What is Marketing Automation?

Table of Content:

• What is Marketing Atomation?
• How Does Marketing Automation Work?
  • What are Examples of Marketing Automation?
• What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?
  • Aids in Creating Customized Content for Your Customers
  • Saves Time & Effort of Your Entire Team
  • Promotes Harmony & Cohesion
  • Helps You Build Detailed Buyer Personas
  • Facilitates Creating Stronger Relationships with your Leads
• Marketing Automation Best Practices
  • #1 TIP Visualize Your Goals
  • #2 TIP Analyze the Data
  • #3 TIP Prepare Personalized Experience for your Leads
• Marketing Automation - The Takeaway

Imagine having an invisible third hand that pushes multiple "send", "reply" or "accept" buttons for you, so that you can devote more time and focus on tasks that aren’t repetitive and mundane. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Sure, it would. Does it sound like a sci-fi movie? Well, it shouldn’t because this is basically how marketing automation works. Let us guide you through everything you need to know about this cost-effective method of managing the enduring relationship between your brand and customers. Let us show you how easy it is to create campaigns that facilitate taking care of the key aspects of a digital marketing strategy.

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"] Source: https://www.hubspot.com/hubfs/State-of-Marketing%20(2).pdf[/caption] The list is pretty long, and it depends on the niche you’re in. Without a doubt, there is a large number of marketing actions you can use to personalize your brand interactions with customers. For example, you can make use of

• ALL SORTS OF EMAIL MESSAGES

These can be welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, newsletters, promotional emails, transactional emails, webinar reminders, video emails, or review request emails. Sending personalized messages to your customers is an amazing way to diversify your content and provoke more clicks through various CTAs. Choose the right type of email marketing automation that is suitable for a particular action or touching point your customer has been in.

• QUIZZES

Yes, quizzes. Asking your customers a couple of questions, you can present to them the exact products or services that match their needs perfectly. Let’s imagine you sell skin care products. Make a quiz for those customers who struggle with finding the face cream that suits their skin type. Don’t overdo the number of questions though. Keep the quiz short and sweet.

• LEAD SCORING

This one shows you how close to making a purchase a particular customer is. Use marketing automation to give points to certain actions a lead takes. Once you get the scoring, you will know what marketing activities you should take next to help your prospect choose your product or service. It’s also worth realizing that lead scoring shows you which leads aren’t worth devoting too much energy to. Read also: How to Generate Lead with SEO

• LEAD MAGNET

One of the all-time marketing rules says that giving a customer something for free increases the chances of them wanting to pay you back in some way - simply buying from you in the near future. That’s why to be generous and provide your leads with free samples of your products, send them white papers, or offer free consultations. Use the Lead Scoring to match the "gift" to the right customer.

• A/B TESTING

With this totally automatized experimentation process you can monitor and verify how your prospects react to two versions of the same message, advertisement, or graphics. Launching A/B Testing helps you discover which types of communication resonate better with particular groups of your target audience. This amazing marketing automation tool may save your team’s great ideas from being thrown down the drain - after all, there may be a small group of leads that gets hooked on a slogan that the rest finds uninspiring.

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.

Facilitates Creating Stronger Relationships with Your Leads

Having this knowledge at your disposal, you create personalized content - and even sales pitches - and display it on the channels your lead trusts and spends the most time on. Marketing automation simply builds relationships with the customers, helping you react to their needs and give them what they look for.

Marketing Automation Best Practices

As they say, work smarter, not harder. This saying can be used as a motto for marketing automation. You can either boost its effectiveness or keep working on the default settings, so to say. If you decide to go for the latter, so if you decide to optimize all of your marketing campaigns with marketing automation, you may consider the following tips:

#1 TIP Visualize Your Goals

Create a map of marketing actions to take at the individual stages of your customer lifecycle. Consider all the options and moves your lead may take, and always be one step ahead to prevent them from losing interest in your brand. Use graphs, diagrams, and other visual representations of all steps you plan to take. This approach is proven effective also for email marketing automation. Think about the automation flow of messages sent to new customers as well to those who leave your store without buying anything.

#2 TIP Analyze the Data

Have your finger on the pulse and keep analyzing the data you receive from the marketing automation software of your choice. The sad truth is that what has been working out perfectly for a few months may stop bringing up the desired effects at the most unexpected moment. Everything changes, and so should your marketing tactics. Have your eyes opened wide and react both to the current trends and any anomalies you notice in the reports generated by your marketing automation software.

#3 TIP Prepare Personalized Experience for Your Leads

Make absolutely everything to ensure an ultra-personalized journey for each of your customers. With all the features that marketing automation offers, your team should be able to create customized pieces of texts, videos and ads that resonate with a certain group of customers. See what engages your leads and expose them to such pieces of content. Ask about their opinions on the things you offer them. Give them the right answers and assistance they seek. Using all the statistics and reports to create the customized and multi-channel experience that your customers are willing to have.

Marketing Automation - The Takeaway

With so many things to handle on a daily basis, marketing automation is a true godsend for every marketing team. In just one place you can manage and create marketing strategies for those customers who came across your brand at least once in their lifetime. A unified platform gathers information on your consumer behavior from multiple online sources so that you are provided with more accurate data. And this promotes making smarter decisions, doesn’t it? It helps you cut down on, or even completely eliminate, repetitive tasks that occupy too many working hours of your team. As for the customers, you expose them to highly personalized, thus engaging content that they actually feel pleasure from interacting with. And this evokes positive emotions in customers for your brand. And on top of that, it’s super easy to use! Actually, that’s what marketing automation is about - ease of use. You can launch some campaigns with just a single click. There are no downsides to marketing automation. Once you introduce it to your marketing strategy, you will regret you didn’t do that earlier! If you would like to get rid of those tasks that make you bored and almost leave you cold, but you don’t know where to start, drop us a line. Do so also when you are hesitating to pick the right marketing automation solution for your business. We will give you all the information you need to make the right decision and hook those prospects to your brand!