With 76% of businesses using automated marketing, it’s no longer a question of simply integrating the technology into your marketing processes, it’s about HOW you use it. When used strategically, the benefits of marketing automation can not only save your marketing team time. It also gives your team the tools they need to reach their marketing goals and help your business make more money.

In this article, we’ll take you through the benefits of automated marketing. This includes preparing your marketing department to make the most of automation. And lastly, illuminate how Wrk’s Hybrid Automation solution is uniquely equipped to empower your marketing teams to streamline and enhance their processes by complementing their current skills. 

If you need a quick brush up on automated marketing fundamentals before diving in, check out our blog post What is Marketing Automation. 

The benefits of automating your marketing processes

  • Ensures that no lead opportunity is missed. And that your marketing strategies funnel seamlessly into rich lead lists for sales through automated list building from social media and lead generation from LinkedIn and other platforms. 

  • Eliminates interdepartmental silos and integrates with your CRM, ensuring Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success strategies are aligned and cohesive, particularly when it comes to lead enrichment and lead nurturing.

  • Promotes stronger client relationships in a scalable way thanks to personalized emails, strategically timed product updates, and automated customer feedback requests. No matter how big your client list grows, automation ensures each client receives bespoke communications.

  • Enhances the quality of marketing strategies and your marketing team’s brand understanding. You can collect and protect up-to-date market research data and report on the success of marketing campaigns. 

  • Creates revenue opportunities by supporting your marketing team as they reach new target markets. You can automate lead generation, and attract new funding with personalized pitch decks.

  • Maximizes the impact of marketing content, such as blog and social media posts, with automated metadata generation for SEO and list building.  

Seamlessly Integrate Automated Marketing with the Wrk Delivery Platform

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Automation should never be a one-size-fits-all solution. Each business has its ways of doing things and a distinct tech stack that its teams work with. That’s why our solution can be tailored to your specific business processes, all while guaranteeing consistent unit pricing, speed, and efficiency. 

Our solution is powered by the Wrk Automation Platform, an intuitive no-code platform that leverages a combination of RPA, API, AI, and OCR technologies to tackle a huge array of tasks and deliver high-quality automation.

But that’s just one aspect of our Delivery Platform.

We also have a unique side to our automation capabilities: Hybrid Automation. Hybrid Automation essentially combines the aforementioned automation technologies with a human community of skilled workers. This enables you to automate a wider variety of tasks as well as more complex marketing processes. 

Hybrid Automation retains the human touch that can be lost with traditional automation.

Simply Powerful Automation

With the Wrk Automation Platform at your fingertips, you can automate the marketing processes of your choosing, whether it's scheduling and publishing social media posts, nurturing leads with personalized sequencing, or campaign reporting. By combining pre-configured Wrk Actions, you can create custom Wrkflows that automate even the most complex of tasks and integrate a wide variety of professional software programs and online platforms, including Salesforce, HubSpot, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google Drive, Asana, Canva, Excel, and many more. We also offer a series of pre-built Wrkflows that you can test out.

The Wrk Automation Platform provides a central hub where you can easily build automated marketing Wrkflow sequences, test them out, tweak them, and scale them as you learn more.

As your business evolves, so too can your automated marketing tools thanks to easy customization without the need for extra IT knowledge or input. 

Ultimately, automating marketing processes can dramatically increase efficiency and give your marketing team more time and resources to deepen market and customer insights, stay on top of changing marketing trends, and create high-quality marketing content and campaigns. In short, automation empowers marketing teams and really lets them make the most of their skills. 

Don’t miss our eBook on Automated Marketing, which covers how our Hybrid Automation solution is uniquely equipped to transform your marketing processes.

What Marketing Automation Can’t Do

An important part of getting the most out of marketing automation tools is understanding the limits of the technology. In other words, what marketing automation can and can’t do. As we’ve seen, our Hybrid Automation solution is capable of a lot, from lead nurturing to campaign reporting. What it isn’t designed to do, however, is automate your marketing strategies. 

Marketing skills will always be central to a brand’s success.

Sure, automation can support your team and make their jobs much easier and more efficient, but it can’t synthesize information and come up with the original marketing strategies that will set your brand above the competition. Some people believe that marketing automation will solve all their marketing challenges, and it has come a long way since its beginnings.

It’s perhaps more accurate to think of it as an empowerment tool, which enables your Marketing team to put their skills and time towards higher value responsibilities, like communicating with Development and Sales departments. You can also track marketing trends, creating high-quality content, and coming up with marketing strategies and roadmaps.

In the end, your Marketing team and marketing automation solutions should be working in symbiosis. Marketing automation takes care of and optimizes many daily marketing tasks, which gives Marketing teams more time to strategize and create content, which ultimately improves marketing performance—not to mention business performance—on the whole.

For more details on what you should and shouldn’t automate, head to our blog post on the topic.

Achieving Key Marketing Goals with Automated Marketing

The value of marketing automation is found not only in its capacity to speed up a number of marketing tasks—particularly the time-consuming repetitive ones—it can also empower your Marketing team to achieve key marketing goals, including finding new customers, retaining existing customers, and fostering customer loyalty to create more brand ambassadors. 

