What is Marketing Automation and How Can it Help Your Business?

A solid marketing strategy is obviously vital to the growth of any business in any industry. It can literally make or break a company. 

But as a business owner, you have a million other things to do. And that’s understandable! You don’t have the time to spend learning about PPC or putting together a cold email campaign. Marketing takes time away from making important sales and taking care of beloved customers.

This is where automated marketing – and platforms like bant.io – come in!

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a series of somewhat independent strategies, often combined with automation software, that generates a steady amount of inbound leads for your business. By leveraging the power of multiple marketing channels, most automation software is designed to help consolidate the sales funnel and generate intelligent leads from various sources.

Allowing a marketing automation tool to run your campaigns for you gives you the time to be able to focus on other aspects of your business growth.

This is where automated marketing – and platforms like bant.io – come in!

For example, with bant.io, we’re able to simultaneously run PPC ads, retargeting ads, email outreach campaigns and social outreach campaigns, as well as help free up time for your sales team by implementing an AI-based sales chatbot directly on your website.

Continued Automation

While automated marketing sounds like the greatest thing ever, the strategy shouldn’t just end at generating incoming leads. While increasing your cold traffic can certainly help, you should also ensure your sales funnel is in tip-top shape to help warm your leads up further and prime them for the sale.

On top of this, there are elements of taking care of your existing customers and keeping them happy – customer retention – that can be helped with automated marketing. As most business owners know, it’s much cheaper to retain existing customers than it is to sell a new customer.

Marketing automation can help you deliver new offers to your existing customers. Use ads or retargeting to let them know about specials and deals, or keep them informed about important changes in your business that might benefit them. Using email or social media outreach is also another great way to run “thank you” campaigns or just say hello during the holidays. Sometimes, your marketing strategy can just be as simple as keeping your brand fresh in their mind.

Common Pitfalls of Automated Marketing

Automated marketing sounds great, right? Why haven’t you implemented it sooner? Well, there are a couple of common mistakes that you need to watch out for. These pitfalls can actually set you back and cause more problems than they’re worth.

First of all, you need to have a large enough database. When using any kind of automation software that claims to bring you steady leads, you need to go with a company that has a very large database or that doesn’t mind working with you to help identify your target audience, like bant.io. This will ensure that you will not only have a steady stream of leads, but that those leads will be of the highest quality and the most likely to buy.

Next, make sure that you are avoiding any spam-y tactics. This is common sense for any type of outreach! If using email, you don’t want to be picked up by any spam filters or nobody will ever see your marketing message in the first place. And on social media, make sure you’re not using harsh language. Use best practices to not sound like spam.

Buying lists is another huge mistake that many people fall for when they first start automating. Having a giant list of millions of potential emails might sound exciting at first, but you’re almost guaranteed to get picked up by spam filters. And even if some of your email marketing material gets through spam filters, you still had zero say in the targeting of this list to begin with. Many people may unsubscribe or report you, and then you’re back to square one. It’s just not worth the risk.

How Does Automated Marketing Help Business Owners?

If it’s not yet clear how automated marketing can greatly help business owners, let’s be totally transparent. Implementing marketing automation saves you time and money, and allows you to focus on other, more important aspects of your business.