If Marketing were a battlefield - which it sometimes is - then Marketing Automation could be the ultimate weapon against the competition!

Long touted as a gimmick, in recent years it has become a formidably effective tool for promoting content, optimizing lead generation, qualifying and nurturing those leads to effectively feed sales teams.

Before you start reading, we invite you to watch this explanatory video "Understanding Marketing Automation in 80 seconds", produced by The Super Agency.

If you're thinking about marketing automation for your business, it's important that you know what to expect, and what the key benefits are, compared to other tools.

Fundamentally, marketing automation is about optimization.

From optimizing your team's work time to optimizing the customer choice your sales team will focus on, marketing automation goes far beyond simply mechanizing the - repetitive tasks of your marketing department.

We'll see many uses of marketing automation throughout this two-part series of 23 articles detailing the unmistakable benefits of Marketing Automation.

Let's start with some of the benefits automation can bring to your entire business.

What is the purpose of Marketing Automation 

There are five major benefits of Marketing Automation for a company.

1 - Reduce staff costs

Using marketing automation software allows a single employee to do the work of an entire marketing & sales department (or nearly so).

How? By setting up lead nurturing systems and marketing campaigns that are automatically triggered based on specific criteria.

After a few months of implementation, your small business will be sending thousands of personalized emails every day, automatically.

2 - Achieve increased profits and average transaction volume

By automating your cross-sales, up-sales and customer follow-ups, you'll likely notice an increase in the lifetime value of your customers. Combine that with improved lead management and prioritization, and your profits should be significantly better.

All of the benefits discussed in this article are intended to increase your revenue and transaction volume in some way.

3 - Improve the level of accountability of marketing & sales teams

Marketing automation will show you where your company's sales brakes are, through a flattened process, and a holistic view of your company's ramifications.

If your marketing department finds hundreds of leads but doesn't "nurture" them into "qualified leads," it will have immediate, unbiased feedback with the goal of improving its nurturing campaigns.

This returns system improves team and departmental accountability so that their mission is accomplished effectively.

4 - Make your customer relationship process more efficient

No matter how big your team is, you only have a limited number of resources to scale your business. Marketing automation allows you to maximize productivity by focusing on the truly valuable tasks in your customer relationship process.

5 - Get less repetitiveness and more creativity

When you replace repetitive manual work with automated systems and campaigns, you free up time for your team members and allow them to focus on more creative tasks.

While this has obvious benefits on your team's efficiency and productivity, there is also a positive impact - less tangible but certain - on the creativity and overall well-being of your teams.

What else can marketing automation do for you?

6 - Perfect your marketing process

One of the good things about implementing marketing automation software is that it requires you to visualize - if you haven't already -  your customers' behavior and your marketing strategy to create relevant pathways (workflows).

While it may not seem captivating, creating processes by focusing them on your customer journeys will gradually allow you to perfect your lead selection and nurturing.

7 - Find your leads in multi-channel

Marketing automation offers advertisers the ability to find customers in a personalized way through multiple channels, online and offline.

When you create a marketing sequence like the one seen above, you choose to send an email, card, text, tweet or call your customers when they reach a certain point in their marketing journey.

Some marketing automation tools have more options than other multi-channel targeting tools. While many tools will use email, social media and phone calls, only a few (like Ontraport) use SMS and e-cards.

8 - Allow you to A/B test your campaigns

Unlike traditional email and landing page A/B testing, where you might do one or two split tests before sending them to your mailing list, automation tools allow you to set up continuous A/B testing easily.

Imagine having continuous A/B testing for every campaign and at every stage of your marketing process!

Over time, incremental improvements in your marketing activities will generate significant refinement in your marketing funnel.

9 - Boosting your customers' value with up-sells and cross-sells

How much is your lost revenue by not implementing or forgetting up-sells and cross-sells series ? Do you even know?

With Marketing Automation, you remove the human aspect of up-selling and cross-selling by implementing series of marketing rules.

An example: you have an e-commerce site for bicycle gear.

In addition to the usual up-sells, such as an email offering customers a tire change or offering holiday ideas, you can set up custom up-sells.

If a customer buys a bike model that has a part that can be changed for a better, or newer, one, you can decide to let them know through an email campaign, 30 days before their birthday for example.

Over time, this type of marketing can have a dramatic impact on the life value of your customers.

10 - Take your marketing activity to the next level of targeting

The ability to create marketing campaigns at a high level is one of the most important business opportunities for advertisers, today.

As you were taught in first-year marketing, the more relevant an offer (or product) is to a customer, the greater the likelihood that the customer will put their hand in the wallet.

Never before has it been possible to reach 1,000 different prospects with 1,000 different messages in a fully automated way.

I'll leave it to your imagination to visualize the possibilities involved!

11 - Save time managing your social media campaigns

Most marketing automation tools allow you to manage all of your social media campaigns from a single dashboard, and post from and to your various profiles all at once.

While this has been doable for years with tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite, it's most convenient to be able to do it from the same system you manage your leads with. This is actually one of the great strengths of the Hubspot !

12 - Pre-schedule your posts and campaigns

Marketing automation tools allow you to be much more organized by offering you the ability to pre-schedule your campaigns and social media posts.

While this functionality can be found since the dawn of e-marketing, the advantage that Marketing Automation offers is that you can easily schedule different posts for different groups of prospects based on your CRM data.

Instead of scheduling a single message for your entire database, you could, for example, schedule five variations of the same message for five target types, making them more relevant to their needs and interests. 

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Don't stop here! The rest of this article is here.