Let’s look at how each of these marketing goals can be realized with the support of Wrk’s Hybrid Automation solution. 

Acquiring new customers

Finding new customers is a top priority for all businesses, for the simple fact that new clients equal more revenue opportunities. In other words, new clients are a keystone in establishing sustainable long-term business growth. Marketing teams are largely responsible for seeking out target markets and coming up with new ways to build brand awareness and reach potential customers. It should go without saying that client outreach strategies and big-picture ideas should be left to the marketing professionals on your team. Where automation can help is in bringing your strategies to life.

When we talk about finding new potential clients and facilitating their conversions to sales, there are 3 main objectives marketers must address:

  • Capture the attention of a target market

  • Educate prospects

  • Provide a clear pathway for follow-ups

Wrk’s Marketing Automation Wrkflows can help with all 3 objectives. How? Let’s dive in.

Capture the attention of a target market

It goes without saying that in order to close more sales, the first step is to make people aware of your brand as well as your products or services. Capturing the attention of a target market and building brand awareness is therefore imperative, and Marketing teams have several avenues through which they build a potential client base, including advertising, social media content, events, and more. 

Automation can help in every aspect of your marketing strategy. To start, our Market Research Wrkflow supports your Marketing team as they come up with ways to reach and engage with more clients. With this Wrkflow, your team can access market data that will give them insights into how your business fits into a specific market and how to make the best marketing decisions. 

From there, automation can support your Marketing team as they deploy a diversity of brand awareness strategies, whether it's ad versioning, scheduling and publishing social media content, or telemarketing. 

Educate prospects

This objective is fairly straightforward: by educating new prospects you are equipping them to make an informed decision about purchasing your product or service. From a marketing perspective, this step is primarily about making sure that educational materials exist and are delivered at the right time and place. Newsletters, blogs, white papers, and guides can clearly illustrate your company’s values and help turn even the coldest leads into warm ones. In short, if a lead has a clear idea of how you can solve their pain points and they can trust you to have the expertise to help them, they are more likely to convert to a sale. 

Traditional automation comes into play not in the creation of high-quality content, but in how it is shared and distributed. With our solution, you can easily automate personalized newsletters and emails that present leads with clear calls to action (CTAs) based on where they are in the sales funnel. Check out some of our tips on leveling up your email marketing.

Moreover, our Lead Generation and Lead Enrichment Wrkflows can help establish a robust lead list—derived from social media and other platforms—filled with rich data. This not only helps your Sales team, but can provide insights into what type of individualized strategy your marketing should pursue to keep the lead informed and moving through the sales funnel. 

Provide clear pathways for follow-ups

Once a target market has been reached, it is also critical that they have easy, low-risk avenues for following up for more information and next steps. It is through these follow-ups that prospects are most likely to transition into high-quality leads and ultimately paying customers. 

Automation lays the foundation for seamless follow-ups, enabling leads to easily request and receive quotes, product updates, book appointments, view demos and instructional videos, access webinars, and more. Automatically generated personalized emails with specific CTAs will bring leads to landing pages, where they can choose their preferred method of engagement. And we have Wrkflows for each option, including automated Quote Generation and Appointment Scheduling.

Our marketing automation solution also integrates with your CRM platform to ensure that your lead transitions seamlessly into the sales pipeline. And that both your Marketing and Sales teams have access to the same client data and can see exactly where they are in their sales journey.   

In the end, a good marketing strategy for bringing in new clients will address all 3 objectives. While some businesses tend to focus solely on price as a differentiator, clients are also looking for the solution that best fits their needs. Demonstrate to your target market and, more precisely, new leads that you understand what they want and will take the time to educate them and make them feel confident in choosing you. This will make them look beyond the price tag and help them choose the solution—your solution—based on the value it offers. 

Retaining existing customers

One part of a marketing strategy is to find target markets and bring in new customers. It must also go further and strive to retain existing customers. It must offer scalability and growth. Marketing experts know that keeping customers is much cheaper than constantly trying to find new ones. This is mostly because existing customers already know who you are and what you sell.

There are various ways to encourage existing clients to stay loyal to your brand, whether it's through new purchases, upgrades, or renewals. Retention strategies include rewards programs, loyalty programs, exclusive discounts, beta testing, early access to new products, and more. Our automation solution integrates with your CRM and can automatically send clients upgrades and offers based on their specific sales journey. For example, once a client has signed a contract, our Client Onboarding Wrkflow will automatically order a welcome gift based on the contract value and have it sent through a gift fulfillment service. It’s an important step in building strong customer relationships that won’t require any extra legwork from your marketing professionals.  

Keep Your Clients Updated

With our Product Updates Wrkflow, you can make sure that every client is kept in the loop about new product releases and upgrades that can benefit them. This will also show your client base that you're striving to always improve your offering while giving your marketing more time to come up with strategies and create high-value content.

