The Productive Benefits of Automated Marketing
Inside Dental Technology delivers updates on digital workflows, materials, lab techniques, and innovation in dental technology through expert articles and videos.
December 1, 2018
Volume 9, Issue 12, December 2018
Page(s): p. 16
Terry Fine
Marketing is a key factor in ensuring your business's success as it can keep your products and services front of mind for clients. Everyday marketing tasks, such as sending emails and updating social media, can bog down a workflow and become a burden. That is where automated marketing tools, such as HubSpot, Hootsuite, and Buffer, revolutionized and streamlined certain repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Your productivity has the potential to go through the roof when you alleviate burdensome aspects from your daily workday. When used properly, these tools can greatly enhance the productivity of your marketing and sales efforts through benefits such as email optimization, streamlining of social media, intuitive lead engagement and conversion, and boosted client retention.
Most automated marketing platforms allow for in-depth customization of email campaigns by providing measurable data. This information will allow you to curate content based on the behavior of your audience. These readily available analytics will show you what content, subject lines, and promotions are most compelling to your clients. As an example, imagine sending clinicians an email promoting a new product. With automated marketing tracking, you will be able to tell just how many of your clients ignore the email, open it, or click any of the links inside. Depending on the reactions you receive, you will be able to modify subject lines to get more opens and content to get more clicks. This aspect of automated marketing makes the process of organizing email lists and collecting data easier and more efficient. It can also help you identify and focus on what works.
The most important aspect of social media automation is the use of a centralized dashboard. You should not have to log separately into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or any one platform. Instead, utilizing an automation tool allows you to build out a complete content calendar for all platforms in one location. This will help you maintain a consistent posting schedule, which is vital to grow a following for your business. Automation also provides you with valuable data that will allow you to make changes to your social media strategy based on the reception of your content.
Automated marketing makes lead engagement and conversion easier and faster. Through the streamlining of emails and social media, your company's reach can be expanded past the limits of traditional marketing and be put in front of more potential clients. Automated marketing also allows for intuitive interactions with leads, including immediately following up with fresh leads or checking in on those who are unresponsive. Utilizing analytics, you can track the cultivation of leads and gain insight into when they are ready to be contacted by your sales team, which is when they are actively thinking about your company. Many platforms also utilize a scoring system that ranks leads based on their level of engagement across all your marketing channels. A scoring system allows your sales team to focus on highly qualified leads instead of those who rarely, if ever, interact with your company.
Many automated marketing tools can help you segment your clients into groups dependent on tracked similarities. This segmentation allows you to run campaigns that are specifically curated for certain groups, resulting in higher engagement. The ultimate goal of marketing is to convert a lead into a consumer and that consumer into a lifelong client. Segmenting groups can increase a client's lifetime value by specifically upselling and cross-selling to those whose data indicates they are in a spending trend and sending promotional material to clients who are in a purchasing slump. You will also be able to stay updated on clients who have fallen off the map or are at-risk of turning to a competitor.
Automated marketing will not be the sole tool that determines the success of your laboratory's marketing campaign. It must also be paired with quality content and an understanding of how effective marketing works. When used correctly, automated marketing is an excellent investment for laboratory owners who are looking for an efficient means of growing an engaged client base.
Terry Fine is President of AMG Creative in Fort Collins, Colorado.
