Automation is all about making things easier for your business. It’s about removing the need for human work in repetitive and menial work. These menial tasks can then be replaced with income-generating ones that are going to help you improve your bottom-line.
Today, both marketing and sales processes can be automated. Since the objectives of marketers and sales reps are different, the very automation tools they use are also different.
Let’s take a look at marketing first.
Marketing automation: what is it? How does it improve your bottom-line?
The focal point of marketing automation is about making campaigns easier to manage and execute. Whether you’re running advertising, SEO or PR campaigns, automating is always there to help.
Let’s look at some of the broad ways that your marketing processes can be automated:
Streamlining your workflow – Automation can be used to make the day-to-day organisation of all processes even easier. This includes activity tracking and designating tasks automatically. Campaigns can be complicated and multi-channel, meaning there’s lots of moving parts. Softwares like Clarity lessen the workload of campaign managers with easy task management and activity reports.
Intelligent campaign planning – Automation can also be used to gather relevant data insights and information to inform your campaign decisions.
Tracking codes, like the Quantcast Pixel, Facebook Pixels, and HubSpot can all help you track user behaviour, which can gather relevant insights when determining who to target, how to communicate with them, and when and where to target them. Back in the day, building audience data was a matter of cumbersome surveys and focus groups.
Day-to-day campaign execution – Whether it’s sending out batch emails to segmented audiences as part of an email campaign, creating reports, or uploading content to social media, there’s likely to be automation for that.
Programmes like Javee and Hootsuite can help to automate social posting, while tools like SeoTools for Excel can allow you to analyse hundreds of websites at once for SEO purposes.
The benefits of marketing automation are numerous. Time savings, money savings, and the ability to scale faster than ever before all make marketing automation a worthwhile investment.
… And what about sales automation?
Nurture, Track & Organise Leads With Sales Automation
Sales automation, on the other hand, is all about leads. It’s about organising them, tracking them, and nurturing them. Once marketing has brought the inbound leads in, it’s the job of sales reps and their automation tools to help turn them into paying customers. CRMs, or customer relationship management programmes, are the weapon of choice for sales teams trying to automate processes and make their lives easier.
Here’s what sales automation has to offer:
Lead management – Leads can be hooked up to the CRM automatically, taken from social profiles or Calendar bookings. Leads can then be automatically designated a set of tasks, like initial outreach, follow-ups or warming up activities, depending on the priority of the lead. They can also be automatically flagged for missed follow-ups, which can be measured and included in performance reports. The less need for managing this type of thing, the more time that can be spent closing deals.
Lead nurturing – Processes like nurturing can be executed by sales automation. Many automated CRMs allow you to create messaging templates for specific lead categories, these templates can then be automatically sequenced. That means, less writing fresh emails, less pressing send and less forgetting to complete the sequence.
All this gives your sales reps more mental clarity. It reduces their task anxiety. They know that all the menial stuff is taken care of.
Team management – In a matter of seconds, you can whip up results reports. Back in the day, these reports would take a matter of hours. As mentioned before, certain tasks can be automatically flagged and designated.
Although sales and marketing automation differ in their goals, the sole objective is to remove the need for menial tasks of little value, free up time, so that your team can work on income generating tasks and improving your businesses bottom-line.
Marketing automation is about making the process of bringing leads into your pipeline easier. Sales automation makes managing this pipeline easier and more successful.
