- What is Marketing Atomation?
- How Does Marketing Automation Work?
- What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?
- Marketing Automation Best Practices
- Marketing Automation - The Takeaway
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is software that integrates a set of automated marketing activities to achieve particular marketing goals. This process involves the use of marketing tools that handle various tasks such as reporting, analytics, content management, and visitor tracking. In other words, marketing automation, which is this imaginable third hand from the paragraph above, can be described as customer relationship management working on autopilot. Using the data on consumer behavior collected from various digital sources, the process of marketing automation contributes to the increased effectiveness of crucial marketing activities. It significantly accelerates and eases running various types of marketing campaigns. Additionally, marketing automation aids in maintaining high-level brand-customer relationships that transform leads into sales. And the best thing about marketing automation is that it’s just one software that relieves a team of marketers from their daily duties that are considered as menial, repetitive, or non-creative. It deals with day-to-day - yet fundamental! - tasks like personalized advertising, behavioral targeting, and lead prioritization, to name just a few.How Does Marketing Automation Work?
Marketing automation consists of two stages. Firstly, it collects all items of information on every customer that comes in contact with your brand. This can be through emails, social media, and the official website, naturally. Later, it combines this data with each customer's online behavior. Having all this information gathered and analyzed in one place, it’s easier for marketers to draw up a detailed plan of action for individual groups of customers. The second stage depends on telling the marketing automation software how you want it to interact with your customers. In other words, you create a personalized journey for each of your customers, or groups of customers. And this customization goes way beyond adding your customer’s name to the beginning of an email. Marketing automation handles things like push notifications and ads that - again - are personalized and displayed in the right place, at the right time. Obviously, it also recommends the products and services that match the profile of each user visiting your page. Basically, you can think of marketing automation as the Instant Pot. When you cook a meal with this kitchen appliance, you are able to select a different setting for each type of food product you use for preparing a dish. You can tell the Instant Pot the cooking time, temperature, and pressure so as to make the exact dish you want to eat. The same is with marketing automation. This software allows you to choose different marketing strategies (settings) for each of your customers (a dish) individually. This way you expose your customer to a set of thought-out marketing actions (temperature or cooking time), taking them all the way through the sales funnel without them even noticing. What ‘settings’ do you have at your disposal? So in other words…What are Examples of Marketing Automation?
[caption id="attachment_61994" align="aligncenter" width="1280"]- ALL SORTS OF EMAIL MESSAGES
- QUIZZES
- LEAD SCORING
- LEAD MAGNET
- A/B TESTING
What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?
Believe it or not, but marketing automation simply has too many advantages to mention. But among the biggest and the clearest ones is that marketing automation allows you to communicate with your customers and expose them to your brand at all stages of their lifecycle.Aids in Creating Customized Content for your Customers
No matter if they are at the very beginning, which is the awareness stage, or almost at the end of their customer journey, you keep providing them with the most relevant content. Simply put, marketing automation enables creating a highly-personalized marketing strategy to each one of your leads.Saves Time & Effort of Your Entire Team
Another thing is the huge - literally huge - amounts of time that marketing automation saves the entire marketing team. Instead of manually doing repetitive tasks like posting on social media or sending emails, they make use of marketing automation that does the exact same thing for them.Promotes Harmony & Cohesion
Additionally, everyone from the team operates on just one tool, and this eliminates mess, misunderstandings, and chaos. This also favors cohesion in communication between your brand and the customers. All things considered, thanks to marketing automation the marketing team has more energy to brainstorm new ideas and come up with even more effective marketing strategies.Helps You Build Detailed Buyer Personas
Last but definitely not least, without marketing automation, it would be impossible for you to build a comprehensive view of each of your customers. With all the extensive data obtained, you can paint a complete picture of your leads. This in turn allows you to understand what things they like, how much time they spend reading/watching, and when they shop.
Read also: User Personas in Marketing and SEO