Marketing typically involves repetitive tasks such as posting content on multiple digital channels. This can be challenging, especially when combining it with customer engagement and maintaining a personalized marketing strategy.
But the silver bullet that will save you all the headaches is marketing automation. Therefore, if you want to increase your operational marketing efficiency, ease the burden on your marketing department, and streamline the workflow, you need a marketing automation consultant.
So what does a marketing automation consultant do?
Marketing automation consultants specialize in using marketing automation software, streamlining the marketing process, and ensuring efficiency in marketing operations to improve conversion rates and increase sales.
These professionals should be an essential component of your business and not an afterthought if you wish to make the most of your marketing efforts. They will customize a marketing automation system that can suit your company's needs.
In this article, I will highlight the services marketing consultants can offer your business, the skills these experts possess, and the benefits of hiring one in your organization.
Main services offered by a marketing automation consultant
As an expert, I usually tell clients they need to understand their use cases and business needs before considering marketing automation.
You don’t just dive into it after googling about it for a minute. This is where a marketing automation consultant comes in. They will assess your marketing activities, provide a clear strategy and optimize the system to meet your business objectives and needs.
The services these professionals offer are listed below.
Cross-channel marketing synergy
A marketing automation consultant ensures uniformity of purpose, content, and messaging across multiple marketing channels.
Optimizing the customer’s touchpoint throughout the sales funnel will eliminate the overwhelming feelings that come with this journey, especially if they do not get consistent messages from your brand.
You should aim to unify their experiences so they can smoothly toggle between two channels and still meet the same information.
Marketing automation consultants will help maintain consistent customer messages and experiences by automating the messages they receive in all your channels.
When this is done, seamless interaction between you and the customer is achieved, creating a more cohesive customer journey.
Automation of the lead conversion process
Marketing automation consultants put a system in place that will convert leads into paying customers by ensuring seamless user interaction that will close more deals.
This automated process will help you generate more successful lead conversions and give you time to focus on other aspects of your business.
They utilize technology such as Keap and create a useful strategy unique to your business to help you achieve that.
Provision of digitization education
They educate your marketing team by equipping them with adequate knowledge of your company's new marketing system, methodologies, and tools.
A marketing automation consultant will teach your team about the changes in your process and tools, what they are meant to achieve, and how to utilize them for success.
If you want your team to become stellar in executing digital transformation strategies in the marketing process, they need the Midas touch of an expert to make that happen.
Enables automated messaging services
Marketing automation consultants set up triggers that ensure your company’s messages are sent to users or subscribers to your service at a particular time or when a specific action is performed.
This will make for easier outreach to your customers and is cost-effective, as you do not need more hands to perform this action. All you need is to schedule the message.
This saves time and improves customer engagement and experiences.
Successful chatbot implementation strategy
They help implement a successful chatbot strategy to improve user experiences when interacting with your websites. Providing a chatbot solution to streamline customer engagement will boost customer satisfaction.
Integration of Customer Relationship Management(CRM) System Platforms
They help in the smart, cohesive linking of CRM systems and platforms across multiple applications.
Integrating your CRM system platforms ensures the seamless functionality of your marketing campaigns and processes. In addition, this helps you merge the data silos and eliminate the problems associated with several isolated data.
What skills should a marketing automation consultant have?
Marketing automation consultants should possess exceptional professional skills to meet your marketing goals. Some of them are listed below.
Mastery of the marketing automation process and workflows
Expertise in the marketing automation process and workflows is the stuff of a consultant. They should possess mastery in defining and executing automation campaigns.
A required skill is a deep understanding of the complex marketing workflow processes, including lead nurturing, lead scoring system, sales funnel design, drip campaign, trigger-based workflows, data management, and lead capturing.
Competence in data analysis
Visualizing, interpreting, and analyzing data to make informed and strategic decisions about a marketing campaign is an essential skill of a marketing automation consultant.
A data-driven marketing automation strategy demands appropriate tracking and analysis of the data to advance the marketing campaign further and improve it.
Proficient in multi-channel marketing
Marketing automation consultants are efficient in marketing across multiple channels. They are familiar with how each channel works and can effectively communicate the value proposition of your business using the unique attributes of the specific marketing channel.
Creativity
A successful automation campaign requires creativity. It combines data-driven decision-making skills, an analytical mindset, and creative strategies that will attract users to campaign materials.
Knowledge of what works for the customer on each marketing channel is essential to maintain the personalized experience needed to create an automated system.
Strategic skills
This is one of the vital skills a marketing automation consultant possesses. Planning some marketing strategies, such as innovative marketing campaigns, building customer loyalty, and the like, will ensure the success of the automation process.
Communication skills
A consultant does not work in isolation; they have to collaborate with various teams across multiple departments to ensure a smooth workflow. Therefore, effective communication is crucial in team building and improving collaboration among team members.
Therefore, mastering the necessary communication skills and techniques is needed to enable seamless operation in the organization.
