Marketing Automation can help salespeople, marketers, and operations professionals be more efficient. I started using marketing automation because I needed to generate more and better leads. Sales automation is just one small piece of the automation puzzle.
Business automation can help the entire sales process as well as back-end operations. For the sales process, the ability to focus on the hottest leads helps everyone. You can stay in touch with all prospects but still have time to give attention to the prospects that are ready.
Below are different automations you can set up for your business using various automation tools:
- Generating Leads – Generating leads is easier because you can use landing pages or forms to capture leads (and immediately follow up).
- Nurturing Leads – Nurturing leads and bringing prospects through the marketing funnel is much easier. Leads can be ‘touched’ using a system of emails.
- Filtering Leads – As you nurture your leads, you want to be able to filter through (and focus on the ‘hot’ leads). If you use scoring (score leads based on the parameters you set — points given for activities like opening emails, clicking on links, clicking on CTAs, etc.) Using scoring (provided by such programs as Marketo and Active Campaign) to help you identify the right leads, you can focus on people that are further down in your marketing funnel.
- Other Email Functions – Depending on what program you use, you can automate every part of the email process (reporting, analytics, sending, scoring, etc.).
- Update CRM – You can update your CRM (customer relationship management) system automatically with the data from the email marketing functions.
- Other Integrations – If you use integration programs, you can set up tasks in other programs. An example would be using Zapier or IFTTT to connect your Asana, Airtable, etc.
- Blog Updates – You can kick off email campaigns when you post a blog on your website. You can automate the posting of social media when your blog comes out.
- Social Media – You can automate posting of social media using programs like Buffer or Hootsuite. You can also automate replies or messaging using some of these programs.
- Saving Files – You can automatically save attachments to your Google Drive or Dropbox.
SO MUCH MORE – With integration programs, there are so many different areas you can automate. If you do something on a regular basis that is ‘triggered’ by another activity, there is a good chance you can automate it!