What is Marketing Automation?

 Learn what marketing automation is, what good marketing automation looks like, and how to make it work for your business.

How exactly does marketing automation operate?

Software is used in marketing automation to automate repetitive marketing tasks. To increase efficiency and give customers a more individualized experience, marketing departments can automate routine processes like email marketing, social network posting, and even ad campaigns.

 

These duties can be completed more quickly and easily thanks to the technology underpinning marketing automation.

 

What advantages does marketing automation offer your company?

 

When we consider the typical issues that organizations encounter, we are aware that generating leads and maintaining client engagement are still top priorities. Businesses struggle to exploit the massive amounts of data being generated in addition to these objectives.

By putting data to work and optimizing our procedures, marketing automation software can assist in overcoming these difficulties.

 

Most companies view marketing automation as a tool for the middle of the funnel, perfect for nurturing prospects with pre-written email sequences. Also, even if email marketing is a great application of marketing automation, this strategy may cause prospects and customers to have a fragmented experience as they travel from marketing to sales to customer care.

 

A fictitious sales funnel that uses random touchpoints and irrelevant content forces prospects through it. Businesses consistently follow the same playbook rather than adapting to the specific needs of each customer.

The customer lifecycle should, however, be covered by automated marketing tactics. A smart integration of marketing automation offers a favorable environment for strong, long-term relationships with your customers. When used effectively, marketing automation offers your company three key advantages:

 

Personalized processes

 

Each of your prospects' actions adds another piece of data to your marketing strategy by letting you know exactly what your target market is doing at any given time. Despite how useful this data is, it is impossible to carefully track these activities. Yet, companies can leverage these inputs across a variety of channels to better understand their consumers' wants and offer the appropriate information at the appropriate time thanks to marketing automation software.

These workflows aid in directing interested parties to valuable material, producing warm leads that may later be thoughtfully nurtured into clients. Nevertheless, marketing automation doesn't end there. Businesses may continue to engage customers with tailored processes that result in devoted, repeat customers who recommend friends and family by placing the client at the heart of the flywheel.

 

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With streamlined procedures that keep your clients at the heart of everything, bring your entire business together. Create procedures that may be used by numerous functional teams to lessen the amount of work the client must do during the entire trip. Break down barriers and collaborate to offer a seamless customer experience beginning with the first contact and continuing long after the consumer has made a purchase.

Because everything is automatically saved in your central data storage with effective marketing automation, there is no need for convoluted hand-off procedures, and internal workflows can help you prioritize jobs as they come up.

 

How to get the most of marketing automation

 

Marketing automation is most effective when it combines software, strategy, and customer-centricity. With the help of highly customized, practical content, you can nurture prospects and turn them into happy customers and devoted advocates.

Businesses should integrate automation into all aspects of their operations to eliminate silos and bring teams together through time-saving techniques in order to get the most out of marketing automation. Marketing automation may generate a flywheel that keeps your company expanding when combined with human interaction.

 

Instead of starting with your company's requirements, concentrate first on the consumer journey. Develop processes that make the customer's transition from one touchpoint to the next by identifying prospective touchpoints that could benefit from marketing automation.

Use a CRM that communicates with your marketing automation program to manage contacts so that each action the customer does is recorded as a new data point.

 

Connect clients to the next stage of their journey using these data points, whether it be through educational material, a salesperson, or a customer success check-in. Using this white-glove method with thousands of clients at once is one advantage of marketing automation.

A effective marketing automation approach prioritizes tasks and streamlines handoffs to bring your teams together. When a lead is warm and ready to be contacted by sales, automation assigns and alerts the sales agent, and contact records can then be held by the marketing team. Customer success receives a notification when the customer makes a purchase and has access to all previous communications and actions the consumer took before to making the purchase. The procedure not only works smoothly and effectively, but it also fosters a long-lasting bond between the client and the company.

 

Can marketing automation actually be successful?

While marketing automation is effective, you must comprehend all of its intricacies and components in order to make it work.

You can use the resources on this page to learn more about those intricacies and how to use marketing automation for your business.

 

What impact does marketing automation have on your clients?