Even though the above incentives are great at keeping customers, it's also important to get feedback from customers so you can keep making your marketing and customer success strategies better. There are many ways to talk to clients and find out what they think, such as face-to-face conversations, feedback from users and customers, surveys and questionnaires, testing, and more. Internally, marketing teams can also benefit from liaising with sales and product development to ensure that strategies are consistent and product updates are in line with customer needs.

Integrate our Customer Growth & Retention Wrkflow and automatically send surveys and feedback requests to existing clients. This will give your team more time to analyze client responses and put their feedback into action.

Turn customers into brand ambassadors

The final step in a marketing strategy is to make your customers do some of the work for you. In other words, transform clients into brand advocates. Happy customers that are satisfied with your product or service—not to mention your customer process—will spread the word and extend your reach. They basically become marketers or walking ads for you.

Word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) is perhaps the most valuable marketing avenue. In fact, 64% of marketing executives believe this to be true. This is why educating leads and clients is particularly important. When they are happy, they are more than happy to talk about it.

The better they know your product and brand, the better they can share your offering and communicate your value to other potential clients. 

Keeping clients updated and informed through automated newsletters and product updates will make them feel valued, and enhance the customer experience. A lot of people also agree that personalization is important for marketing success with clients. A whopping 99% of marketers say that personalization is important in building strong customer relationships. Our Hybrid Automation enables you to achieve scalable personalization across all customer-facing processes, all while maintaining a human touch. 

Providing clients with products and services that meet their needs is only one part of building customer success. Marketing and the customer experience are also very important. In the end, automation can help your business better predict what your customers want and give them the tools they need to understand your brand and tell others about it.

How to prepare for your new automated marketing process

To make the most out of automated marketing tools in your business, it's important to plan ahead and make sure things are prepared for the transition. Like any transformation of business processes, the adoption of automation is best accompanied by strategy and transparency. Working with clients to deliver and improve marketing automation solutions has taught us a lot, and we want to share it with you. Here's how to prepare for marketing automation and ensure that you are getting the most out of the technology.

Before implementation

  • The first step to prepare for marketing automation—or any automation—is to define your goals. What do you want to achieve with automation? What processes are you looking to streamline? As early as this stage, you can speak with our experts to help you understand the automation potential for your business.

  • Before implementing automation, it’s a good idea to communicate with various departments and teams. Marketing automation impacts other departments, such as Sales and Customer Success, so it’s important to get everyone on board and on the same page.

  • Based on insights from your marketing team, create an overview of marketing processes and the steps involved in each. The processes with repeatable steps will benefit most from automation and can be turned into Wrkflows.

During the process

  • Organize your databases in preparation for data segmentation and merging. Automation can break down silos between departments and standardize data across teams. In fact, our Deduplication Wrkflow and Lead Enrichment Wrkflow can come in handy here, eliminating redundant data and sourcing any missing fields.  

  • Build a foundation of content for each stage of the customer lifecycle. This library of material will form the basis for automated personalized outreach and various templates that can be integrated into automated Wrkflows. 

  • Take it step by step. Marketing automation doesn’t have to happen all at once. Start by integrating a select number of tools for marketing automation, evaluate them, scale them, and then move on to more automation. The beauty of our Automation Platform is that you can automate at your own speed.

  • Evaluate and analyze the impact of marketing automation continuously. Our Automation Platform enables you to track the success of your automated Wrkflows. It helps you visualize what is working and what isn’t. From there, it's easy to scale Wrkflows, or adjust them using the drag-and-drop function so your processes are optimized. 

Automated Marketing statistics to put things into perspective

  • 84% of marketers using marketing automation have experienced success to some extent, and 52% believe that quality data is the most important tactic for amplifying the success of marketing automation tools.

  • The leading benefits of using marketing automation according to marketers are: improved customer experience (43%), better use of time (38%), better data for decision-making (35%), and improved lead generation and lead nurturing (34%). 

  • In 2022, 62% of consumers stated that a brand would lose their loyalty if it delivered an non-personalized customer experience. This is up from 45% in 2021.

  • 39% of marketers say that lack of training and knowledge are the main hurdles to making the most out of marketing automation. 

  • 55% of marketers cite easy integration into their existing tech stack (including CRM platforms) as the most important feature of marketing automation solutions. 

  • 45% of marketers cite lead scoring and lead qualification as the most important features of marketing automation solutions. 

Looking for more insights about the state of marketing automation? Look no further, we’ve got a blog post illuminating the top 10 trends in marketing automation.

Automate your Marketing Processes with Wrk

Wrk’s automation solution is intuitive and easy to implement. Even so, we understand better than anyone that the transition to automation requires support sometimes. That’s why our team is available all along your marketing automation journey. In the end, our goal is to not only give you the tools to streamline your business processes. But to also ensure you're making the most out of those tools and are taking advantage of the full benefits of automation. We are here to help. And we want you to succeed.

We designed the Wrk platform with your pain points in mind. We work with you to understand your business processes and to automate them so you can focus elsewhere. Connect with us today. Speak to a representative. Plan out your future.

Want to learn more about our Hybrid Automation solution and how it can help your brand? Get in touch or book a demo!