Tech-savvy
An automation expert is not necessarily a tech genius, but they have the essential skills and knowledge needed to understand the technical aspects of the organization.
Detail-oriented
This field involves attention to detail and noticing minor errors to ensure precision, accurate tracking, and successful execution of marketing campaigns.
It also ensures appropriate personalization of content and messages shared with customers across channels.
Project management skills
Marketing automation consultants are proficient in project management. This enables them to discharge their duties efficiently.
The role involves handling multiple responsibilities simultaneously; hence they need to know how to prioritize tasks, track progress, and delegate duties efficiently.
Time management skills
Because this position requires proper planning and being proactive, these experts have strong time management skills that help them to structure their work, meet deadlines and make appropriate decisions.
Benefits of hiring a marketing automation consultant
Due to the proliferation of multiple marketing channels, marketing automation consultants are increasingly important in creating and delivering effective campaigns in these complex marketing ecosystems.
Below you can find 12 benefits they can provide for your business.
1. Cross-channel integration
A cross-channel integration will create a more cohesive customer journey and unified messaging in all touchpoints. This will eliminate the risk of fragmented interactions.
If your marketing operations take place in multiple channels, you need the expertise of a marketing automation consultant to automate functions across these channels.
2. Highly targeted marketing
A consultant will help you segment the market and concentrate your marketing efforts on these few segments, who are your most likely potential customers.
A highly targeted marketing will identify your target market and tailor and personalize your ads to the intended audience.
This will create an effective marketing funnel to optimize your marketing campaigns.
With this, you will do away with the spray and pray strategy in your marketing. Your campaign is now highly targeted and more focused.
3. Selection of an appropriate marketing automation platform
So many marketing automation platforms abound, but a consultant will help you choose an adequate platform that will suit your business needs and goals.
They will evaluate your marketing activities, create an automation plan, and deploy and integrate the best marketing automation software [affiliate link] suitable for your business.
4. Improved customer experiences
These specialists help in the automation process that will improve customer experiences and build customer loyalty.
A personalized marketing strategy made possible by this process can help you target a potential customer, effectively facilitate the lead nurturing process, and monitor their engagements.
5. High-quality lead generation
With segmentation automation, you can generate high-quality leads by identifying the buyer persona, monitoring their journey, and noting their place in the funnel.
6. Improvement of your marketing campaigns
These professionals will evaluate your marketing campaigns and suggest strategies to help improve the performance of your marketing efforts.
With their proficiency in automation campaigns, they will design, test, and launch a result-driven campaign strategy.
7. Provision of streamlined omnichannel experiences
With this automation, the customer experience is streamlined on all digital channels, and they get the same experience no matter the channel they use to interact with your business.
They can smoothly toggle from one digital touchpoint to the other without repeating their messages because data from the interactions have been collected and stored to ensure a seamless process.
8. Drives traffic to your website
A data-driven strategy will help drive traffic to your website with a better lead scoring system and targeted marketing. A consultant will identify the best lead traffic sources for your website.
9. Boosts your conversion rate
A combination of the strategies and processes will put a system in place that will help improve your conversion rate.
You will no longer be shooting blanks with adequate lead scoring, nurturing, and targeted marketing. Your marketing funnel will lead to high-quality leads that convert.
10. Cost reduction
Hiring a marketing automation consultant is cost-effective because it will reduce the cost spent on non targeted advertisements, improve return on ad spend, and ensure a reduction in customer acquisition costs.
Additionally, you no longer need to hire more staff to improve functionality, especially for the repetitive tasks, because they have been automated.
11. Increases your revenue
It goes without saying that all these measures put in place will boost your ROI. With more high-quality leads and an increase in conversion rate, you will close more deals and make more money.
12. Productivity increase
With the automation of your marketing process, your team will become more productive and focus on what is more important in your organization.
The system will help nurture leads and guide them through the buying journey, eliminating the issue of holding their hands throughout the process.
Conclusion
Marketing automation will help you leverage a robust lead generation process, increase conversion rate, drive traffic to your site, reduce cost and increase your ROI.
There are many marketing automation software to choose from. I have often received questions from clients about the best marketing automation software they can use for their business.
As someone that has deployed and used a wide range of these tools, I always recommend Keap. This software is an all-in-one marketing automation solution that will help you increase efficiency, synchronize the marketing campaign process, and deliver adequate results for your business.
You can start by checking out the free trial to ensure it is the right option for your business.
Alternatively, contracting a marketing automation consultant will be the best option to save time and money. I wrote this article to explain why your business needs a marketing automation consultant to gain a competitive advantage and the skills you should look out for when you want to hire a consultant.
You need to choose an expert who will adequately audit and assess your marketing activities to create a system that specifically works for your business.
If you are looking for marketing automation consultants to help you generate more leads and close deals, Book your automation assessment session with Blick Digital now!...
