The Importance of Digital Marketing and Marketing Automation

We live in a digitally devoted environment with a good portion of marketing taking place online. Although the internet has opened a lot of opportunities for marketers, the increasing amount of noise and activity makes it tough for businesses to be heard and seen. It keeps getting harder and harder for business owners to keep up with current digital marketing trends, which results in lost sales.

Fortunately, marketing technology is growing at a rapid pace to help businesses curb this issue and instead, better engage with existing clients while also reaching more qualified prospects. In this article, we will try to explain what digital marketing is and why businesses should embrace marketing automation as part of their online marketing strategy.

What is digital marketing?
Marketing is a tool that businesses use to reach out to target audiences. Ideally, the best way to reach clients and leave a lasting impression is to meet them where they are already spending their time, which in this case is online.

Digital marketing is any form of promotion or advertising that takes place online. In this digital age, digital marketing is an essential promotional strategy a business can take on.

Still, it is important to note that digital marketing is quite demanding. From email marketing to social media campaigns, branding, pricing, and strategy, it can get overwhelming for most business owners to excel while also focusing on growing their business. Luckily, marketing automation is helping to change the rules of this game.

What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation is the use of software to automate manual marketing processes. These processes include repetitive tasks such as qualifying website leads, sending emails, social media posting among others.

Just like any other marketing technique, automation has gained acceptance due to its ability to help businesses attain specific goals among which are:

• Generate qualified sales leads
• Convert qualified leads into paying customers
• Increase the lifetime value of a customer through customer retention

Marketing automation has been reported to drive up sales by approximately 14.5% and reduce marketing overhead by as much as 12.2%. Overall, automation makes marketing faster, easier and more efficient than ever before. What can marketing automation do for your business?

Today, most businesses employ marketing automation through email marketing campaigns. It serves as the cornerstone that sets up customer journeys with all actions being automatically activated and executed. This can relieve you of any worries about manually nurturing leads and directing them towards the conversion path.

Amplifies your SEO efforts
Although SEO is a powerful lead generation tool, its power is amplified when coupled with marketing automation.

Most businesses make the mistake of overemphasizing on their search engine ranking and are not concerned with what happens after a lead clicks through to their page. Marketing automation programs help you create optimized forms, landing pages, offers and call to actions that are delivered and tracked to ensure you never lose track of that lead. This improves the chances of the lead ultimately converting into a buying customer.

Qualifying Leads
Marketing automation contains lead scoring and grading modules which help you determine where leads are in the buying cycle, and how closely they align with your buyer persona. Some automation programs use points to qualify leads. For instance, a lead can accrue one point for visiting your site, 10 points for downloading a specific document and 50 points for completing a lead generation form. As visitors gain points through their interactions, your automation program will be able to ascertain which ones are more likely to convert into buying customers.

To reach prospects at the best possible times
Some marketing automation programs enable you to access real-time lead monitoring features that show you when a lead is actively searching on your website. These programs can send alerts whenever a prospect hits specific scores or takes decisive actions. This allows you to take action as soon as you see a prospect demonstrating high levels of engagement.

Automation reduces the time and resources needed to close deals
When you put all these different features together, depending on your business goal, the result is that marketing automation significantly reduces the effort it takes to close a deal. Instead of treating all prospects equally, which usually results in wasted time and resources, marketing automation lets you focus your effort on the potential customers that have demonstrated a high interest in your product. Ultimately, this makes your digital marketing more efficient and profitable.

Take the time to determine precisely how you plan to use your marketing

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