Developing a promising marketing campaign takes a lot of work, but that’s only scratching the surface — implementing it on a scale is an entirely different story. While countless strategies now leverage digital solutions, understanding how one works is far from a walk in the park. Technical processes are often too complex for the uninitiated, and businesses will often require experts. But for digital marketers and business owners, discovering a new solution is best started by understanding how it can benefit their business well enough to consider it an investment.
One example is automating workflow processes for marketing. Automation solutions are usually a costly investment depending on the features, but to find out if it will be worth it, knowing how it can improve the business process is fundamental.
Find out right here how automation can help improve and even scale marketing processes.
Workflow Automation In Action
Good workflow automation can be the key to a steady flow of high-quality leads, as it allows marketers to track consumer behavior at each touchpoint and map strategies better according to the buyer’s journey.
Most businesses invest in a workflow automation BPMS (Business Process Management Suite) with intuitive platforms that make workflow processes clearer and more accessible. This also makes creating new workflows and expanding existing ones with better processes easier.
Here are the best examples of workflow automation in marketing:
- Posting on social media – automation is commonly used in social media pages to schedule content posting, analyze collected data from social media campaigns, and answer messages with frequently asked questions.
- Sending emails – automated email marketing has become a standard in digital marketing. It enables the automatic distribution of timed and customized emails to multiple recipients. This usually includes welcome messages to newly registered users, reminders of an abandoned cart, order and shipping confirmation, product review requests, birthday greetings with promotional coupons, ‘back in stock’ notifications, and more.
An ideal workflow automation for marketing processes should also change with the evolving needs of the target audience. If you’re using other marketing channels, it’s also a good idea to consider their interaction with each channel, as it may help identify your leads’ challenges and influence their decision to make a purchase.
How Automation Can Improve Marketing Processes
- By Nurturing Leads
Lead nurturing — or keeping potential customers engaged and enticing them to purchase — requires patience and frequent contact through emails, which automation can only make easier. Lead nurturing becomes more efficient by automating personalized and perfectly timed messages for potential customers.
This can be done by tracking and measuring the engagement activities of potential leads and using the data generated to create triggers and schedules for targeted content delivery that will prompt them to move to the next stages of your sales funnel.
Read Also: Outsourced vs. In-House Marketing: Which is the Best?
- By Facilitating Dynamic Personalization
Aside from the apparent time savings, using automation to personalize messages based on behavioral data creates a better user experience for both audience groups in remarketing and retargeting campaigns.
Automation, in this aspect, adapts the content visible to a specific user based on their tracked preferences, which creates unique experiences that can influence more conversion.
- By Putting Data To Work Faster
Software programs used to automate marketing processes deliver real-time data, which is particularly useful in measuring the success of each campaign you run. This means improvements can be made faster too, as the data analytics included will show you what works and what doesn’t.
With the updated information from automation tools, you can ensure that all your marketing content remains relevant and timely. This enhances audience targeting, which is what marketing campaigns strive for.
- By Aligning Marketing With Sales
Improving sales is the primary goal of every marketing campaign, so a productive collaboration between the marketing and sales team is an indispensable part of the process. Without automation, it’s more difficult for both teams to be transparent with each other. If they’re not on the same page, there will likely be gaps when it comes to lead scoring and other shared workflow processes.
With marketing automation tools, the improved accessibility of data relevant to both teams will help answer questions faster and open a common workspace for the two teams that share the same goal – to increase revenue.
- By Enhancing Cross-Channel Marketing
Digital marketing campaigns are typically spread across multiple platforms. With automation software, tracking prospects and following their activities in all your marketing channels in just one dashboard is easier. This provides better insights into user behavior across all media.
Leveraging such information, you can plan cross-channel campaigns strategically and create cross-channel workflows that can target prospects better in whichever channel they stay the longest.
- By Streamlining Overall Processes
Marketing campaigns consist of repetitive tasks that can be easily streamlined and organized using automation software, which will reduce errors and allow task monitoring. Through data analytics, automation can also help to evaluate and enhance any stage of the workflow process, and the improvements made can make overall marketing processes more efficient.
On the workforce side, a streamlined overall process will facilitate better teamwork and collaboration, since data becomes transparent and accessible for everyone in the team, so delegating priority tasks, including sending reminders for unfinished tasks becomes easier. The best part is this also creates a unified experience for customers.
- By Freeing Up Time For Other Marketing Tasks
Manual workflows are understandably time-consuming. As automation reduces workload, more time can be spent on more valuable marketing tasks instead of spending hours on repetitive ones. There can be a better focus on innovating, sharpening skills and expertise, and scaling marketing campaigns using new strategies based on actual data and results delivered by automation tools.
Get The Most Out Of Automation
Automation doesn’t only make workflow processes faster; it also improves efficiency, accessibility, and accuracy. When choosing workflow process solutions, don’t just focus on the features. Think about the results you can get and their viability for long-term scalability. Once you’re certain of the benefits of a potential solution, the next step is planning how to make the most of each advantage.
