Automate your sales and marketing activities

Have you ever wondered how you could make your life as a marketer, easier and more effective? Would you like to achieve faster the marketing goals that you set? Would you need some help to determine the right audiences, quickly and at a scale? We think your answer is marketing automation.

What is marketing automation?

According to salesforce.com, marketing automation can be described as a set of tools created with the purpose to optimize and simplify some of the most time-consuming responsibilities of the modern marketing and sales roles. It is an excellent way to engage with your customers, without the need for you to be there and do each action, manually. Sales automation, on the other hand, also known as sales force automation (SFA) is built around assisting human sales agents - while the human touch is what makes all the difference in sales, as selecthub.com says.

So, what are the benefits?

There are many various tools created for different specific needs of those who practice digital marketing. Also, there are many benefits to list when it comes to marketing automation, but here are some of the most obvious!

Time efficiency

This is the biggest, most important and most mentioned benefit when we talk about automating marketing actions and processes. It can be extremely rewarding to know that a part of your tasks is done, without having to manually press “send” or “post”. This way, you can start focusing on growing your business, without affecting the quality of the services you actually provide.

Less repetitive tasks

With fewer repetitive tasks, you maintain your enthusiasm for the work you do and you can focus on more important, non-automated activities, such as getting involved in one to one discussions (for a faster and more effective qualification of your potential customers), framing the marketing strategies and the goals you want to achieve and analyzing along the way, what works and what doesn't.

Customization and segmentation

Depending on the actions that a potential customer takes, on your website, depending on the purchases he has made in a certain period of time or depending on other parameters (date of birth, first purchase and so on), an automation tool could send certain messages and offers. This is how you can personalize your client's experience and get a higher rate of engagement with your services.

Scalability

A marketing automation solution can be very helpful, especially in the case of small businesses. That’s because it can support you when you want to grow your business and you start getting more customers. All you have to do is just upgrade your subscription to a better one, that fits all your business’s needs.

Cost-effectiveness

This benefit is observed in the long run, especially when you’re achieving more and more clients and when your business is growing. Take into account the time and money you spend without automation processes and then start testing some automation tools. Most likely, the difference between the two strategies will convince you not to go back to time-consuming, manual tasks.

Tools that make your work easier

There are so many activities that you can automate in the field of digital marketing that most likely we should make an extremely long list of tools that exist and what they are useful for. Here are some of the most popular ones!

Linked Helper, Expandi, Dux-soup, We-connect - are great tools with a wide range of features to streamline lead generation and sales outreach on LinkedIn.

Phantom Buster - is a tool that helps businesses automate any action they may want to perform on the internet, including LinkedIn automation.

Kennected - is a tool for businesses and entrepreneurs and it focuses on lead generation. They have different solutions that integrate copywriting, LinkedIn marketing, personal branding and so on.

You can read an extensive explanation and comparison of some of these tools, in this hyperise.com article.

Also, LIA offers an AI-based recognition of social media profile content and usage in automatically generated messages. Hootsuite, Loomly and Planable are social media management tools, designed in order to help you plan, schedule and manage your content and postings on social media. But these are just a few of them. You can read about many more and compare them, on buffer.com.

We hope that we have made you think, at least, of automating your marketing and sales processes, if you have not already tried any of the tools mentioned above. The benefits are more than obvious, and the transition is significant, especially for businesses that want to grow and develop.

These being said, we think that the next level is process automation through the entire workflow, also on other platforms, such as event/matchmaking pages. These systems can crawl through different online sources in order to reach your target audience and schedule a meeting with it, so you can present your product or service. But maybe we’ll discuss this more in a future article if you’re interested.

Which one of the above tools did you try or do you plan to try?