The benefits of marketing automation go beyond what they can achieve for your company. By addressing typical pain points that have emerged in the digital-first, omnichannel world, it also benefits your customers.

The amount of information available to your clients makes it challenging for them to obtain the solutions they require. When consumers do manage to get in touch with your business, they usually endure a fragmented experience as they switch between teams, channels, and platforms. With team collaboration, data collection in an accessible manner, and work prioritization, marketing automation may lessen this friction.

 

Provide more pertinent content

 

With marketing automation, you can be particular about what each customer sees. Use your buyer personas and behavioral targeting to send only the information each prospect or client needs in your advertising and email marketing campaigns.

Consumers are pressed for time, therefore automation helps by highlighting the most important material at the appropriate time utilizing the data you're already collecting.

 

Provide quicker and better responses.

 

Marketing automation helps organizations prioritize work and handle leads, so incoming questions get responded swiftly. Also, front-line staff members are enabled to offer more pertinent assistance without having to do preliminary research thanks to behavioral data saved in your CRM. Recognize the past behavior of your consumers and program replies based on past purchases, in-product actions, or lifetime value.

provide multichannel, seamless interactions

 

Everyone dislikes repetition. And this is why clients love marketing automation so much. In order to provide your consumers with a tailored experience, such as pre-filled forms, targeted emails that fit their needs, and customer support that seems as familiar as the store down the street, data is collected, saved, and used in your marketing software. No matter how a customer contacts you, automation ensures a consistent experience.

 

Marketing automation: What is it?

Software that automates typical marketing chores eliminates the need for human intervention. Email marketing, behavioral targeting, lead prioritizing, and tailored advertising are examples of typical marketing automation operations. Teams can collaborate more effectively, deliver more individualized, pertinent material to prospects and customers, and save time by automating these tasks.

 

What causes marketing automation to fall short?

 

Because middle-of-the-funnel marketing automation is frequently not supported by a top-of-the-funnel basis. Until they have a consistent stream of leads, marketers won't have the elements they need for efficient marketing automation. Too many marketers who lack inbound lead generation tactics spend their time attempting to maximize the small portion of the market that currently resides in their database. As they are doing that, their rivals are devising strategies to capture more of the 99.99% of the market that is still available.

 

Do you already have in your database all the leads you'll need to reach your income targets? Do you have access to your fair share of the market?

How effective will your marketing automation be even if your database is now stocked with high-quality leads after all of those leads have been turned into customers or when your database starts to deteriorate by about 22.5% annually?

 

Many marketers end up purchasing lists of contacts to nurture with marketing automation because they realize that a sizable database of leads is necessary for marketing automation to have any impact on their bottom line. The ROI from this spamming strategy is quite low.  

Sending unwanted emails to people who have never requested any information from you results in low interaction and damages your IP address reputation, lowering your email deliverability rates in addition to the cost of purchasing these lists.

Don't spend money on marketing automation before your nurturing initiatives have a chance to succeed.

What characterizes "excellent" or "poor" marketing automation?

Emails can be triggered in traditional marketing automation depending on time delays or events like email opens and clicks. Yet, is a single email click sufficient information to implement a customised lead nurturing strategy?

Poor marketing automation is frequently the outcome of marketing automation solutions that provide the marketer with little information. To provide prospects with a positive experience, you need context about who leads are and what they are interested in.

 

The prospect is the focus of marketing automation that is supported by an inbound strategy. To offer the information a customer needs to make a purchase, exactly when they need it, in the location they're looking for it, inbound marketing automation uses all the information we know about a person to influence the automation plan.

The needs of your leads are constantly changing, and good marketing automation takes into account their activities and interactions with you through all of your marketing channels. not merely email. Marketers can get the context they need to completely comprehend a lead's difficulties by using behavioral inputs from several channels, such as social media, seeing a pricing page, or consuming a certain piece of information.

 

Beyond email, those other channels are also used by the most efficient marketing automation. The success of your campaign will therefore rely less on email and more fully on the different channels that can affect a customer's choice.

When is the ideal moment to make a marketing automation investment?

