage your leads. For example, if a customer has abandoned the shopping cart on your ecommerce store, marketing automation tools would send out an email reminding the customer of the abandoned cart. These tools can even incentivize the customer’s purchase by offering a discount or other incentives.
This is set up during the onboarding process and helps the business by increasing conversions and sales. In its true essence, marketing automation helps you become true marketing professionals by following and assisting your visitors every step of their journey.
Saves time and money
The world around us is very fast paced and it is near to impossible to be able to reach out to all of your business contacts and leads manually. It is possible but, with automation, this can be done much more efficiently and with more precision.
Marketing automation can manage your email list and create content according to the needs of the business. It can also help determine the effectiveness of the campaign based on the data collected during the previous campaigns. In short, automation can help you make better decisions in terms of sending out personalized content from your business. This saves you a lot of time and money as you do not have to hire freelancers to write content, pay for email servers or respond to each and every query manually.
There are numerous services out there which manage your landing pages and lead forms and then the responses that are generated by them. The leads collected by your business are assets and marketing automation can help you with the asset management by sending out regular content, rooting out unresponsive leads based on the open rates and convert the leads into customers.
Benefit sales
It is a common misconception that comes with the term ‘marketing automation’, that it only benefits the marketing department of the company. Marketing automation not only benefits the marketing of a company but also helps the sales departments, as both these departments are highly dependent on each other.
By integrating marketing automation tools with your CRM, the sales team can greatly benefit from it. Distributing the leads according to the date received from marketing automation and prioritizing them accordingly helps the sales team convert the data into sales.
Marketing automation tools are easily integrated with the CRMs. They later give insights to the sales team on how the potential customers are responding to the marketing materials sent out by the company or with the various marketing campaigns. This can help segment the leads into various categories that help the sales team work faster and with more efficiency.
Wrapping it up
Marketing automation has almost become a necessity in the modern day marketing industry. Hours of manual labor have been replaced by tools and software. This does not mean that the human value in the marketing industry has dried up but these tools are in place to assist the humans to work faster and make more informed decisions.
This increases the productivity and efficiency of the people that you are working with. A start-up already faces the challenges of limited resources and time, marketing automation is the solution to save time and money both and help the start-up grow faster.
