Marketing automation may be daunting, but here’s why it’s worth the investment

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Startups often come from the littlest of things: an idea, an envisioned product, or an observed niche.

More often than not, all it takes to get started is yourself (perhaps a partner), your computer, and the internet. Of course, getting the ball rolling from there is a lot more complicated. And if you’re like most startups, you probably only have a few resources at your disposal.

Marketing automation is a simple and practical solution to this problem. The term automation can sound intimidating and expensive for startup owners, but there’s much more to it than what you may expect. True, the cost of marketing automation solutions often limits their use to medium and large organizations, but there are a number of lightweight tools designed for startups. Depending on the automation tools you use, your startup can have the same benefits enjoyed by larger enterprises.

Below are three reasons why startup owners should work towards cracking marketing automation for their business.

Low demand on human resources

Most startups would be lucky to have more than 10 members. Chances are, you don’t even have a dedicated sales team aggressively looking for leads but have just one person in charge of sales and marketing.

A marketing automation solution is capable of doing what entire teams can.

A marketing automation solution is capable of doing what entire teams can. On top of that, it’s never late, never sick, and always completes its tasks without excuses. It lets you reach out to leads with as little human intervention as possible.

Of course, you’re going to need someone to set up the system according to your needs and goals. It’s good then that many marketing automation software providers are more than happy to help you set up your solution at a small additional cost — think personalized email campaigns or PPC campaigns.

Most marketing automation tools like Getresponse have an easy drag-and-drop feature that can make things really simple for you to start. There are numerous other free/paid tools out there in the market and, based on your requirements, you can choose any of them.

More tasks at a lower cost

Marketing automation takes out much of the tedious work required when running marketing campaigns. This allows your startup to grow faster without having to spend time and resources on things like scheduling, setting reminders, tracking metrics, comparing data, and other such tasks.

As more and more businesses automate their social media posts, email newsletters, and paid ads, developers have no choice but to improve their marketing automation solutions. This makes business smarter, more feature-packed, and better able to stand out from the competition. Gartner predicts that “By 2020, customers will manage 85 percent of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human.”

Simply put, marketing automation helps your marketing efforts become leaner and helps you stay ahead of the curve.

More cost-efficient than hiring employees

Depending on the marketing automation tool you use, it’s easy to do more at a cost lower than hiring a dedicated marketing team.

Challenges with marketing automation

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