 

It's time to start thinking about the future of your business. When determining whether marketing automation is the best course of action for your company, you should consider the following questions:

 

- Do you consistently produce new, qualified leads?

 

Has there been agreement between Marketing and Sales over which conversations to have with Marketing and which with Sales?

Have you created a content strategy that is aligned with your buyer's journey?

 

- Do you monitor the digital body language of your leads across all touchpoints and marketing channels, not just email?

 

- Do you have a proven lead nurturing technique that you want to scale?

 

These are all encouraging indications that marketing automation could benefit your company. Understanding that marketing automation cannot carry out your marketing for you but can assist in scaling your productive efforts is crucial in this situation.

 

How can I pick the ideal marketing automation program for my company?

Don't concentrate on the specific features when choosing a marketing automation solution; rather, concentrate on the long-term collaboration and the business outcomes.

 

Here are some tools to aid you in making your strategic choice.

 

- Confused and Clouded? How to Choose a Supplier of Marketing Automation (MyCustomer, November 2013)

 

Software for Marketing Automation Grid (G2Crowd)

- HubSpot vs. Pardot (HubSpot vs. Marketo) (HubSpot)

 

increasing your marketing ROI

By connecting automation to CRM, the process of calculating ROI is made more precise.

greater accuracy in predicting future investments

Companies can precisely determine the worth of each sales opportunity and the ROI of all marketing activities with closed-loop reporting, which is very useful when making future investment plans.

provide outstanding customer service

Discover how to develop ongoing customer engagements that offer excellent customer experiences using the marketing cloud.

Why use the Salesforce platform

B2B marketing automation

 

Due to lengthier sales cycles, complicated decision-making dynamics, and multi-step purchasing procedures, B2B markets are a perfect fit for marketing automation. It can score leads, automate targeting and tracking campaigns and interactions, and tailor the customer experience to encourage recurring sales.

 

B2B markets are frequently very focused and relationship-oriented, and spreading product knowledge and awareness are essential. It's a setting where decisions are frequently made by a variety of influencers and decision-makers over the course of weeks, months, or even years.

sending prospective clients on a trip

 

This means that acquiring business clients typically involves a longer lead generation process than B2C marketing, when a prospect conducted extensive research prior to being prepared to speak with a sales representative and even make a purchase. Marketing automation can produce many data points that will be examined and utilized by sending targeted content at key stages in the sourcing process and evaluating the reaction.

 

Companies that provide financial services must contend with issues like the rise of new rivals and catering to the needs of millennials. Marketing automation can spur growth without jeopardizing the confidential relationships on which these businesses are founded. In order to provide targeted messages at the best moments, it offers both scalability and segmentation capabilities.

 

B2C marketing automation

 

Making the customer aware of the company's brand and product line and providing them with a strong incentive to purchase are the main goals of B2C marketing. In order to be quick and involve the sales team as minimal as possible, B2C marketing automation supports both the automation of the parental process and the sales process.

 

Marketing in a consumer-facing environment is all about persuading potential buyers in a much shorter amount of time, but B2B marketing automation is all about lengthy sales cycles.

Make ways to increase sales and brand awareness.

 

The messaging plan must be determined by monitoring the behavior of potential customers in B2C marketing automation, however there is a significant variation in the length of the campaigns. A consumer campaign needs to capture customer interest very quickly, and the path to checkout needs to be quick, easy, obvious, and alluring.

 

This is not to say that long-term strategic approaches to the clientele are out of the question. In B2C, brand loyalty and trust-building are just as important as market education. Yet, because of their more in-depth requirements for product knowledge, they take a different form than the multi-touch B2B trip.

What distinguishes CRM from marketing automation?

 

In many businesses, the two systems are combined to produce a consistent and thorough person profile, from contact to steer to customer, because the responsibilities and functions of selling automation and CRM overlap and compliment one another.

 

However, marketing automation is typically more concerned with automating the operations of producing leads, particularly leads with the capacity to be generated on a sizable scale. Capturing lead interest and managing lead creation at scale through campaigns across a good variety of online and offline media are the first steps in marketing automation.