Optimizing your workflow with automated marketing reporting

Automated marketing reporting can do many different things to benefit your business. But there are several anomalies. For starters, the majority of the marketers don’t know all the marketing and reporting tools out there or what they do and how they do it. Well, digital marketing is a very nascent industry that seeks innovation and progresses every single day. The patterns and trends change so quickly that even the experienced marketers have trouble keeping up. 

Every marketer needs to show that whatever they are doing is valuable. The most efficient way this can be done is via marketing reporting. However, In this digital era, the primary aspect that affects the workflow is manual data entry, which is not only tedious but inefficient as well. If you are concerned about your workflow, automated marketing can play a crucial role in boosting your overall productivity. 

At a fundamental level, automated marketing reporting is all about optimizing workflow. The scope of automated marketing reporting goes way beyond simply automating your workflow for repetitive tasks. From optimizing which target audience your sales team focuses their efforts on to optimizing your workforce’s time, there is more to marketing reporting that you can imagine. 

With the right automated marketing reporting tools, you can easily optimize your workflow by cutting the resources and time out of your equation. Most importantly, optimizing your workflow with automated marketing reporting can increase your lead close rate. 

This post focuses specifically on how automated marketing reporting enables your workflow to be more effective and generate a higher return on investment on your activity. 

Let’s jump right into it. 

#1 Reduce your Staffing Costs

When you optimize your workflow with automated marketing reporting, you can train your staff to compete with a 50-person sales and marketing department. You don’t have to spend a lot of time researching and looking into numbers that trigger certain marketing criteria. With automated marketing, you can set up marketing campaigns and lead nurturing reports that are automatically triggered when they meet your certain criteria. All it takes is a few months to automate your workflow. After that, you will be sending out hundreds and thousands of personalized emails every day on autopilot.  

#2 Grow Revenue and Average Deal Size 

Automated marketing reporting frees your time for other important tasks, allowing you to gain more insights from data. As a result, it helps in improving your digital marketing workflow by giving you more time to market your client’s budgets more efficiently. Consequently, it gives you improved ROI. Moreover, you will likely see an increase in your consumer lifetime value. And when you integrate this with prioritization and better lead management, it is likely that your sales and marketing activities produce a better return on investment. In automated reporting, you have everything you need to implement a better workflow strategy. So, it contributed to an increasing deal-size in some way or another. 

#3 Improve the Accountability of your Marketing and Sales Team 

When you automate your marketing reports, it makes it very clear where the congestions in your team are. With automated marketing reporting, you can have clearly defined processes and hawkeye-view reporting of the organizational pipeline. Therefore, if your marketing and sales team are failing to nurture hundreds of leads to come ‘sales-qualified leads,’ they will receive impartial feedback that they need to work on their nurturing campaigns. Everything will be in the report, and your team will receive it very often. This not only reduces company politics and tough conversations but also improves the accountability of your team. As a result, you will be able to determine whether your team is performing effectively or not.    

#4 Less Repetition and More Creativity 

One of the biggest reasons why you need to optimize your workflow is because it naturally frees up your team’s time to concentrate more on creative tasks. When you replace manual, tedious, and repetitive tasks with automated campaigns and rules, this allows your staff to stay productive and enhance their effectiveness. They can work on something meaningful every day with automated marketing reporting, bidding goodbye to mundane, repetitive tasks. You will see not only positive results in your marketing campaigns but also more happy faces in your department. 

#5 Redefine your Marketing Processes 

With automated marketing, you can visualize your customer journey and sales strategy for creating processes around them. Reporting tells you what are the best ways to approach a marketing campaign and what are the worst. While this may sound riveting, you will be able to create processes around your customer journey, letting you refine how you nurture and target your leads. Refining your sales strategy beforehand gives you a leap. This way, you don’t have to wait for the campaign to end so that you can see the results. The reporting works as a tool that lets you perform predictive analytics based on the numbers and graphs. So, you can easily tweak your campaign strategies that best suit the current scenario. This way, you will be completely optimizing your workflow. 

#6 Never Stop A/B Testing 

Another reason why optimizing your workflow with automated marketing reporting is stressed that it allows you to test your campaigns to see which one performs better. It makes it easy to run ongoing A/B tests, unlike traditional landing pages. Suppose you are running A/B tests on every campaign, including at every stage of the sales and marketing process. Over time, you will be able to notice the incremental improvements throughout your marketing activities. As a result, you will be able to generate a substantial improvement in your marketing funnel’s efficiency. You don’t have to stop A/B testing for the sake of your campaign. You can do it freely. 

#7 Target Potential Customers Across Multiple Channels 

You can reach out to your targeted customer base in a personalized manner across numerous offline and online channels. Thanks to automated marketing reporting, you will be able to create a marketing sequence, using which you can choose to send the audience a phone call, tweet, text message, postcard, or an email when they reach specific stages of the customer journey. Marketing automation reporting tools have more options when it comes to creating a marketing sequence that allows for multi-channel targeting. When you create a perfect marketing sequence, your team can work hassle-free on each sequence. This increases the chances of your campaigns, reaching the target customers. Before that, marketers used the hit and trial method, where they approached the client from every possible channel. This not only hindered the workflow but also was considered a wastage of resources.    

