A Quick Guide to Marketing Automation

eCommerce Pay-Per-Click Sales

Artem Daniliants

11 min read

What comes to your mind when you hear the words “Marketing Automation”? For others, it’s just simple marketing software, but the truth is, automated marketing solutions can change the way conventional marketing campaigns work to a whole new level.

Key takeaways:

  • Marketing automation consists of a set of tools and resources. Combined, their job is to automate and improve the process of executing various tasks in the digital marketing sphere.

  • Most important benefits of marketing automation are related to efficiency in performance tracking and targeting .

  • Given that marketing automation is executed correctly with reliable automation services utilized, it allows employees and agencies working in digital marketing to focus on both strategic tasks and tasks that require human effort .

In this article, find out how automation will change the future of marketing.

What is Marketing Automation?

What is Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is the most modern and effective way to automate marketing tasks. This can include many important marketing activities from creating a contact list to sending out emails, posting and managing social media content, and developing highly targeted marketing strategies. Automation makes all marketing tasks way easier compared to traditional marketing. Automated solutions can help free up time and maximize resources so that marketers can spend more time on other important tasks.

Benefits of marketing automation for businesses

Benefits of marketing automation

Marketing automation is a collection of tools and resources created to fully automate and streamline modern marketing activities that are involved in an otherwise complicated and time-consuming task. When you say digital automation, it requires lesser manual tasks, eliminating the need for an employee to work for long hours just to create, manage, and track any process that's involved in a campaign. Thus, saving you money and time . From automating the lead qualification process to developing project management for digital campaign design, all the processes involved in your campaigns will be done quickly in a few clicks.

How does automated marketing work?

It increases the effectiveness of any marketing campaign since it allows you to track your campaign performance. While it's true that using any new technology can come with a new set of obstacles, the benefits it brings can make it all worth it.

What common problems can automation solve?

With automated solutions, you can develop an online strategy instead of manually creating and sending every email or creating a post or campaign on a daily basis. You can even identify your audience easily and because of that, you'll have the ability to come up with appropriate content that best matches the needs of your market. You can also run the tasks on your campaign such as content posting, email automation, etc., based on the behavior and schedules of your target market.

what marketing automation do

Here are some of the most common problems that can be solved by automated solutions with the help of a reliable automation service provider:

  • Not being able to do more tasks with less time and resources
  • Not effectively tracking or optimizing user engagement
  • Leads are not converting
  • Handling unqualified leads
  • Inefficient marketing campaigns and technology gaps

Not being able to do more tasks with less time and resources

In the field of marketing, there is often pressure to achieve more with limited resources. However, having a reliable automation service provider and a well-structured marketing plan can help ensure that automated practices run smoothly, as the marketing automation tools will handle a significant portion of the work.

If your goal is to accelerate the revenue and growth of your business, then automating your digital processes is the most effective solution. With the help of reliable automation software for your campaigns, you can be able to save money, time, energy, and resources without having to sacrifice the quality of your processes. This modern way to streamline your current and upcoming leads will surely change the future of your business.

Not effectively tracking or optimizing user engagement

When it comes to maintaining the image of your brand, you can come up with the right marketing templates and assign them to different teams within your company so that there will be a consistent brand identity. This enables automated marketing to manage your brand identity and make it visible to customers. Automation helps in capturing, tracking, and managing scoring leads that enter the funnel environment. This is very important in tracking the engagement of your users. Aside from that, this data can be used to improve your design and automate both online and offline processes.

Since customers use different types of devices to view your website through a multitude of channels, automating the way you engage with the users can be of great help. Through proper retargeting to connect with your buyers, you'll be able to utilize automated solutions to provide the right content that matches the need of a specific target market using the right platform.

Leads are not converting

A truly efficient and effective marketing strategy should involve many activities of the funnel. Most of the time, these are not easy to manage especially if you're doing the tasks manually. The good thing is that there are modern automation solutions nowadays that can help maximize your efforts, especially in successful lead conversion and managing leaky sales funnel. Having said that, automation can help optimize your efforts at running your campaign by letting your team work smarter, faster, and easier by creating well-targeted and engaging campaigns.

Handling unqualified leads

Today, highly competitive industries exist and around 80% of leads are not for you at first. However, with the help of automation, you can be able to come up with an effective lead qualification strategy that nurtures the buying public at first, which can turn them into loyal customers in the long run.

Identifying qualified leads is important as it determines if they are suitable for sales engagement. By determining lead qualification, you're able to instantly identify if that certain lead is not interested in your product or service or if they're not worthy enough to devote your time and resources. The most efficient way to provide your sales with the highest quality lead qualification process is through a reliable automation platform.

Inefficient marketing campaigns and technology gaps

Business owners often tend to find it difficult to maintain their marketing productivity as their businesses continue to grow. This is because in general, marketing teams are smaller compared to other departments in the company, and they're usually assigned the lead generation tasks and managing them at the same time. Thus, marketing inefficiencies and tech gaps could take place.

Fortunately, automated marketing solutions can help since it allows you to automate the most time-consuming and complicated marketing activities such as email marketing and lead nurturing. Because of it, you can maximize your efforts without the need to add an extra hand.

Aspects of marketing automation and its impact to your business

We can't deny the fact that marketing automation is rapidly expanding, and business owners now have the ability to incorporate automated solutions to many important aspects of their tasks. The question is, how far can it go? What is the future of digital marketing with fully automated solutions?

Marketing automation impact to business

1. Lead nurturing

Marketing automation streamlines repetitive tasks, enabling efficient lead nurturing. According to experts, there's no other way to effectively nurture leads than marketing automation. In order to have an effective lead nurturing strategy, you have to get the necessary information from your leads. After that, segmentation, educational content, email campaigns, and social media interaction follow. What automation do is that it gathers the information of the leads in one place using an automated tool and organizes it based on job title, browsing behavior, location, and many more. By developing a persona using automation, you will know what kind of product, service, or solution he or she will benefit from.

