As our marketing succeeds, our businesses grow – and when your business grows, your marketing and organization will become more and more complex. While complex may mean complicated, it shouldn’t have to mean difficult. With any growing business, there comes the inevitable growth of moving parts to navigate through, and also where the risk of waste, inefficiencies, and human error rises. We can’t help ourselves. No matter how organized a business may be, we are still human, and there will undoubtedly be times where things can start to fall through the cracks. But instead of correcting this with more time or more people, let’s look at how technology can solve our challenges.

Cue The Terminator music, because robots are about to rule your world…..

Marketing Automation

Okay, so we don’t have to worry about any Arnie-beef castle-murder-robots, but technology will, and pretty much already does, rule the world. It’s in almost all the things we do and love, making our lives better and, most importantly, making them easier. This is exactly what we want out of marketing automation.

A marketing automation platform helps marketers, like us, by doing tasks for us. Tasks that would take a human a great deal of time and effort. Common tasks, like capturing contact information and sending emails, can all be simplified and automated. These automated actions can be as complex and customized as needed to fit your exact needs and scale with us as we grow. By leveraging a platform, such as Hubspot or SharpSpring (my two favorites), will make our lives much easier.

Here are 5 examples of how you’ll benefit from marketing automation:

Organization

Organization is key to any successful…organization. This may seem straightforward, but I cannot stress enough how impactful a marketing automation platform can be on your day-to-day. Imagine a rusty old filing cabinet down in your basement that’s been overflowing for years. We all have one. Your wife has been begging for you to sort ever since you couldn’t find the paperwork for your adopted dog named Ozzy (that example got oddly specific). Combing through all those files, who knows how old they are, sounds like a straight-up nightmare… but what if you had something managing that for you? Every important document, all perfectly organized the way you like? Now that’s the straight-up dream.

This is how a marketing automation platform with a built-in CRM works. Every customer contact, past and present, organized with detailed information. You can even remove contacts who are no longer of value or identify the contacts who are likely to buy, so sales can find them in a few clicks and focus their efforts. As our organizations continue to grow, this CRM technology will be able to grow with you and help you grow quickly.

More Time

Time. If you’re like me, you love time! Less time doing repetitive busywork, more time doing rewarding engaging work. Marketing automation allows us to spend more time doing what matters, like closing business and fulfilling great customer experiences. What’s so great about technology is that it’s advancing so quickly. What would take a full team to accomplish in a day, now only takes minutes with a few clicks of a button. Just think of all the other things you could do with that time!

Efficiency

Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Woody and Buzz, Thelma and Louise, Time and Efficiency. Talk about iconic duos! Time and efficiency go hand in hand. Both have a direct impact on each other. If we can be more efficient with our processes, we have more time to achieve other initiatives. Marketing automation isn’t just doing things for us, it’s doing this quickly and effectively! How much more efficient is it to use three different tools to do one job compared to having to manually send an identical email to 900 different email addresses? Very! A good automation platform should be a swiss army knife or a tool belt. Everything you need in one spot for anything you need.

More Savings

It’s obvious, we already covered saving time, but time is money! Maybe I should have led with the money bit? Marketing automation allows us to save money. No more allocating unnecessary money, budget, staff for these now automated tasks, the automation will have you covered. And better yet, you can start to re-allocating those resources to other impactful needs, such as web development, content marketing, social media campaigns, a foosball table, the possibilities are endless! If I’ve learned anything about marketing automation, it would be why to do more with more when you can do more with less.

Reporting and Success

Combine all the previous benefits and add an extra layer on top, tracking and performance. Any great marketing automation system is going to have tracking and reporting metrics. So what does this mean? This means you can take the guesswork out of your efforts and see clear results. How engaging are your emails? How engaged are your contacts? How effective are your contact forms? And if you go with one of our favorite platforms, like SharpSpring or Hubspot, you’ll be able to tell how much revenue you are generating through your marketing efforts. These are all questions that can inform strategic decisions, which can result in monumental positive changes in your strategy, and ultimately, will then result in better organization, time savings, efficiency, and budget savings.

So, if you haven’t yet, or are considering upping your marketing by integrating a streamlined automation tool, then now is the time to do it. Every minute you spend on a task could be a minute saved, and every dollar you spend could have been better spent.

Dan Seitz is the Director of Strategy at Hawthorn Creative and has helped execute marketing strategies for clients from all over the hospitality industry. This blog post was automated, Dan is actually a fully automated writing robot fueled by human brains.