Marketing automation has proven to be a game changer for many marketing teams. It can help manage time consuming and repetitive tasks so marketers can focus on more strategic tasks.
It can also help save costs, increase efficiency and lead to an enhanced customer experience.
The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) is having an impact on automation as it helps speed up processes and drive personalization on platforms such as social media, chatbots and personal assistants like Amazon’s Alexa.
According to a report by Ascend2, the main goals for marketers using automation is to optimize their overall strategy (43%), improve data quality (37%) and identify ideal customers and/or prospects (34%).
With so many benefits, it’s crucial for marketers to understand the scope of marketing automation so they can leverage it to generate leads, nurture prospects and drive conversions.
In this guide, we’ll explain everything a marketing team needs to know about marketing automation, provide some tips on how to use it effectively and include some key automation marketing tools you can use.
What is marketing automation?
So what exactly is marketing automation? Marketing automation is a term used to generally describe the use of a platform whose main purpose is to automate activities across your inbound marketing channels.
Generally, these can include repetitive, albeit essential, tasks such as sending emails, social media, and managing contact information.
When used correctly, marketing automation allows you to efficiently and effectively generate leads and nurture prospects at every stage of the customer journey, allowing you to drive more revenue and maximize ROI – all without having to sacrifice the quality of your work.
Through the implementation of streamlined workflows, marketing automation can help you to achieve more, faster.
Marketing automation is not a replacement for you or your skillset. It will simply enhance your existing capabilities.
“Automation is not about taking marketers’ jobs away from them. It’s just about re-angling what marketers do”. – Cathal Melinn on a DMI podcast.
What is an example of marketing automation in action?
Marketing automation has many uses across a range of digital marketing channels. The three most common uses of automation according to Ascend2’s report are email marketing (63%), social media management (50%) and paid ads (40%).
So what’s an example of how it can be used in an email workflow?
- Step 1 – Imagine a user visits your website and downloads a brochure or data capture asset like an ebook for a particular product or service.
- Step 2 – Their contact details are sent to your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. From here, you can access information on this lead’s history and interactions with your company.
- Step 3 – An email is then sent to them, thanking them for downloading the asset. The content is personalized based on the information you have regarding the user.
- Step 4 – Follow-up emails can be sent automatically to that same user, all based on their previous actions and interactions with your company, and featuring tailored calls-to-action.
In this way, marketing automation can help you to easily nurture a lead with minimal exertion, and increase the chances of a conversion.
What are the benefits of marketing automation?
Working with the right marketing automation platform and approach, you will see a healthy return on marketing investment (ROMI).
Here we look at the benefits of using marketing automation tools and making them a key part of your ongoing marketing strategy.
1. Cross-departmental collaboration
The right marketing automation platform and strategy will inspire better communication between your sales and marketing department.
Increasingly, the role of sales and marketing is seeing a colossal level of crossover, such as within social selling.
Marketing automation tools offer sales enablement features that empower marketing teams to enhance their lead nurturing efforts with targeted campaigns, content, and communications.
2. Save time and money
Another key benefit of marketing automation is its ability to save time and lower operational costs.
Not only can these intuitive tools automate certain repetitive tasks, giving marketers time to invest in more creative or profit-boosting activities, but some platforms also serve up valuable pockets of data.
Automated processes will take care of customer communications, lead nurturing, content scheduling, social media management, market research, analytics; practically any task that doesn’t require active human involvement. Implementing automation can, therefore, lead to increased productivity and better efficiency for your business.
Insights based around marketing campaign success rates, engagement, and consumer behavior ultimately lower costs as they offer the intelligence to continually optimize your activities, making them more financially efficient in the process.
3. Improved budget allocation
Expanding on the last point: when team members have the time to focus on their core tasks, it makes them more productive. In turn, projects are delivered faster, without the need for investment in extra staff.
Automation removes the drain of repetitive tasks, allowing you to get the most out of specialists. With this saving, your business can reallocate the marketing budget back into campaigns to see more returns.
Being efficient with allocation is particularly important as budgets are falling. According to Gartner’s Annual CMO Spend Survey, average marketing budgets have fallen to 7.7% of company revenue, down from 9.1% in 2023 meaning that ‘CMOs are living in an era of less’.
4. Monitor and target audiences
A solid marketing automation platform will give you the power to monitor and target your audience with pinpoint precision.
Armed with autonomous technology, such tools can track real-time data or monitor engagement and behaviors with minimal human input. In doing so, it’s possible to create more targeted, personalized communications across channels at the times where specific audience segments are likely to engage the most.
For example, for an event like Black Friday many customers are seeking promotions and deals. This is the perfect time to create highly targeted emails that use past behavior to segment lists and send out tailored communications.
The result? A consistently healthy ROI and increased customer loyalty.
5. Be consistent with branding
Without consistent branding across channels, you will become less recognizable to prospective customers. Strong branding is one of the cornerstones of marketing success and by using marketing automation to your advantage, you will remain consistent across the board.
Marketing automation tools are effective at retaining a specific style with visuals, content, and communications across all key marketing channels which, in turn, will help you boost your brand reputation in a saturated digital space.
In a DMI podcast, Jason Byer, former Head of Marketing & Partnerships at Crowdspring gave some advice on how to build a brand or do a rebrand:
- Look at other brands out there, not just your obvious competitors, and see who is offering a solution to a user’s core problem
- Doing nothing is often a solution to a problem
- Think about where you can be different
- Start the creative process
What are the best marketing automation tools & platforms?
Now that we’re up to speed with the benefits, we’re going to look at a variety of marketing automation platforms.
This selection of marketing automation software is designed to drive insight and efficiency, leading to progressively better promotional outcomes in the process.
Marketo
Marketo Engage is an AI-powered marketing automation platform from Adobe that helps marketers and sellers scale personalized buyer engagement and grow pipelines and revenue.
It has a number of useful features which include:
- Profiles and audience – help to build customer segments with automated capture and continuous enrichment of lead- and account-level customer profiles.
- Omnichannel engagement – You can automate across channels such as email, web, mobile, chat, webinars, digital advertising and more.
- Tailored content – Use AI to create tailored and personalized content for your audiences.
- Align marketing and sales – Connect to your CRM and use lead scoring.
- Analyze and track campaigns – Create dashboards and use custom reporting, and multi-touch attribution to get deep insights into your campaigns.
Active Campaign
Active Campaign describes itself as “an intelligence marketing automation platform that can help build frictionless customer experiences that delight your audience and drive growth.”.
The platform offers hundreds of automation triggers and actions, conditional routing, and an AI-powered drag-and-drop builder.
It covers email marketing, SMS marketing, social and ad audiences and forms. Active Campaign also enables split testing and dynamic content creation to drive personalization.
Get Response
Get Response is a marketing automation platform that was originally focused on email marketing. But now, this savvy piece of marketing automation software has a far more agile and integrated automation setup.
With Get Response, you can organize workflows with an intuitive drag and drop menu that’s based on a trio of parameters: conditions, actions, and filters. The workflows system responds to subscribers’ specific needs, so segmentation is smooth and simple – you can even add filters to subscriber lists to assist with your targeting efforts.
The platform’s accessibility and scalability allow you to maintain the same systems even if your business grows or shrinks. It’s also compatible with ecommerce sales, and comes with a landing page builder tool and video tutorials.
