Marketing Automation

A few years back, the benefits of an automated marketing system could only be enjoyed by the affluent business enterprises. They produced the automated marketing system as an 'in-house' venture by investing a huge amount to develop the technology to create the system. But the problem with such a system was that the investment required was greater than the amount saved with this automation.

There was yet a high demand to make such automated systems available at lower costs, and several third party suppliers took up the challenge. They has made it available for large and medium level B2B and B2C companies to make use of such automation software quickly.

The best use of this is for the B2B businesses that have integrated such an automated system with their customer relationship management system. Both the businesses can be benefited in doing so, whereby marketing and sales drive can be taken up in a parallel mode.

Marketing Automation for the User

One of the biggest breakthroughs towards marketing automation was provided by the development and popularization of social media. Earlier the only modes of automated marketing were through emails, snail mails, and targeted ads. Presently, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other social media networks have made it possible to send out messages to customers, and they can even send back messages to the businesses. This has made mutual communication a possibility.

With such an interactive platform, companies that can take advantage of this facility by conversing with the customers in real time, are becoming successful in their venture. For a beneficial social media presence, it requires the business to invest time, skills and resources.

Advantages of Marketing Automation

The reasons for a business to invest in marketing automation are:

1. Time Saving: Advertisement campaigns can be pre-set and scheduled to be launched at different times with different targets. The user can set the desired release date and time. It can save a good deal of useful time.

2. Cost-effective: When compared to the manual marketing methods, it takes up less time and labor.  There is a smooth flow to the advertisement launch,  saving time and cost.

3. Combining with CRM: The leads produced from the marketing ads are maintained in contact even after unsuccessful business completion attempts. This ensures that all leads are maintained in the database and kept in constant contact.

4. Collect Customer Data: Businesses can use these automated methods to get to know more about the customer and make necessary changes to their advertisements and communication methods.

5. Email Management: Usually businesses maintained only a single email channel, and this was easy. But currently, there are multiple email channels used by customers and handling several of them has been made possible with marketing automation systems.

6. Uniformity: Branding requires that the look and feel of all the ad promotions should be the same. With a single platform that handles all of the marketing promos, this consistency is ensured.

7. Customization: The business can personalize the advertisement campaigns according to the customer. The user will rather welcome this and thus, increase the conversion rate.