Answer: To optimize lead capturing, nurturing and content management/creation process.
There are many marketing automation platforms out there but before you start reviewing them and comparing every aspect and functionality of a tool with another, think about what problems your team is facing right now and how marketing automation can help tackle them.
Here are few reasons of how marketing automation can benefit your company, irrespective of your team size.
1. Marketing automation helps to optimize lead generating campaigns:
Have you ever asked yourself, why am I creating this landing page? Why am I drafting this e-blast? Or what is my ultimate objective behind the current digital activity?
Asking any of the above question will give you the same answer: To capture new LEADS
With marketing automation you can cohesively combine different digital components such as landing pages, blogs, Call-to-Action buttons, forms and emails to maximize your lead generation process. It helps you to connect the dots, understand the performance of each component, tweak the digital process and optimize your overall digital campaign to increase leads.
2. It helps to manage your content more effectively:
When you create a landing page or an email or a form for a particular campaign, the life span of that content is tied to that particular campaign and then it expires. By using an automation tool you can re-use existing elements like landing page, email or a form and make it available for your next campaign easily.
There are few tools that allow you to clone an existing piece of content and import all the text/media/form settings and questions and helps to get a great start for your next marketing campaign.
This helps you to focus more on your creativity and worry less about creating content from scratch.
3. Helps to create effective workflows:
Often times when you capture a lead, they end up in a huge contact list and remain there for a long time until they are no longer relevant for you.
Automation tools can help you create a  workflow where you can capture a lead, send them an auto- reply email as soon as they sign up on your website, provide timely automated updates via email based on the interval that you set and keep the contact engaged with your company. This automates your lead nurturing process and keeps the contact fresh.
4. Helps to measure the performance of every digital component:
You may have heard about S-M-A-R-T objectives i.e. Specific – Measurable – Achievable – Realistic – Timely
While setting new objectives or analyzing the performance of your current objective, you need to make sure that every digital activity and component that you create is measurable.
Marketing automation keeps track of all important digital activities and helps you generate insightful reports, compare the performance with historical data, analyze competitors performance and suggests improvements and opportunities.
There are many awesome marketing automation tools out there. If you want to get started for free, I would recommend checking Mautic or Leadsius. Both are pretty decent tools and will provide all the basic functionality that an automation tool provides. For advanced users Hubspot and Marketo would be my top two choice.
