Marketing has traditionally been viewed as a deeply human process, requiring the skill, insight, and experience of multiple people to find the best way of targeting specific audiences and niches with tailored promotional materials. Finding the right balance between design, content, message, and values in order to effectively promote products or services is an art, and rolling out these campaigns to the masses in seamless, cost-effective ways is a science—achieving both is one of the most difficult processes imaginable.

It’s perhaps because of this that the concept of marketing automation hasn’t had much traction among businesses. After all, initial versions of this type of software were developed in the early 1990s when IBM unveiled their Unica platform, and yet today—thirty years later—businesses are still put off by the potential red flags. After all, if some of the tops minds in the industry work to develop massive campaigns and sometimes still struggle to make an impact, what hope does a computer program have?

Well, as it turns out, its chances are better than we initially thought, and the benefits associated with its adoption are many—this article is going to take a closer look at just some of them.

Consolidated, Streamlined Conversion Efforts

Ask any business in any industry, and they’ll tell you that the reason that they promote their products or services at all is to generate awareness, enthusiasm, and—ultimately—sales. Creating conversions is the holy grail for most businesses, and one of the biggest barriers to this process is the current technological landscape. With more channels than ever to monitor and manage, it can be extremely difficult for marketing departments to effectively capitalise on each of their unique capabilities.

Marketing automation software facilitates this process by bridging the gaps between platforms and channels. Traditionally, a company trying to generate leads might ask their customers to fill out a contact form on their website before sending out precise, targeted emails, and encouraging recipients to follow the business on various social media channels. In this familiar scenario, the biggest detriment is the fact that the process is incredibly time-consuming and hands-on—one which can be simplified by turning to software.

Instead of handling each of the above steps on an individual basis, customers can browse through your website, find something that catches their eye, provide an email address, and get delivered real-time product status updates on the fly. They can then follow automatically generated links to your storefront on their smart device, purchase the product, and then share their purchases at the click of a button—thereby organically promoting your business—to their social networks, all without your teams ever having to lift a finger!

Rationalised Employee Efforts

For businesses that are managing multiple different platforms, automation software can help you optimise your operations by integrating every core function of your marketing departments into one convenient, accessible central dashboard. Right from the marketing conceptualisation process to the final collection and analysis of data, every step can be managed, tracked, assessed, and any required changes implemented on the fly. Thanks to programs such as Hootsuite, businesses can now create their promotional materials, schedule its delivery to various social media channels, and routinely collect reports, thereby automating the roll-out and refinement process entirely.

Rationalised Employee Efforts

Speaking of data, marketing automation software offers one exceptional, highly appealing advantage—unification. Data unification is all the rage in the corporate world today, and it refers to the reduction in the use of “silos”—fragmented servers or databases—in order to unify data collection and storage, creating comprehensive sources of complete, accurate information.

Prior to the development of automation software, marketing departments would generate sets of data and act upon them in order to refine and improve their practices. In parallel, sales departments would have access to their own reports, and make the necessary operational changes that did not necessarily reflect or complement those made by marketing. In these situations, unproductive, ineffective, and unreliable compromises would often have to be made.

In order to combat these inefficiencies, a piece of automation software such as Marketo can act as a conduit between your departments. If everyone has access to the same piece of software and the data that it generates, best-practice recommendations and refinements can be made in tandem, based on the same criteria and real-world performance metrics. This encourages cross-departmental collaboration, which increases the capabilities and agility of your business as a whole.

It’s understandable that businesses are hesitant to take the plunge and transition to the heavy use of software, rather than people, to manage their day-to-day marketing operations. However, making effective use of the practice offers a number of substantial benefits that can improve the impact and reception of their campaigns. If this article has convinced your business to make the necessary arrangements, then it’s advised that you do so quickly—almost 80% of companies classed as “high-performing” have automated their marketing for periods of less than three years. Evidently, its impact is immense, and can be felt very swiftly as well. Don’t lag behind—get on board before it’s too late and you find yourself falling further and further behind the performance and profitability of your competitors.