What Is Marketing Automation and Why Marketers Should Invest in It

To define it, Marketing Automation is the use of a software platform to simplify and automate tasks to aid the consumers in their buying journey; and according to EmailMonday, at least 51% of companies are utilizing Marketing Automation on average. And 58% of B2B companies are planning to use this technology.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a growing technology that enables businesses to move further by automating marketing processes and customer engagement tracking. This allows them to deliver their campaigns and various engagements online to the right target market.

This technology helps businesses and companies establish effective processes for every stage of their marketing goals. Since data is gathered, it optimizes how they can keep things at maximum potential, making every customer engagement meaningful.

You can utilize automation tools to customize your customer’s experience based on their preferences and purchasing activities. This approach is more personalized and helps them build trust and loyalty toward your brand—not to mention increase others’ brand awareness if they tell others about your business.

What Marketing Automation is Not?

Yes, it’s easier to understand if we define it by its purpose or function, but it also helps if we understand what it’s not and some misconceptions about it:

1.     Marketing Automation is not just a single tool of function.

It does not just exist for multiple email send-outs or as a tool to drive your lead campaigns. It comprises different tools that enable businesses to maximize their branding potential. This comes with managing social media, a built-in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology, a landing page builder, and more. Graphic design tools can also be part of the marketing automation process.

2.     Marketing Automation is not a Turn On and Off feature tool.

One of the common misconceptions about these kinds of automation technology is that once you have it all ready, you don’t have to look into it as often since it’ll work on its own. Of course, it is a great supplement to your website marketing strategies, but you also need to invest your time and effort in it to ensure that your campaigns are aligned with your objectives.

It is meant to enhance and to give support, not to replace the major gameplayer—You.

3.     Marketing Automation is not all about Email Spamming.

 Marketing Automation is not just about sending out as many emails as possible to your target market. Spam is mostly irrelevant email content, but the former is the opposite. You get to make things personal with marketing automation.

Make your email content more personal and targeted so that you know you’re getting the right message across and that you’re building enough opportunity for your market to increase their brand awareness of your business.

What Can You Automate?

 So, with all these in mind, what are those tasks that you can automate?

1.  Analytics

The truth of the digital world is everything you put out there can be tracked and measured. It’s no different with your marketing activities. You can maximize the use of this data, even in real-time, so you can grasp more of what your business is about- what impact it has created, who it has engaged, and from these, you can determine your steps to make necessary improvements.

With automation, you don’t have to wait until the end of your marketing campaigns to know the results. You can have visibility into your projects and make adjustments as you go.

2.  Social Media Posts/ Campaigns

With the right marketing automation platform, you can ensure that your social media posting is on the dot, relevant, and engaging. You can do this out of one platform and publish it on different channels. When things get busy, you need to find what works for you and what will help you manage your campaigns better. All the more if you’re doing it on social media. Automation allows you to compose and approve posts in advance and numbers. You can also automate how you make engaging graphics to go along with your campaign. You can use an online photo editor to create visuals instantly. This will help you easily make the graphics needed for your campaign.

3. Customer Engagements and Communications

Yes, it is possible. You can now automate standard customer communications to help assist customers and provide them with efficient customer service. Now, you don’t have to worry about replying to that email.

4. Nurture Campaigns

These are your personalized email campaigns that enable you to hit the mark and deliver the message you want to your target audience. When you use targeted data, you have a huge chance of increasing your brand awareness. Nurture campaigns are necessary for inbound marketing because these lead to further conversations and engagements with your market. That’s why “nurture” is the nature of the process, as it helps you build relationships while educating your audience about what your business is about—and all these you can automate, too.

Why Should Marketers Invest in Marketing Automation

1.  Save time, save resources.

 It’s true. Marketing Automation assists you in doing all those tasks that you do repetitively when you do marketing campaigns. It enables you to go beyond since you can do things in advance.  To make things more specific, here are some ways that it helps you save time and resources:

a. Scheduling

If you’ve done this before, you’d know that for every marketing automation platform, there’s always a scheduling feature. And because of this, you can reclaim your time. Auto-scheduling social media posts, email send-outs, blog postings, video postings, even appointments, and reservations help you save time and, yes, even money.

b. Growth in Revenue

Because of the productivity boost, client engagement, satisfaction, and work efficiency, marketing automation has proven to have allowed businesses to experience revenue growth. According to statistics, 78% of marketers have claimed that automation has increased revenue for businesses.  Automating your marketing communications is one of the most common ways to make your brand known—and don’t forget your analytics. Utilize it as much as you can.

c. Lead Campaigns

Lead campaigns, nurture programs, and nurture campaigns have, in general, helped increase lead generation and, most especially, the sales that come in. All the more, when marketing automation came into play, it helped increase and double the number of leads being generated through these campaigns. Not only that, but you can make things personal with your content, using a photo editor to create accompanying visuals, targeting the right audience, all while doing this at a pace and timing that is convenient to your sales and marketing team.

