If you have not embraced the AI revolution in marketing, you will soon find your business squarely behind the eight ball in your industry. Automation is one of the core implements/takeaways/precursors of artificial intelligence. Its proper use sets you up for big growth in every aspect of business. Here’s how:
Cost Reduction
Big growth doesn’t start with big revenues. You need to shore up your supply side first, and automation in either your production or your marketing can help tremendously.
Production automation has been a part of our business culture since the Model-T Ford assembly lines. The modern version of this automation actually helps in the procurement of more personalized vehicles – the money a company makes from selling the base model aids in customization for special customers. The same is true of your marketing department – use automation to cut down on your manpower and overhead in customer acquisitions to redirect those resources into loyalty programs, PR, and mid-level sales funnel functions.
Tie your automation platform to your CRM to stop manual rekeying and the errors that follow. Use built-in deduplication, field standardization, and bounce suppression to keep records clean and outreach costs down. For building materials brands, that means fewer duplicate quotes to dealers and clearer handoffs to sales.
Customized Manpower
Big growth comes from big ideas. Big ideas don’t come from your CRM, logistics or administration software. No matter how robust those platforms may be, they can only organize and feed off of the data that your employees put into it.
If your employees spend all day on repetitive tasks, they are demoralized and otherwise unable to deliver the unique ideas that give your company its unique personality and core competencies. When they are relieved of tasks that require only a rote knowledge of procedure and mental function, they respond with customized ideas that lead to higher ROIs (even if most of them are never implemented). This is why Facebook and Google give their employees 20% of the workday to brainstorm and even fund some of the best ideas from those sessions. You may not have Facebook and Google money, but you can do the same thing on a smaller scale by giving your employees the gift of marketing automation.
Higher Revenues
Automation in your marketing department can lead directly to higher revenues. If you find a message that resonates with a certain buyer profile, that message should be repeated. There is no reason to employ a human to key in this message over and over – this is when automation is most useful. Modern automation platforms allow you to imprint cursory personalization modifiers into a repeated message for a more sophisticated communication.
Most platforms support lead scoring, awarding points for page views, spec sheet downloads, email clicks, and form fills. Pair that with behavior-based segments to trigger nurtures when buyers show intent, not just when you have time. This helps sales focus on active contractors, distributors, and architects while lighter-touch drips keep others warm.
Many companies forego marketing automation because they believe the technique is see-through. The true strength of marketing automation is that your clients know you are using it. You are in the B2B marketplace – most of your clients are probably serving their clients using the same techniques! Your buyers are more interested in your professionalism while using the tactic. Can you keep up with your own lines of communication? Do you direct the correspondence to the correct person? Do you know when in the sales funnel to create truly personalized messages?
Channels for Outreach
You can synchronize your communications channels through modern automation. Your social media outreach should be high on your list of priorities to automate as much as possible.
You can easily save time and money by updating all of your social media channels as you update one of them. Schedule posts, test headlines and creatives with A/B experiments, and keep winners in rotation. Tag every link with UTM parameters so analytics can attribute traffic and conversions to campaigns across paid and organic. That clarity improves budget decisions in SEO, paid search, and social. IFTTT is a great resource to begin the process, although there are more sophisticated platforms out there.
