Let’s be real, we all have heard about how important marketing automation is. But if all tasks can be performed with the assistance of technology, why there are yet so many business owners that struggle to find time to develop their companies? Something must be wrong.
You definitely know the feeling of drowning in tasks but having no clear results at the end. You spend the entire day replying to emails, handling small problems, trying to organize your computer working space. The day is busy and you have no time to look up. In the end, nothing meaningful is done.
If you feel the same thing, it might be just the right time to consider marketing automation. Let’s go through 10 signs that might mean your business needs automation (even if you don’t).
Sign #1 — Where is the data?
The more your business grows, the more information you collect. There is no scaling without data. Data gives possibilities but also lays many traps. When there is a lot of information to handle, it’s easy to get lost in storages and eventually do not process it all properly. If you do it, manually, of course.
By saying “data”, we don’t just mean emails addresses, names, or credit card numbers. There are more fragile insights into customer’s behavior and preferences which are not easy to track and use if you do that by yourself.
With marketing automation, you can get the platform to do it for you. You’d be amazed on with what insights software can collect (even ones you could never think about).
Sign #2 — All these privacy discussions slightly scare you
There is no shame in being concerned about security. Moreover, it’s a reasonable thing to do, and often it saves businesses from breaches and fines. However, worrying does not solve the problem, and you can’t take care of all of that on your own.
If you have been maintaining your user’s data in Excel or Google Spreadsheet, it’s really time to consider automation. Don’t take us wrong here, there is nothing wrong with spreadsheets, just not for the customer’s data.
To process and store the data efficiently, you need to maintain it in a special environment where it can be used with one touch and click. Spreadsheets do not give that.
Decentralized automation platforms, on the other hand, solve this problem in a great fashion. Not only they provide possibilities to use the information right away in marketing campaigns but also, because of their decentralized nature, this one fragile spot that hackers could target doesn’t exist.
They can get to your spreadsheet but they can’t get to thousands of blockchain servers and databases.
Sign #3 — I don’t know whether I am efficient
We all do something to improve our companies. The question is, does it work?
You definitely heard about this Pareto rule which implies that only 20% of all tasks will bring the most favorable outcomes, and 80% are basically just ‘fillers’. Regarding business, it goes like this: recognize this 20% and concentrate on it to get more things done in less time.
When you are busy with everyday routine tasks, they all seem to be extremely important — otherwise, you wouldn’t be doing them, right?
However, with no objective documentation, there is no way of really telling what actions bring the most result. Doesn’t matter how productive and self-managing you are, the overwhelming feeling will come from time to time.
Automation allows you to monitor the outcomes of your actions. Could be, these 80% of filler-tasks occupy all of your time, not those really valuable 20%. Using technology, you can spot that and actually do what matters.
Sign #4 — You don’t delegate because you don’t trust your team
If you want to have something done the best way, do it yourself. That’s how the saying goes, doesn’t it? This is not, however, the right approach when it comes to doing business.
Anyone who ever tried to delegate knows how challenging this actually is. When you do a task yourself, it might take more time, true, but at least you have control. With delegation, you are constantly stressed out because someone misunderstood something. Yet, doing everything yourself means never scaling. It’s putting a stop to continuous development.
A warning here, don’t expect marketing automation to solve these issues, so natural for any human nature.
No platform will spare you the anxiety of losing control over task implementation. It helps with monitoring and evaluation: you can see who among your team is doing the fruitful job and who just hides behind pretend-to-be-busy walls.
Sign #5 — There is no way of predicting the future
Entrepreneurship always means some instability, that’s a given. Every day, you feel stressed out because you don’t really know what can await you around the corner. There is no clear idea of how much you could earn or lose until the end of the month which leaves you no way to plan a vacation or buy a new car.
Such lack of confidence comes from the lack of planning. You don’t put goals for the future and don’t build strategies to achieve them. Neither you have comprehensive reports on previous months and years so there is no telling of whether your business is growing or not.
Marketing automation deals with it by giving you a possibility to create automatic reports without you even knowing about it. It might seem like a small thing but that what makes the night sleep easier.
Sign #6 — The lack of discipline
This is very common. We work with marketing optimization on daily basis and that means, we often get to hear things like: “I can’t make myself invested in marketing, it’s just not my priority at the moment”.
If you had such thought, it does not make you a poor company owner. The truth is, it’s difficult to see the place for marketing in your business until you start doing it.
With marketing automation, it’s (almost) the same as if you hire a little marketing team. It motivates you to invest in your business development further and contributes to discipline tremendously.
Sign #7 — You don’t have time for all the clients
The moment you start achieving some success, you’ll begin dealing with concerns as “I’d be happy to work on that offer but there is no way I could really pull it off”. We have this stage when, instead of desperately searching for clients, we start refusing them. There are only 24 hours available each day, and we don’t want to spend each of them servicing customers.
Marketing automation solves this issue by buying you time in creating reports, doing emails, making follow-ups (we all hate doing manual follow-ups, let’s be real), monitoring the results. It means you wouldn’t have to refuse new clients — and more income.
Sign #8 — My competitors seem to do it all faster
That’s because competitors have perhaps already adopted the technology. The answer to the question ‘why does my competition seems to handle it better” usually lies in the automation approach.
You see, could be that your competitors have already automated 90% of the tasks that you do manually. Of course, it buys time and saves motivation. Of course, your competitors will be faster this way.
Sign #9 — You looked for the right platform but couldn’t find anything
It’s a real concern. There are many automation solutions out there but many of them are truly expensive. The answer to this question is to try a new platform which is not as popular yet but actually gets the job done as fine as the popular software (if not better).
When you seek the automated solutions, it’s natural to look at the most popular choices, assuming that these might be the best (that’s why everyone is buying them, right?). However, you’d be shocked to find out that many of these platforms are nearly not as popular as they want to seem. Don’t be afraid to try new solutions, they are often more innovative and less demanding in terms of price.
Sign #10 — It all depends on you
Sounds as a good thing, what’s wrong with having all the power over your marketing? It might seem as an advantage but really, it’s a limitation. If for some reasons you are not capable of handling all the processes, your business is put on hold. Shall you go on vacation or get sick for some while, or spend time with kids, it all throws a great shadow on your business development.
Here, perhaps, lies the main purpose of marketing automation. While outsourcing tasks to the platform, you get to live, actually enjoying the fruits of your work without losing resources and potential income. Of course, this doesn’t mean that marketing automation can fully handle all marketing and sales activities for you but it’s a sure relief.
What if I don’t want to give away the influence over my business
That’s a great point, you definitely shouldn’t. It’s a real concern with most of marketing automation platforms. All the data about your business goes to the third-party hands, and shall something happen to the data holders, your company will suffer a huge crisis.
That was a real deal breaker. Not anymore. With blockchain and decentralized systems in place, you don’t have to give away all the sensitive information to the one-third party. All the data is saved on your server and belongs to you, therefore, leaving you in control of all the information.
That’s exactly what we did in Triggmine, first blockchain-based marketing automation service.
If you’d like to know more how this works and how the platform differs from others, stay tuned to our blog updates.