2. Email marketing automation

If you want to take your email campaign to the next level, then email marketing automation is the best solution. It's one of the best strategies to keep in touch with your subscribers regularly. All you need to do is to create content that matches the interests of your subscribers and schedule it on a regular basis using email automation software.

With email automation, you can send the right content to your subscribers at the right time. Small and big companies can use automated email marketing no matter what product or service they offer. Automated emails typically encompass a range of types, such as newsletters, welcome messages, greetings, and promotional messages for new products or services.

3. Social media automation

Social media automation goes beyond creating content and scheduling it to be posted on different social media platforms. To get the most out of your automated marketing campaign, you need to plan your social media content and incorporate other marketing initiatives you already have that are leading to your goal – to win your target market. Having a concrete content plan can help you identify what your followers want to learn from your social media.

The good thing about marketing automation is that you’ll be able to identify what your subscribers want and you develop the content according to the data you gather. This means that you are able to increase lead generation while enhancing your customer’s experience through informative and interactive social media content. Aside from that, social media automation can also let you extend your campaign efforts by repurposing your content and using calls to action.

4. Analytics and reporting

It's important that you use analytics and report tools if you want to know how your current and potential customers engage with your website, email campaigns, and social media channels. This will help improve your marketing analysis to better understand the behavior of your customers and leverage them to make dependable campaign decisions.

Financial, quantity, cost, and activity are the major aspects but there are also more subcategories down the funnel. Fortunately, with marketing automation, most of these aspects can be taken care of in just a few clicks. Plus, there's no need for you to manually store your data into a spreadsheet so you 'll have more time efficiency for advanced reporting and analysis down the road. There are lots of metrics to take into consideration as far as marketing goes.

5. SEO and paid media

  • SEO - Automated marketing and SEO are both parts of a larger scale marketing and they should be combined to get the best results. They have some things in common including the fact that they focus on the promotion of content. Their processes are also the same since they're designed to boost an organization's reach and generate leads. Combining SEO with marketing automation will improve your company's overall ROI . Marketing automation and SEO are important parts of an inbound marketing strategy. When done right, this can continuously scale up and bring increasing leads.

  • Paid media – If you want to increase your reach, capture new leads, and spread brand awareness, then you should opt for paid media. Did you know that if paid media is combined with a powerful automated marketing strategy, it can be one of the strongest marketing tools you'll ever have for your business? Paid marketing's future is automation and it's the major key to success. You just have to find the right automated marketing tool in the market to start improving your campaign performance and increasing your ROI .

Top 5 best practices of marketing automation

Marketers use marketing automation to automate all their marketing activities across different channels. It's the process in which you use an automated platform to perform repetitive tasks such as planning marketing campaigns, updating data, sending emails, etc. instead of manually doing it. Here are the top practices you should take into consideration when implementing marketing automation for your business:

Top 5 best practices of marketing automation

1. Map your lead flow

Automated marketing without a lead process is nothing. But with a solid lead generation process in place, you will not only get revenue, but you will make five times for revenue if it's done right.

2. Understand your customers' buying schedule to deliver customized and targeted content

Thanks to marketing automation, it's now possible to deliver messages to your target audience at the right time. However, to maximize the benefits you'll get from using an automated marketing tool, then it's best that you understand the buying cycle of your customers first in order to deliver content that matches their demands. Your prospects' behavior is the key to converting them into buying customers in the future. This is why it's important to engage with them to develop trust and start a conversation.

3. Come up with buyer personas

Buyer personas are imaginary versions of your customers, potential prospects, and followers. Identifying different buying personas is a good stepping stone for automated marketing campaigns. This will guide your campaign to the right part with the help of reliable marketing automation software.

4. Send the right email at the right time

Good email marketing should be interactive and read like a story. It should open with a problem so you can introduce your solution and why yours is the best among the other competitors. A lot of marketing campaigns actually make the mistake of digging into every single detail of their product or service without analyzing if the receiver might be interested or not.

Email reputation is also an important thing to consider when using digital automation software. While it's true that you can provide great content and email copies, chances are all of your hard work could go to waste if you repeatedly send emails to bad email addresses. Simply put, your hard work will just go to the Spam Box instead of the inbox.

5. Generate leads effectively

In order to generate leads, you will need to use different marketing sales and tricks. These 3 tips on how to generate more leads are really helpful:

  • You can build compelling landing pages on your website. Use forms that are user-friendly so that it's convenient for your prospects to fill in their information.
  • Not all leads will buy immediately but you can contact them for other promotional content using the information they left on your website.
  • Bear in mind that distractions can overrule conversions. It means you need to focus on one call to action alone such as a file download or event registration.

Lastly, it's important that you keep your emails and all your content simple and objective. When it comes to scoring a lead, keeping it simple as possible can keep the scoring process fast and easy based on your customers' feedback.

Do you need to be an expert to use marketing automation?

Most problems marketers face when managing campaigns are not the lack of knowledge or resources – but the lack of time. This is where automation enters the picture. It's like having a clone of yourself except it works virtually to look after your marketing campaigns. So, is marketing automation easy to use? The answer is yes. Do you need to be an expert to use marketing automation? Definitely not!

The best thing to do is to find a reliable marketing automation service provider and you'll then be able to automate marketing tasks, have data analysis managed on your behalf, and generate leads in the most efficient way. Since marketing automation does most of the tasks for you, you can use your extra time to scale your business by taking on new clients and achieving better results. Don't let manual tasks hold you back!

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