Marketing processes your business should consider automating

As a marketing professional who has to perform multiple tasks in a day, you are likely to appreciate leveraging the benefits of systems which can automate much of your workload. Through these systems, you can significantly increase your productivity, allowing you to focus your energy on tasks which really need it.

Here are four marketing processes your business should seriously consider automating.

1.Customer relationship management (CRM)

Although a crucial sales and marketing tool, CRM can be highly inefficient as it creates extra work for sales reps. According to research, sales reps spend just 11 percent of their time actively reaching out to potential customers due to spending the majority of their time performing administrative tasks.

By automating the mundane activities such as data input, data retrieval, and forecast updates, CRM systems can be made more efficient by automating customer responses, data capture activities as well as follow-ups with clients.

Your marketing workflow plan can also be automated in the CRM software. For instance, your activities, emails, and documents can be tracked at every stage.

2. Customer experience

Though obviously, a highly important aspect of your business, reaching out and engaging with customers can be a time-consuming task.

Fortunately, automation means that your communication with customers can be carried out by certain systems on your behalf. Many companies are enlisting the help of chatbots to offer 24-hour responses to frequently asked questions.

KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, for example, has developed BlueBot (BB) to facilitate its human agents in responding to customers. The bot helps passengers to book a ticket, deliver booking confirmation, send check-in reminders and boarding passes, deliver flight updates, as well as answer passenger questions.

According to KLM, so far it has recorded over 1.7 million messages sent by 500,000 passengers to BB, showing just how valuable this tech can be in handling large volumes of requests from customers.

Many people are skeptical about technology diminishing the human touch which is undoubtedly necessary for providing strong CX. Yet, automation can further facilitate a customer’s journey with your business in many ways.

For instance, automation can help you create customized pitches after following a customer’s online behavior;  you can better engage customers using personalized content; and you can significantly reduce the time it takes to respond to your customers.

3. Content marketing

Creating engaging and compelling content for your marketing strategy can eat up a whole lot of time. Fortunately, there are ways you can automate aspects of your content marketing plan to put more time back into your hands.

Content curation: An effective marketing strategy is one that involves the sharing of others relevant content- not just your own. There are tools available which can automate this process, allowing you to grow your brand presence by providing your audience with interesting content- without you having to spend hours finding it.

Tools such as Scoop.it and Crowdfire are must-haves when it comes to automating this process. They allow you to pick a topic and generate relevant content to share with your audience. They also offer the ability to schedule the posts, saving you yet more time.

Social sharing: Scheduling your content is a crucial feature of social media management, as it allows you to share updates with your audience at a time that they’re most likely to engage. As this may be a time when you’re snoozing in bed, there are tools which can automate this for you.

Tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer can be integrated with your social media channels, and allow you to set a time to post your content.

4. Lead scoring and nurturing

Seeking leads and managing them can be a time-consuming and tedious process. With the help of technology, you can carry out lead scoring based on your communications with your prospects in order to identify strong leads. As a result of this, other marketing processes will be sped up such as timely follow-ups which will ultimately result in higher conversion rates.

In order to prevent leads from getting cold and jumping ship, they need to be nurtured. Through automation, you can personalize emails to drip into your leads inbox. When these leads hit the targeted engagement score, the sales team can then proceed to take further action.

While automating certainly does not eliminate the need for the human touch in marketing, it can increase your productivity by saving you a lot of time to spend on other, more valuable tasks.