#8 Take your Marketing Activity to an Ultra-targeted Level 

Since you are able to create dedicated marketing sequences, creating targeted marketing campaigns at a large scale is not just a dream anymore. While it is considered the biggest opportunity for marketers to grab all their options, it is achievable to a great extent. With reporting, you get to know what the customers like about this particular product and what they don’t like. It allows you to determine the reasons why the customers will hand over their money for this product. As a result, with the help of a marketing sequence, marketers never had the privilege or opportunity to reach out to 1000 different leads with 1000 different marketing approaches in a completely automated manner. Now just imagine the possibilities of the outcome if you hit the right spot.    

#9 Improve Customer Lifetime Value through Cross-sells and Up-sells 

Do you know how much revenue your business leaves on the table by not implementing or remembering a series of cross-sells and up-sells? Automated marketing reporting bridges this gap by taking the human aspect out of cross-selling and up-selling. This is achieved by creating a series of automated rules. With reporting, you get to know about the customer behavior, like what they do after purchasing the product or what are the additional accessories that they buy right after. For instance, suppose you are an e-commerce marketer selling bicycle accessories. On top of generic up-sells, like inspiring the customer with popular holiday gift products, or reminding them to order new tires, you can set up highly-personalized up-sells. 

That is, if someone buys a bicycle that has an optional gear upgrade, you can automate an email campaign telling the customer about a particular upgrade a month before their birthday. In this way, you are giving the customer lifetime value as you are suggesting they should upgrade their cycle on the occasion of their birthday. It sounds simple but can be significantly dramatic. This is all because of reporting. 

#10 Schedule Campaigns and Posts Ahead of Time 

Automated marketing reporting can help you optimize your workflow by staying organized at every point. It enables you to schedule your social media posts and marketing campaigns ahead of time. Reporting tells you when and how prospective customers access their social media accounts. It tells you what social media platforms they prefer the most and when they are active. If you know all this, you can schedule all your campaigns accordingly in a way that the customers won’t skip anything that you post. As a result, they will constantly engage with your posts. This is one great way to do branding. And the best part is that you can schedule your posts based on different segments of your audience. Your audience is scattered everywhere on social platforms. So, instead of scheduling one message to the entire database, you can schedule different variations of the same message for the different segments of your audience. 

#11 Save Time Managing your Social Media Campaigns 

As a marketer, you know the importance of social media. It can make or break your brand. So, it is critically important that you take social media campaigns seriously. However, since it requires you to post on social media platforms regularly, it can consume a whole lot of your time. However, with automated marketing reporting, you can manage all your social media campaigns using a single dashboard. It will tell you when your target audience is most likely to come online and what activities they prefer doing. This way, you can create a robust strategy for all your social media campaigns. And with the help of an automation tool, you can manage all your social media posts through a single dashboard. It not only saves a lot of your staff’s time but allows them to focus on other important aspects.  

#12 Repurpose Existing Content to Nurture Leads 

One of the most significant advantages of automated marketing reporting is that it tells you exactly what type of content your targeted customer base likes to search on the internet. You can leverage this to repurpose your existing web content and nurture leads. How? Well, it is almost like giving your blogs and articles a second life. You can set up automated rules and recommend content to your target audience that educates the leads and readers over the customer lifecycle. For example, you can send emails to those readers who read your article on a specific topic, telling them that if they want more information regarding the topic, they click on this particular link or post. While it is considered the best way to engage your customer, which tells them that you care about them, it is also a great way to generate return customers to your website. As a result, you can ensure you get the most out of your investment in content marketing.  

#13 Reduce the Time it Takes to Create Marketing Campaigns 

You get to execute your marketing campaigns more effectively and efficiently with automated marketing reporting. The report tells you everything about the customer behavior. Now, you can instantly create a campaign and close it whenever you feel like the customer sentiment is changing towards this campaign. Earlier, marketers used to run the entire campaign for months before they realized whether it was a success or not. Today, with the help of reporting, you can know whether the audience is showing interest in the campaign. If not, you can immediately tweak some changes and again launch the campaign. And if you use automation tools, it becomes even easier to create campaigns. By doing this, you are saving a lot of time and completely optimizing the workflow. 

#14 Take the Guesswork out of Lead Scoring 

Constant reporting allows you to create a set of criteria and rules that lets your team score incoming leads based on the leads’ information and actions. This avoids guesswork completely. Now, you will be certain that this specific target group is interested in this particular campaign, and the other target group likes something else. Earlier, marketers completely relied on guesswork and hit & trial to test their campaigns. With reporting, you can prioritize your leads on different scales as you prefer. Then, you can categorize them as “sales qualified leads” or “marketing qualified leads.” In case if the lead is classified as a qualified marketing lead, it means the lead remains in the nurturing campaign until or unless it becomes a sales qualified lead. This lets your team focus on converting the sales qualified leads and not waste any time on unqualified leads. They literally discord the unqualified leads or approach them with other tactics. Overall, this improves the workflow and productivity of your team. 

Conclusion 

You can see that there are many ways of optimizing your workflow with automated marketing reporting. We have tried to explain all its aspects using the benefits of automated marketing reporting. It is all about choosing the right reporting tool. Reporting helps you plan ahead your strategies and campaigns so that the margin for error is lower.