You’ve probably heard the term marketing automation floating around lately and for good reason. As brands adapt to the ever-changing franchise landscape, automation has become crucial to their marketing strategies. Marketing automation uses software platforms to automate recurring tasks such as local store orders, data consolidation, and marketing material creation.
This technology has revolutionized how brands engage with their operators and, in turn, their customers, providing them with personalized experiences while increasing efficiency and reducing costs. This article will explore the benefits of marketing automation, its key features, and the best practices for implementing it into your existing marketing strategy.
Marketing automation involves using software or partners to simplify and streamline repetitive marketing tasks. Instead of manually designing local marketing materials, sending emails, or creating reports, your brand can automate these processes to save time and effort.
Automating your marketing isn’t just about efficiency. It lets your franchisees personalize their marketing strategies and tailor them to their local market, resulting in a better customer experience. After all, who doesn’t want to keep their operators and customers engaged and happy?
With marketing automation, you and your operators can gather data on your customers’ interests and use this information to create workflows that help you build lasting relationships with them. By simplifying your processes, you can also reduce the effort required from your operators, leading to a more enjoyable experience from start to finish.
Marketing automation is a valuable tool to consider if you want to keep operators and customers engaged and optimize your brand’s local marketing efforts. With the right approach, you can use data from your local market to create personalized experiences that encourage repeat business.
When considering what level of marketing automation is right, brands must adopt an operator-centric approach that leverages software and strategy to deliver highly relevant content to customers. The goal is to provide your operators with the best information to adjust their marketing tactics accordingly.
One way to achieve this is by breaking down organizational silos and unifying teams with automated processes that save time. By integrating marketing automation into your business, you can provide a seamless customer experience that keeps everyone engaged and satisfied.
To get started, focus on your local operator’s journey, and identify touchpoints that would benefit from automation. Use a portal that integrates with marketing automation software to track signage requests and gather valuable store data. Using this data to create a white-glove approach that helps local store operators connect to customers.
Marketing automation isn’t just about improving your operator’s experience; it also benefits your customers. It helps solve common pain points by offering more relevant content, faster answers, and seamless omnichannel experiences. By leveraging marketing automation, you can enhance the customer experience and build a long-term relationship that will keep your customers returning for more.
UMI’s Brand Hub can integrate marketing automation software with other marketing solutions to unite the corporate team and the operators across the US and simplify the customer journey. However, the marketing and sales teams must collaborate on defining a shared goal and determining what success will look like.
Marketing automation is crucial in B2B because it manages complicated HQ, operator, and customer journeys in one central location. In an ever-evolving marketing landscape, it provides a stable foundation for all other brand channels to plug into.
While highly transactional brands in the B2C space may not require marketing automation, most brands can, at the very least, use it to track their customer engagements and measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.
The timeline for seeing a return on investment in marketing automation software varies based on several factors, including the company’s size, the specific level of marketing automation, and the company’s goals.
A more advanced marketing automation tool may take longer to implement and see results than a more straightforward option. On average, a small company can take around six months to implement and see results fully. In contrast, a larger company with a sophisticated system may take over a year to utilize all available capabilities.
Before implementing marketing automation, it’s essential to plan and carefully consider how you want to use the software, such as which marketing tasks you want it to automate and how it will integrate with your existing systems. It’s also beneficial to take advantage of the expertise of the marketing automation provider and their maturity frameworks to help guide your implementation and use of the product.
One of the most significant benefits of marketing automation is the alignment between corporate and franchisees, but only if they communicate effectively. It’s crucial for both groups to come together and determine the best communication process from start to finish and to understand each other’s roles in the process.
Failure to implement this type of software can lead to complications for growth down the line. Before marketing automation, there was no software to connect HQ and local franchisees, so there were fewer opportunities for data-powered growth. But with constantly updated and improved software, there is no limit to the marketing impacts brands can achieve today.
You can view the value of marketing automation from two perspectives — corporate’s value and the value to the operator. Implementing marketing automation brings about a significant transformation in the marketing strategies the operators can utilize. This transformation enables operators to create on-demand materials that drive revenue for the entire brand. It also creates time efficiencies by eliminating extra layers of redundant communication. When marketing operations software is loaded with corporate-approved pricing and images, local operators can get more promotional materials created faster.
From a business perspective, marketing automation is a crucial driver of revenue growth. By automating communication and reoccurring tasks, marketing automation helps brands achieve higher levels of efficiency than they could without it, with local operators and HQ’s ability to track sales, marketing effectiveness, store inventory counts, etc. Marketing automation provides a high return on investment, enabling brands to optimize their marketing budget and make informed decisions about their marketing strategies.
By leveraging marketing automation, you can enhance the operator and customer experience and simplify the role of HQ, resulting in a more connected business with greater operator satisfaction and increased customer loyalty. Marketing automation software can be integrated with other marketing solutions, serving as the central hub where all marketing and metrics are accessible.
While not necessary for all businesses, most brands could benefit from using marketing automation to track their customer engagements and measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. However, it’s essential to carefully plan and consider how to use the software and which tasks you want it to automate before implementing it.
UMI is a cutting-edge marketing automation platform that provides services to multi-unit franchise brands. With UMI, franchises can automate their local marketing efforts across all locations, making managing and optimizing their campaigns easier than ever. UMI’s powerful marketing automation tools allow franchise owners to create and distribute targeted marketing materials across all their sites, ensuring each franchisee has the resources to drive traffic and increase sales. UMI’s data analytics capabilities also provide valuable insights into customer behavior, allowing brands to make data-driven decisions that improve their marketing strategies. With the help of UMI franchises with locations across the US can streamline their marketing efforts and achieve more success across all their locations. Want to learn more? Schedule your Free Brand Demo today!