Coming up with ideas about how you’re going to advertise or promote your brand can be fun, but usually the literal implementation of those concepts winds up being much easier said than done. Once you actually start taking action and completing routine marketing tasks, you’ll find that there can be a lot of work and multi-tasking involved. In fact, professional marketing firms usually assign one or two specialists to serve as campaign managers that are tasked with the job of overseeing all aspects of the company’s marketing efforts. With that said, here are 3 ways any entrepreneur can use marketing automation to benefit their business:

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Comparing the Top Marketing Automation Platforms and Tools

A number of platforms have arisen to accommodate the need to automate a wide range of marketing activities. To learn about the differences between the leading options, it’s best to check out a Marketo, Eloqua, &Hubspot comparison before deciding which one you want to start with. Of course, you could also try all three at the same time to develop your own personal opinion about which is best before settling on one for the long-term. It’s also good to remember that there are new automation tools entering the market on a regular basis, so staying up-to-date on the latest developments in this sector is highly recommended.

The Primary Benefits of Marketing Automation

Spending too much of your personal time handling mundane and tedious tasks is never good for overall productivity. Instead, you’ll want to outsource or automate any simple yet time-consuming activities that are consuming a sizeable chunk of your workday unnecessarily. Once you’ve freed up your schedule proper automation, you can then begin to focus on more critical aspects of business development such as lead generation, conceptualizing, production creation, and networking. This follows the common entrepreneurial principle of “focusing on $1000/hour tasks instead of $10/hour tasks.”

Using Automation Platforms to Track Data and Conduct Analysis

Aside from the obvious benefit of saving you time, automating tasks also makes it easier to monitor and draw insight from key marketing stats and metrics. Instead of having to manually record and organize all of this data independently, a marketing automation solution can take care of this as part of an all-inclusive package. In this way, you can more readily identify your main strengths and shortcomings to determine which area of the business needs to be improved up on next. Although other business intelligence (BI) tools should be used in conjunction with automation platforms to provide a well-rounded analytical arsenal, starting with automation is a good preliminary step to take when fine-tuning operational efficiency.

Taking the First Step Towards a More Automated Approach

In closing, marketing automation doesn’t have to be overly complex or difficult. In fact, it’s supposed to be just the opposite, and the only real effort required on your part is setting up the campaign initially. After that, you can sit back and watch the events unfold as you reap the rewards of marketing efforts that would’ve otherwise been a burden on your personal workload.