What You Need to Know About Marketing Automation

A successful marketing campaign leaves nothing to chance. It works across multiple channels, including email, social media, digital ads, and trade shows. However, traffic by itself is meaningless without engagement, and a campaign with unmeasurable results can leave your business in the dark. Marketing automation software doesn't just automate the dull but necessary repetitive tasks that make up so much of your marketing efforts; it also gives you actionable insights into what is or is not working, enabling you to make the most of your time and your marketing spending.

What is Marketing Automation?

Simply put, marketing automation services work much the same as manufacturing automation. If you have a repetitive task, like an ad campaign that needs to be served to a highly targeted market segment across multiple platforms, the software takes care of it for you. What used to be a rather narrow niche has exploded as the cloud and robust analytics have taken hold, leaving the average business with more options, metrics, and solutions than they may know what to do with. Cain & Company cuts through the clutter, giving you more time to concentrate on your core business.

Purpose of Marketing Automation

Just as your business processes, whether in manufacturing or healthcare, have a clearly defined series of steps, marketing automation relies on careful strategy to ensure a clear and logical flow. Automating your marketing process forces you to think through what might have been a subconscious or haphazard process, so you can identify and address pain points and friction to make your process more efficient.

Traditionally, marketing is approached as a sales funnel. Experience has taught us that the process isn't usually quite that linear; rather than an assembly line, it's a series of touchpoints that customers often have to pass through before they're ready to commit to a buying decision. The more of those touchpoints you can automate, the more you can use the process not only to inform but also to guide customer behavior, which helps to increase the chances of conversion.

The Benefits of Marketing Automation for Specialty Manufacturing

There are many advantages of marketing automation, some of which can vary across industries. Marketing automation has some specific benefits for specialty manufacturing.

• Lower Acquisition Cost: Acquiring new customers is a costly endeavor. Automation lowers the cost of acquiring new customers, in both time and money.
• Customer Retention and Lifetime Value: The fewer new customers you have to acquire, the less time and money needs to be funneled in that direction. Marketing automation is a good way to retain customers while also increasing a customer's lifetime value by cross-selling or up-selling.
• Run Your Marketing Around the Clock: You can't always have someone at the computer with one eye on the screen and the other on the clock, trying to post precisely the right content at just the right time. Automating key marketing tasks means your business is always "on" even when nobody's "home."
• Repurposing Content to Save Time: Content creation is a vital part of marketing but can also be time-consuming when done properly. Automation isn't just for boosting new content; it breathes new life into older, but evergreen, content, educating new leads and existing customers alike and keeping your business top-of-mind.
• Clarity: Whether you're planning a campaign, troubleshooting what isn't working, or figuring out how to capitalize on a surprise success, nobody wants to guess at the whys and wherefores. Automation doesn't just automate outputs; its ability to collect and synthesize data also gives you insight into inputs, understanding traffic patterns and customer behavior, so you're always adjusting and improving.

These are just a few of the benefits offered by marketing automation. Because each business is different, we customize solutions to fit, and as a result, the benefits are often as individualized as the implementation.

Working with Cain & Company

Headquartered in Rockford, Illinois, Cain & Company offers end-to-end B2B marketing solutions and creative services to specialty clients in the manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and nonprofit sectors. With extensive experience working with a variety of marketing automation platforms like HubSpot and SharpSpring, we bring several advantages to the table. Our team has trained extensively on all aspects of digital marketing in addition to becoming intimately acquainted with the capabilities of these platforms. We also have access to tools and resources not available to the general public, which further help us to empower your business — whether you're new to automated marketing, or your manufacturing business seeks to get more from its existing marketing automation platform. For growth marketing in industry and manufacturing, request a consultation today.