When 2020’s coronavirus pandemic hit, it gave a massive push forward to the growing popularity of remote work. Many companies that had never had any intentions of achieving a work-from-home workforce suddenly found that it was thrust upon them and they had to adapt in a hurry.

The silver lining among all this cloud is that we’re living in a digital age. There’s no need for Marketing teams to slow down or cancel their work, just because marketers have had to replace the office chair with a seat at the kitchen table.

However, many businesses found (and are still finding) the transition very challenging, and so did many employees. Shifting to remote work disrupted the normal rhythm of tasks that you’re used to in the office. Collaboration became more difficult, brainstorming became harder, and even something as simple as deciding when to hold a meeting can be a major undertaking when you’re not all in the same physical space.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

You and your marketing team can still offset and overcome these difficulties, once you find the right tools. What’s more, once you start using them you might well be so wowed and delighted with the benefits they bring that you’ll never give them up, even when you can return to the office. Here are 7 benefits that Marketing Automation tools can bring to your remote workforce.

1.  Make better use of your time

Marketing teams can save time with advanced marketing automation tools that offer automated workflows. Use automated drip campaigns to nurture leads via email or text messaging, to free up marketers for other tasks.

Send personalized messages automatically in response to preset purchase or behavior triggers, and use automated lead scoring to track prospects’ progress through your funnel until it’s time to make human contact, so you can focus your efforts on qualified leads.

2.  Produce more relevant content

The more you can tailor your marketing content for the precise pain points and interests of each customer, the more impact it will have and the more ROI you’ll enjoy on your marketing efforts. Advanced CRMs help by automatically segmenting leads into different categories, so you can send interesting content and relevant offers that are personalized for each contact.

Marketing automation that dynamically adapts content when it detects the recipients location allows you to target specific geos, cities, and regions, no matter where you are physically located.

3.  Keep track of marketing assets

When you’re in the office, it’s not a serious distraction to ask someone at the next desk to send you  a report or a white paper, but it can be a much bigger disruption when you’re all at home, and probably “at work” at different times of day. The average knowledge worker is interrupted 13.9 times a day by questions or the need to find information, which significantly affects their concentration and productivity.

Marketing automation platforms give you a single location to store all your marketing assets, and enables employees to quickly and easily produce reports on any topic, reducing frustrating interruptions and increasing employee efficiency.

4.  Empower teams with data

Data is fundamental to effective marketing campaigns. With new Marketing Automation Tools you can gather, process, and analyze data from multiple sources, like Google Analytics, Facebook Ad Manager, email campaigns, social media monitoring tools, and more, in a single platform. Then create reports at will and use the insights to track customer journey on a granular level, understand customer behavior, and identify your most popular ads and content.

5.  Streamline workflows

When you’re waiting for everyone to sign off on a new idea, the frustration is real. Brainstorming at a distance can be challenging, too, which is why you need project management tools like a digital whiteboard, so everyone can share their creativity no matter where they are located. Shared marketing boards and to-do lists mean that every member can see which tasks are waiting for them and track overall progress whenever necessary.

6.  Work more closely with sales

It’s ironic, but having to work from home can bring marketing and sales closer together than when you were both in the same office space. Marketing automation can serve both marketing and sales teams on the same platform, helping you to share materials, collaborate on lead scoring, and gain a better understanding of the overall process from both perspectives.

7.  Prove business impact.

Only 34.9% of marketers feel able to prove the quantitative impact of their marketing efforts, although another 43.8% say they have a good sense of their qualitative impact. But when you track the process of planning marketing campaigns, producing content, preparing ads, and nurturing leads in a single platform, you’re better able to demonstrate RoI on your efforts, helping you keep track of the time and effort you put in and the results that you receive.

WFH can lead you to marketing automation tools that bring more benefits

Remote work was the final straw that pushed many businesses to adopt marketing automation, but the software brings benefits that you’ll keep on enjoying even after you can return to the office. By helping you to streamline workflows and empower teams with data, enable better access to marketing assets, produce more relevant content, and work more closely with sales, your marketing teams will be able to save time, work more efficiently, and prove the business impact of their actions to increase revenue and profitability.

Once you discover marketing automation tools, you’ll find how they can make your business more resilient and future-proof regardless of what may come your way.