It’s no secret that inefficiency is a huge concern for virtually every company. A recent survey by Salary.com estimates that approximately 2.09 hours per each 8 hour day is wasted by employees. While there are number of time wasters, companies are inefficient across the board, largely due to company-wide inefficiencies as a whole.
Depending on the size of your company and marketing needs, marketing automation will exponentially increase productivity and organization within your company. Whether you’re selling a product or providing a service, marketing intelligence, automation and workflow management programs will increase your return on investment by providing you with valuable information and actionable insights.
Marketing Intelligence is the first kind of marketing automation. This includes analytics for on-site visitors and social media campaigns and conversions, among other things. This allows you to measure every action of potential leads and improve on-site performance and lead capturing. Moreover, collected information allows for a targeted response to a lead’s needs once their information is collected.
Workflow Automation involves making your internal operations more efficient and productive. Any task that involves deep collaboration between several people, or even people in several offices, will benefit from a workflow automation solution. Moreover, workflow automation helps manage budgets, events, or any task that requires organization and efficient execution.
Lastly, marketing automation solutions are used to manage and nurture leads. This involves moving your leads through your sales funnel to the point where they are either ready to buy or ready to be moved out of the funnel. This process usually includes in-depth email marketing campaigns that drip emails to potential customers over the course of about a month. Recently, integrating social media into the lead nurturing process has become increasingly popular and productive.
Whether you run a small or large business, the above automation solutions can help your company stay organized and efficient. However, these solutions can also be costly depending on your needs and number of users. For larger businesses with dozens or hundreds of users, this software can run many thousands of dollars per month. It is not unheard of for larger organizations to spend several hundred thousand dollars a year on their automation suites.
Depending on the type of business you run and the number of employees and offices you have, a marketing automation solution may or may not help you. However, if your company is large and active, and developing new products and initiatives, then an automation solution is a necessity to ensure that work is being completed in a timely and efficient manner.
Ryan enjoys writing about marketing automation and all things Internet marketing.
Featured image courtesy of bORjAmATiC.
