We all know what it means to automate something – to make it run on its own over and over again. So, marketing automation takes advantage of various software to automate various marketing strategies and processes.
There are the obvious marketing activities that can be automated like email marketing, social posting, or ad campaigns. In reality, though, there are far more marketing processes and activities you can automate if you find the right software.
What is Marketing Automation?
Ideally, your marketing automation should sit at the crossroads of strategy and software. Your marketing strategy should be tailored to take advantage of marketing automation software and you should be choosing your marketing automation software based on what fits best with your marketing strategy.
Your marketing strategy should be focused on capturing potential clients, nurturing client relationships, and closing the sale. This process should be able to happen over and over and over again. Your marketing automation is a massive part of making this process run as smoothly as possible.
Now, the difficult part of marketing automation is being able to put this entire process on autopilot while making customers feel they are cared for. This is why it is so important to consider having your customers and clients at the center of your marketing strategy and your marketing automation software.
For a visual, think of a plane. Your marketing strategy is the plane, the process that is doing the moving and shaking and flying customers from capture to close. Your marketing automation software is the pilot. It is making sure the process is going in the right direction and making it to its destination, each and every time, without incident. Your employees are the flight attendants. They are checking on the customers and making sure they feel seen, heard, and cared for throughout the entire process.
Finding the right pilot, in this example, can be the difference between success and failure, no matter how sturdy your plane or nurturing your attendants.
Why Does Marketing Automation Fail?
By now, you see how marketing automation can be a big boost for your business. It is important to recognize that sometimes your marketing automation software can do more harm than good. Typically, this comes down to a lack of strong strategy behind the software or the lack of a strong software supporting the strategy.
The most common mistake that is made involving a lack of strong strategy comes down to focusing on the wrong lead generation strategies. Rather than trying to capture more of the market, bring them into their audience, so they can nurture them into closing customers, they want to take their existing audience and squeeze more money out of who they already have.
The fix? Focus on capturing more leads not to make a sale or an immediate customer, but to nurture into future customers. When you spend time focusing on how to grow your audience, you will find a lot more opportunities to create demand over time.
The opposite is also true. If you have a lack of strong software or are doing everything manually, then you are only going to grow as quickly as you are able to work your process.
The more programs you are using to automate your marketing, the more opportunities exist for miscommunication. If you have no marketing automation, then you are trading time for money at a one-to-one ratio, and your time is worth more than that.
The fix? Focusing on streamlining your process so you have more time to nurture current leads into future customers in as simple a way as possible.
You need a strong strategy and competent software for the biggest ROI on your marketing automation.
How Can Marketing Automation Help Your Business?
A good marketing automation software will synergize with your marketing strategy to:
Increase productivity
Generate revenue
Increase customer retention
Measure and track everything
Increase Productivity
What is the #1 thing every person wishes they had more of? Time. When it comes to maximizing and optimizing your time, then the data is in: research shows that about 74% of marketers agree that marketing automation saves them time.
As you are able to find more time in your day, you will be able to find better ways to be productive. As your available time increases, your opportunity to multiply productivity increases.
Generate Revenue
We have already touched on this subject, but a good marketing automation software will generate more leads. When you generate more leads, you generate more revenue. In fact, some markets have shown as much as a 50% conversion rate by taking advantage of marketing automation in their business.
What could you do with 50% more customers? Chances are good it would generate a lot of revenue for your business.
Increase Customer Retention
Now, we have mentioned that some businesses may implement marketing automation software with their marketing strategy, and it brings plenty of leads. However, the true power of marketing automation comes into place by nurturing customer relationships to retain them, create potential future or repeat customers, and to invest in raving fans of your business.
When you couple the right strategy with the right software, customers will stay with you longer and keep coming back.
Measure and Track Everything
The name of the game in marketing is data. The right marketing automation software can help you keep track of successful campaigns and funnels, reveal obvious tweaks that need to be made, and boost your lead generation.
The right data, given enough observation, can grow your business by leaps and bounds. The right software, tracking and measuring everything, to give you the best data possible will inevitably increase productivity, generate revenue, and increase customer retention.
Go HighLevel For Your Marketing Automation
When it comes to the best marketing automation software on the market, we cannot recommend HighLevel* enough.
With HighLevel, you no longer need to manage multiple streams of marketing automation to create your desired processes. In fact, HighLevel considers themselves the “agency empire builders.” They are created “by agencies, for agencies.”
The method of HighLevel is centered around three core concepts, which we have already mentioned: Capture, Nurture, and Close.
Capture Leads and Customers
HighLevel is designed to be an all-encompassing platform for businesses. When it comes to capturing leads and customers, HighLevel provides everything from landing pages to surveys to appointment scheduling to full website creation.
There is nothing you need that isn’t already packaged in the HighLevel platform. The major features to help you capture new leads and customers are: sales websites, funnels, and landing pages.
Sales Websites
HighLevel has a built-in website builder packed with everything you need to get a sales website up and running. There is a wide selection of website templates to choose from or you can feel free to create your website from scratch on your own. Even building the website and its pages are simple to do with drag-and-drop functionality.
Whether you are creating a website for your business or you are designing and creating sales websites for clients HighLevel has everything you need to quickly and efficiently build sales websites.
Funnels
Just like with sales websites, if you are wanting to build a funnel, for any reason, HighLevel has a funnel builder, too. Drag-and-drop what you need to build out your funnel or even take advantage of the migration tools provided by HighLevel to simply move your entire funnel to HighLevel.
