There are a ton of marketing tools out there. Everything from apps to software and they all do many different things.

The unfortunate truth is that marketing teams are always on a budget.

So how do you go about getting the most bang for your buck? The answer is marketing automation. It’s a powerful part of any marketing strategy with 82% of marketers seeing a positive ROI.

The purpose is to put some of your strategies on autopilot. This will help your team to operate with more efficiency and they can stretch their budget and still meet goals.

Efficiency

Cold-calling and other traditional methods can eat up your team’s time and the ROI on these old-school methods is fairly low. Opt-in forms and other types of information gathering should all go into one database. You can buy software that makes decisions once it hits a certain threshold of information.

Once you have x, y, and z info on a customer, your software will send out a piece of content or relay a specific tactic to the prospect to help push these qualified leads down the funnel.

And that’s another thing. Old-school lead generation techniques don’t bring in honest data. Catching people off-guard or being too pushy can make leads say whatever you want to hear. But at the end of the day, they really aren’t interested.

The internet has helped to thin the herd, so to speak. People will consume content and come to you when they’re ready. This is the beauty of creating content that’s better than the competition.

So when your software is sending out emails or making other forms of contact, you will have a much better chance of converting your leads.

All the Things

You can automate almost every aspect of marketing, especially when it comes to Adwords. This is why I tell people to start automating your Google Ads campaigns.

Google, thanks to the combination of Adwords and Analytics, had made the process even easier.

You can track traffic and conversions with these tools, find out which strategies are working, and alter your automation processes as necessary.

Cost Reduction

When you read posts online about marketing automation, you will typically see figures saying you should spend anywhere from 2-5% of revenue on it.

This probably boggles your mind, as it did to me when I first started seeing these figures. Then I realized why.

Marketing automation has the power to significantly reduce staffing costs. And the reason for this is simple. Automation does most of the work. Your marketing team can set up any kind of data gathering they want and then just press a button. They can track any metric they want and make changes immediately. You no longer have team members sending out emails one at a time to leads.

The Takeaway

Innovation needs to be part of your marketing strategy.

To accomplish this goal, you can’t have your marketing team tied up with mundane tasks.

It takes money to make money and setting up automation now will not just save you money, but in the long-term, it’s going to substantially increase your revenue.