2. Complete complicated tasks easily

 With all these time-saving opportunities, marketing can become a more dynamic playing field. Customer engagement need not be boring, even if your tasks are automated. Marketing automation comes into play here by helping you accomplish tricky tasks easier.

a. Automate and incorporate content that is based on what sites a customer has visited

With this data, you can be more specific about the content you create, making customer engagement more personal. This allows you to reach a wider and better number of leads and adds a whole new level of dynamics to your campaigns.

b. Submission of forms and follow-ups

Following up with customers with their next steps in subscribing to your brand or business sometimes gets tedious. But with automation, you can easily set this up and create personalized responses and email send-outs to them. Even creating forms becomes an easy task with automation, plus you can schedule it in advance.

c. CRM Integration

This platform helps your marketing and sales team have a healthier cross-collaboration to streamline your lead generation, sales efforts, and more. With CRM integration, you can connect each application you utilize so data can be more fluid. Now, your team can move with efficiency and time-saving strategies even while doing email marketing, social media posting, scheduling, accounting, helpdesk, proposals, and business intelligence. Challenges of CRM are big issues in this process, and you need to know each challenge to avoid any adverse impact on your efforts.

3. Makes you focus on other important tasks

Since some of the tedious tasks that you could do before have now become automated, you can have more ease in focusing on the other important tasks that could shape your branding and marketing.

This includes improving your digital marketing strategies, which aim to strengthen your nurture campaigns. Aside from this, you can focus on planning how you can improve the customer service experience; along with this, you can also now start working on your new ideas and begin implementing ones that are on the pipe.

4. Measures results with precise metrics

Since you’re using a technology that utilizes data, you can see and measure the results. What you’d want to double-check is that your automation platform is working right and being used the right way to gain a meaningful return on investment. Also, there has to be a heavy flow of activity to have valid results to measure.

Some things you can measure and carve out pathways of improvement on are:

a. Segment Activities

As you have begun mapping out consumer data and purchase behavior, you have rolled out the lead segmentation process. With this, you can already check activity levels for each segment. It would help if you had visibility and an acceptable level of activity for each of your segments. Depending on what tool you’re using, it will be easier to track your segments and other metrics as well.

b. Website Traffic

You can double-check to see if you have increased site traffic in comparison to the time where you have not yet utilized marketing automation. In general, you should notice an improvement in traffic once you have rolled out your automated marketing campaigns.

c. Conversions

You can check your conversion rates at different stages in your marketing funnel. Once your automation is correctly utilized, you should see a spike in your conversion rates. You can determine the contrast in rates based on timings such as pre-automation, during automation, and post-automation conversion rates.

These are your signposts to determine your performance or if there are reconversions even (like for those customers who purchased or subscribed to your brand/product again). It tells you how well you’re doing and how well you optimize the data you already have in your hands.

5. Saves money in the long run.

 It’s probably true when they say that time equates with money. The latter ties up with the former. Marketing Automation makes the money you’ve invested in it work for you. You have technically invested your budget to serve your marketing goals better and deliver optimal results. You can save money in the long run as you put your resources where they are needed the most. When you start automating tedious tasks, you save your time, work more efficiently, have lesser labor costs, and can be guaranteed a positive return on investment.

Takeaway

Marketing automation can be a real booster for your business and brand. It helps you optimize your sales cycle, increase conversion rates, and strengthen your lead campaigns. But beyond that, it helps you focus on other things that you may have lost sight of prior—like better strategizing and creating ways to reach your clients on a more personal level.

Leveraging marketing automation can yield incredible long-term results. You’ll have a history of targeted improvements and successful marketing campaigns.

The one thing to take note of is that even if technology has once again saved the day (and our time and money, too) by assisting us to work better, it does not mean that we can just lay low and let it do the major hustling. Automated platforms are not replacements for the human and personal touch that we get to incorporate into our branding and marketing. It’s the personal factor that gets to the core of how a consumer trusts your brand. And again, marketing automation is meant to enhance and to give support, not to replace the major gameplayer—You.

Author’s Bio:

Shelly Solis is a content specialist and a passionate blogger. She is the co-founder of SaaSLaunchr: SaaS Marketing Agency. She is currently working as a blog outreach specialist and SEO for SaaS startups and businesses.