Creating a funnel doesn’t need to be needlessly complicated. HighLevel makes funnel building easier and quicker than ever, even if you are migrating from another funnel service.
Landing Pages
Building off of the functionality and features of the website and funnel builders that HighLevel provides, they make it incredibly easy to build out landing pages, too. All of the drag-and-drop simplicity or the customization of building your own landing page, if you want.
Having all of these features so readily available and easy to pick up and run with is huge to the process of investing in automating your marketing.
There is so much more HighLevel has to offer to capture new leads and customers, including forms and surveys to replace all your survey builders and appointment scheduling to replace your calendar apps and services!
Nurture Leads Into Customers
HighLevel truly shines when it comes to the plethora of features it provides to nurture leads into customers and nurture customers into raving fans.
In order to nurture leads and customers you need to be able to effectively communicate with them. HighLevel has some of the best communication features available on any marketing automation platform available. Whether it is email marketing, text message marketing, or phone call marketing HighLevel has you covered.
Right at the top, it is also important to note that HighLevel gives you the ability to organize these different communications across multiple channels. You can create an email marketing campaign and then cross it over into your text message marketing with no problems!
Email Marketing
Every feature you need for email marketing is wrapped up within your HighLevel account. It has the same template gallery or customization options like the website builders above. Some of the best additional features you may not find or have access to on another is the ability to have files shared across the entirety of HighLevel.
No more needing to track down the right image or graphic or link or other file to include in your email so it matches your landing page. You can have files shared within HighLevel across all your marketing channels.
The synergy you can create between your email marketing campaigns and all of your other methods of communication is incredible with HighLevel.
Text Message Marketing
“Complicated” is not a word you would typically associate with text message marketing. HighLevel has all the features you need, plus the ability to communicate on multiple channels, plus access to all the shared files across your marketing campaigns, plus the ability to communicate and respond to customers across multiple devices.
That’s right. HighLevel allows you to send, receive, and respond across multiple devices so your text message marketing is active and responsive. The ability to set everything on autopilot with triggers and responses makes this type of marketing streamlined, responsive, and, most importantly, simple!
Phone Call Marketing
How do you automate phone calls? That is a great question, and one to which HighLevel has figured out a wonderful solution. HighLevel has a feature called Power Dialer that allows you to automatically start the process of calling contacts in a contact list, but with the option of automatically recording and sending voicemails when the contacts don’t answer.
This has huge implications for your productivity because it allows you to only have to worry about talking to people when they answer the phone while knowing HighLevel is supplying a voicemail with all the important information when someone doesn’t answer the phone.
This feature along with the ability to handle scheduling appointments can be huge in generating leads and revenue for your business without slowing you down.
All these powerful features come together to boost your marketing strategy and automate your marketing while nurturing potential customers and converting current customers into raving fans.
Close Sales
Closing the deal is the part of the marketing process that seems to have the most dedicated features for automation. All of those features are available on HighLevel, and then some.
Being able to see your entire pipeline throughout the marketing and sales process, collecting payments, and viewing all the analytics and data you will ever need are the features that drive HighLevel above the competition.
Pipeline Management
HighLevel has a built-in Pipeline Management feature which allows you to keep track of all of your leads. This feature gives you the ability to see what stage of your sales funnel each lead is in, giving you a bird’s eye view of the potential customers and leads you have flowing in and our of your business.
Being able to maintain a visual for who is in the capture, nurture, and close stages of your marketing automation, as well as where they might be “stalled” in the process, gives you the ability to tailor the entire marketing process to nurture your leads into closing opportunities.
Collect Payments
Collecting payments can be a hassle, but it doesn’t have to be. HighLevel makes it simple by integrating directly with Stripe, so you can collect payments easily. Whether the revenue is coming in through websites, email marketing, or anywhere else, you will be able to collect payments without any added stress to your customers or adding any stress on yourself.
The beauty of HighLevel payment collection isn’t only reliant on Stripe, though, but on all the data you can gather about how you make sales and which campaigns are effective across all of your marketing campaigns. All thanks to the massive amount of data and analytics provided by HighLevel.
Analytics and Data
HighLevel includes an analytical dashboard where you can see all of the various data you store via HighLevel tools and features. From pipeline management to text message marketing response rates to closed deals from those campaigns, you can view it all in one convenient location to make it simple to look through the data.
As we mentioned before, you are only able to improve when you have the right data showing you what needs to be improved on. Otherwise, you are simply guessing, at best.
Go HighLevel and Grow Your Business
Investing in marketing automation will go a long way to helping you get the best things done for your business without having to stress over the details every single day. Thanks to HighLevel, you can create some great landing pages, do some phone marketing with Power Dialer, and keep track of your data to see what is working and what isn’t without having to leave the app. More importantly, you can get a lot of those things done on autopilot without needing to lift a finger.
Looking For Some Help to Automate Marketing Systems For Your Business?
How can implementing some of these marketing automation strategies help your business grow? Is there something about marketing automation that we didn’t cover? We would love to answer any questions you may have. If you are looking to create your own custom automation portal, then please Contact Us to start a conversation. We are happy to offer a free estimate on a marketing automation system guaranteed to help increase revenue and grow your business long-term! At Catalyst Brand Group we focus on implementing proven growth strategies in brand, platform, and growth that will help your business grow by 2x-3x per year.
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