If you’re weighing up the advantages and disadvantages of using marketing automation for your digital agency, then we are here help you solidify your decision and move your marketing and sales efforts into the 21st century.
Like anything in business, it’s essential to have a complete understanding of what to expect and how it will benefit your agency growth, as well as your clients. Not only will you optimize your sales and marketing efforts, but you will also create so much more value for your already existing clients with minimal effort needed.
Before you know it, you’ll have a loyal fanbase of clients who would recommend you to all their professional associates. Some marketers think that marketing automation just eliminates time-consuming email sends, but it has such a broader scope than that. From integrated sales and marketing, real-time reporting, social scheduling and automated journeys – the list of benefits are never-ending.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the overall term used to describe all the digital marketing functions that we can automate in 2019. It’s the software that helps you automate everything from emails to social media and other website actions. It is a way to centralize marketing actions like social posts, email marketing and personalization.
The US Marketing Automation Software industry was a $3.3 billion market in 2017, growing 30% annually, according to SharpSpring. In the State of Marketing Automation Survey 2019 report, 75% of marketers say they currently use at least one type of marketing automation tools.
What can Marketing Automation do for our agency?
It’s a tactical approach to content distribution that helps lead generation, lead nurturing and community building in a centralized location. It also gives us the ability to track and measure every digital click and find out what’s working well in real-time.
Almost 70% of the respondents find improved targeting of messages is the most important benefit of marketing automation. Adding to that, 64% of e-commerce marketers said email marketing and marketing automation contributes to more sales.
When asked what the main benefits of marketing automation were, the top five features included:
- Improved targeting of messages – 68.5%
- Improved customer experience – 45.9%
- Better quality of leads – 37.7%
- Getting more leads – 34.5%
- Improved efficiency/ROI in marketing – 32.9%
Other benefits included: Optimizing productivity, increasing marketing ROI, improving campaign management, improving database quality, acquiring more customers, measuring performance and aligning marketing and sales. To show you what we mean, we’ve collated our favourite ways that you can create more value for your clients just by implementing marketing automation.
Why you should include Marketing Automation as part of your overall marketing strategyÂ
Manage your clients in one place
Streamline your management and look after all your clients in one easy-to-use place. Marketing automation will allow you to centralize all your client data securely and efficiently that will save you a lot of time and effort. Forget about jumping from platform to platform and keep everything in one place.
See exactly what’s working for your clients in real-time
With automatically updated reporting, you’ll be able to see what exactly is working and what isn’t in real-time. By being able to see updated reporting, you’ll have much better advice for your client’s upcoming marketing campaigns. You’ll be able to forecast marketing trends that you know your clients will love in the future.
Whitelabel the platform and customize it to match your branding
Rebrand the interface to suit your own company’s branding guidelines. Display your own agency logo and colours across the platform and campaigns. Complete the entire customization process by creating a vanity URL to mask any sign of the original software provider. Every aspect of the marketing automation platform will reflect your brand. Not only will you be able to customize the actual platform, but you’ll be able to create personalized and consistent marketing materials too.
Know their strengths and weaknesses
The beauty of real-time reporting is that you’ll be able to see clearly what your clients are really excelling at, and what they need help with. You’ll be able to remain focused and productive always. It might be content or multi-channel marketing that they need help with, but either way, you’ll be able to tailor your approach and create much more value for them. They’ll really appreciate it.
Create specific personas for them
Most marketing automation platforms will allow you to create detailed and accurate buyer personas for yourself and your clients. A buyer persona is a fictional, generalized character that outlines the different goals and challenges among your current/potential key audience.
They help create reliable and realistic representations of your key segments. They’re based on customer insights, sales team feedback, additional research and digital analytics. Not only will they be helpful for you to use for your own business, but you’ll also be able to create so much more value for your clients and their private sales and marketing goals.
See what marketing and social channels your client performs best on and advise them accordingly
Marketing automation will allow you to market yourself and your clients across a wide range of marketing channels in one platform. Centralize all your marketing channels in one area and organize them over Owned, Earned and Paid. You’ll be able to see what channels are performing best and are a good reflection of your client’s personas. Give them the option to post directly from the platform and schedule social posts long in advance.
See what campaigns are resonating best with their audience
Your client might have multiple campaigns going out at one time, and it can become overwhelming to stay on top of them all. With marketing automation, you’ll be able to show them precisely what campaigns and what content is performing best. They will then know what their audience wants to see and therefore, will know what to produce more of in the future.
Make it easy to forecast marketing trends in the future
With all this real-time reporting, you will give your clients the tools to produce better content and campaigns and improve lead generation. Reporting and forecasting are so important in marketing, and if you’re able to show your clients what to do in the future, they will really appreciate it. You’ll take the guesswork out of lead generation and let them use their time much more productively.
Nurture them with automated leads and leave yourself more time to do more work for them
Create, edit and monitor automated journeys for your clients. Eliminate the tedious and repetitive task of email marketing and introduce journeys into your client’s current marketing strategy. When you hit the start button on an automatic journey campaign, you’ll be able to save them so much time to use on something more substantial.
Manage all their leads in one place
Without the help of marketing automation, your client might have to manage and update their leads manually from a few different platforms. If they are gathering leads from their website or a few different landing pages, they will have to manually enter each lead into a separate CRM system or an Excel spreadsheet.
Marketing automation will allow you to eliminate all those pain points for your clients and manage all their leads in one easy-to-use place. They should be able to filter the leads by date, campaign type and name. Not only will you save precious time and effort, but you’ll allow them to unsubscribe from any third-party CRM subscriptions and save some money too.
Score leads quickly and accurately and knows who to prioritize
With sufficient lead scoring, your clients will know precisely who to prioritize and focus their energy on. They will want to talk to a prospect who has engaged with some free content differently than someone who has downloaded a brochure and signed up for a free trial.
By creating automatic lead scoring, your client will be able to spend more time nurturing ‘hot’ leads and can use a much more personalized approach.
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