Automation is spreading into every sector of practically every industry—and marketers need to keep pace.

The human element remains a critical part of marketing. While personal connections and psychology are at the heart of a successful marketing campaign, automation can significantly improve your team’s daily workflow and free up time for deep work, strategy, and planning.

How? Let’s take a close look at how marketing automation processes can be a net benefit to your organization.

Why is automation crucial for modern marketing?

Simply put, automation streamlines and improves your organization as a whole. Automation processes, platforms, and tools can do a lot, including:

When leveraged properly, automation should not replace standard marketing practices like understanding your leads, leveraging human psychology, and trying to forge real connections with prospective and current customers. Instead, automation frees up more time for marketing practices such as B2B outreach, email marketing, and data analysis, among others.

Your business can’t afford to ignore automation tools any longer. These tools should become a big part of your business plan because they can significantly impact your marketing efforts and lead to major gains and advantages in the long term.

5 ways automation can improve daily marketing workflows

Not sure how marketing automation can specifically improve your daily marketing workflows? Here are five concrete ways in which marketing automation can provide tangible benefits to your company.

Automated B2B outreach

For starters, marketing automation can assist with B2B outreach strategies. Many of the latest tools will help you:

• Market automatically to new leads that are entered into your database.
• Organize leads into different categories, allowing for targeted marketing efforts rather than scattershot or generalized marketing (which is usually much less effective).
• Respond instantly to leads if they try to contact your team. This is invaluable since it may prevent a lead from falling away if your team is busy and doesn’t catch a phone call or email.

Outreach strategies are the cornerstone of many modern marketing efforts. After all, if you don’t actively pursue the new leads that your advertising and brand reputation bring in, your marketing is all moot and your cash flow may suffer. Automation is designed to make your outreach efforts more simple and less time consuming on your end. Organizing leads and delivering initial, instant responses to leads who try to contact your team are two examples of where automation can help you save time from doing them manually.

Email marketing automation and social posting

Marketing automation processes can seriously improve your email workflow and social media efforts. Email marketing and social media posts are vital because they:

• Allow you to advertise to targeted individuals and leads
• Allow you to remind leads about upcoming sales
• Help customers remember they have items in their digital carts

However, email marketing and social media posts need to feel organic and directed toward your target audience. Otherwise, most consumers simply filter these messages out. This is doubly true for any emails that may be perceived as “spam” messages.

It takes a lot of time to personalize an email campaign or to tweak social media posts until they are perfect. Fortunately, marketing automation tools and software can:

• Tailor email and social media post copy to different demographics or groups, increasing engagement.
• Include automatic name mentions for email marketing, which is useful when trying to connect with a single individual.
• Automatically publish social media posts at scheduled times.
• Send emails automatically, negating a lot of the repetitive tasks inherent in an email marketing workflow.

All of these features can make your email marketing and social media marketing campaigns much more effective, time-efficient, and streamlined.

Chatbots

Don’t forget chatbots. These helpful automated tools are often considered a part of human resources or customer service, but they can also help with marketing. How?

Say that a lead lands on your website and wants to ask a quick question about your product. However, your team is away for lunch. A chatbot can answer a question from a client or lead immediately and direct them to some helpful resources, and then alert your sales team.

The lead feels responded to and listened to even if your people weren’t there to personally receive them. On top of that, some chatbots can direct leads to customer service lines or email addresses.

Automated data analysis

Marketing automation processes and tools can also help you analyze your market research and strategy performance. Automated tools can look at all the data you collect from your marketing campaigns, such as conversion rate or customer acquisition cost, then produce important insights your team can use for further improvements.

This is invaluable, especially if you have a small marketing team with no statisticians on the staff. In a way, marketing automation can improve conversion rate optimization and maximize the efficacy of your marketing campaigns.

Plus, automated tools usually make fewer analysis- or insight-related mistakes compared to humans. That’s because automated tools look at the raw data and don’t allow human bias into the equation.

This can extend to other elements of your marketing, as well. Say that you have multiple online ads running simultaneously, but you have to cut one. An automated marketing tool can record important data and monitor the ads as they run, then tell you which one you should cut for maximum efficiency.

Freed-up time for non-tedious tasks

Above all else, marketing automation tools free up time for your marketing team by taking care of a lot of tedious tasks. In turn, your marketing team can then focus on the human element that is so important to modern marketing. They can also spend that time collaborating with other teams, hiring more people, or anything else you determine.

For example, you can create customer service responses via email automation. You can take over and reply personally with a more in-depth answer if a customer is still asking questions, but offering automated emails is a way to respond to customers immediately. Just make sure that your responses are always written with the most up-to-date information and that can actually help solve the issue at hand for a customer. Also make sure that your response addresses the customer by their first name and is written in a more conversational rather than formal tone.

Are you ready to invest in marketing automation? Start here.

Marketing automation processes can do a lot for your organization regardless of size (or the size of your marketing team). In fact, marketing automation is even more beneficial for smaller teams and companies, which may not have as many resources as their larger counterparts.

The post How to Improve Your Daily Workflow with Marketing Automation Processes appeared first on Capterra.