• Automation is now an inseparable part for the operations of almost every single business out there. Some businesses automate only one or two of their processes, others fully rely on tools to do the job and the analytics.
• Why is marketing automation such a handy thing nowadays? Does your business need it? 
• Read on to get a clear understanding of marketing automation and how it can benefit your overall business.

As with all businesses, it’s important for manufacturing companies to invest time and effort into researching which of their processes can be automated. Automation can be applied to anything in your business, whether it’s front or back office processes, tracking your customer relationships or even just improving your current system.

However, more and more companies are moving their automated focus towards their marketing processes, and they can streamline their workflows on a daily basis. We're here to give you a clearer perspective.

Do I need to automate my marketing strategy?

Of course, it’s not essential that you automate your strategy, but the benefits that it provides are unparalleled. Consider how much your company spends on man hours carrying out certain tasks in your marketing department.

Now imagine if 90% of those tasks were automated. What other projects or strategies could you invest those man hours in? How much more effective and free from error would your strategy be? One study even found that automating their strategy improved their lead conversion rate by 107%, a figure that cannot be ignored.

Integrating your CRM solution

There are many benefits that come with integrating your CRM, most notable of which is gathering, collecting and analysing information you have on your customers.

“By automating your CRM solution, you’re cutting out all the menial and time-consuming tasks but still allowing customer information to be readily available” – says Helen Brewer, a Digital Marketer.

Understanding your buyers

By having a better understanding of your customers, you can help to create and tailor a strategy that’s directly customised for them, rather than just risking resources on a campaign that might not work.

These are known as buyer personas, something a business may have multiple versions of.

“Automating your processes makes this information far more accessible and easy to manage, such as tracking your reach and engagement rates on your social media profiles, so you can cater for exactly what your customers want.” – explains Sheldon Flynn, a Blog content writer.

Personalised marketing

Very similar to the two main considerations above, having all this customer information so readily available means that you can give each and every one of your customers a personalised style of marketing, making it much more effective and targeted, and therefore, more cost-effective.

Using these processes, you’ll also be able to identify challenges that your business and customers are having with your sales process, helping you to adapt and address these challenges so you can create and generate sales.

Active lead scoring

Lead scoring is such an important part of marketing and if you’re not doing it already, now is the time to do so. With lead scoring, you can track and analyse your current leads to see exactly how qualified they are and what sales they are going to make.

With this automated information, you can then nurture these leads, making it much more likely that you’ll make a successful sale.

Monitoring your analytics

Of course, one of the most important tasks you’ll have to carry out within your marketing strategy is checking and analysing the performance of your business and the campaign. By using automation solutions, such as the ones listed in the tools section below, you can make it incredibly easy to carry out this task, making sure that all the information you need is in an easy-to-understand place.

Marketing automation tools you can use

To give you a head start when it comes to automating your marketing strategy, here are some tools you can use to make things easier;

• HubSpot - an automation tool for monitoring and tracking the analytics of your website and social media profiles.
• Marketo - a market-leading automation platform which allows you to automate all aspects of your strategy, including social media, email and even digital ads.
• Grammarix and Viawriting - a free online tool you can use when automating your content marketing processes.
• Boomessays - a writing agency you can use to generate content for your business with minimal effort (as recommended in Huffington Post ‘Write my paper’ article).
• Sales Force - the world’s #1 CRM automation platform for all sized businesses to automate all their content-related processes.
• Oxessays - a free automation blog you can use to automate your SEO practices with ease.
• Assignment Help - a tool you can use to generate SE optimised content for your marketing strategy automatically.
• Leads Squared - an all-in-one lead conversion platform and solution that helps you to generate and convert leads.
• Ukwritings - use this online tool to create email content automatically and with minimal human effort.

As you can see, there are a huge number of benefits to automating your marketing strategy as a manufacturing company. Not only will this help you as a business to be a lot more accurate in the tasks that you’ll carry out, but you’ll also be able to save time and money on resources, allowing you to hugely invest in other key departments