When it comes to growth hacking and digital marketing, it’s vital to leverage marketing automation and implement a solid customer journey optimization strategy that helps you save time, money, and quickly acquire more customers.

What is Marketing Automation?

In plain English, marketing automation refers to the technologies that enable you to automate, and measure your marketing activities, workflows and strategies to attract more customer faster, and generate a higher return of investment (ROI).

If implemented correctly, you can nurture your visitors and leads, and walk them through an engaging journey that you designed in your customer journey optimizationstrategy. Then you can convert them into lifetime customers, who are not easily swayed to your competitor’s product.

Having said that, there is a misunderstanding about marketing automation among marketers. Unfortunately, there are marketers, who don’t follow a proven growth hacking strategy, and invest in purchasing email lists. They then try to automate their marketing campaigns using the customers that have not gone through the customer journey.

This solution may sound intriguing, and in some cases may produce short-term results, but, growth hacking has never been about short-term spikes. In fact, it is all about achieving a consistent growth rate.

Related: Content Marketing Isn’t Really About Your Content

When should you invest in marketing automation?

The best time to automate your marketing strategy is when you’ve put together your customer journey strategy, and you’re beginning to see a steady flow of new visitors from organic search results or paid marketing campaigns. Consider automating your marketing campaigns if any of the following apply.

Related: 5 Killer Examples of Branding Done Right

• You have a steady traffic flow of new visitors.
• You manage to convert those visitors into leads.
• You are producing engaging content to offer to your leads.
• You want to personalize your email marketing strategy.
• Your sales process is manual, and despite having lots of leads, your sales representatives can’t generate enough revenue.
• You’re spending too much time on social media management.
• You want to leverage influencer marketing and content amplification strategies.
• You want to increase revenue by scaling your lead nurturing strategy and developing better relationships with customers at any stage of your sales funnel.
• You decided to automate your sales funnel to increase your conversion rate.
• You plan to incentivize your customers, and implement a solid gamification strategy.

If your business meets any of the aforementioned criteria then it’s time to plan your marketing automation strategy.

Related: 6 Link-Building Tips for Bootstrapped Entrepreneurs

To help you learn more about the benefits of marketing automation, Brian Downard, and I have put together a stunning infographic, elaborating on the nine benefits of marketing automation that can help you save a lot of time and money.