“Automation” is a popular term used when talking about increased efficiency in the workplace. However, when you hear it, you might be imagining something more like the robot-driven assembly lines from an episode of “How It’s Made,” rather than anything that can be implemented to assist your internet-driven business. Let’s forget about factories, and talk about the type of automation that you should be using.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the process of using software tools to streamline and elevate the results of time-consuming activities like prospect outreach and follow-up, contact segmentation, and other repetitive tasks. An effective marketing automation strategy aims to save businesses time spent on tedious (but necessary) responsibilities, while increasing overall productivity for marketing systems.
What Does Marketing Automation Do?
It allows you to deliver personalized messaging to your prospects
If you’ve put in the time to learn about your customers and define your buyer personas, marketing automation will let you take that knowledge to the next level and efficiently deliver content to your prospects that is personalized to their objectives.
For example, imagine a potential customer visits a landing page on your website that is relevant to their needs, and your awesome copy encourages them to fill out a form with their contact information. Now what?
Marketing automation tools can then be used to:
- Add this visitor’s information into your Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)
- Segment them into one or more specified contact lists based on the website page that motivated them to provide you with their information
- Automatically add this contact to a prewritten email drip campaign centered around the content that you now know they are most interested in
- Use this email campaign to continue to market to them and, with enough meaningful touches, convert a lead into a customer
After a bit of planning ahead to map out the journey you want your contacts to take and create deliverable marketing content, this entire lead capture and outreach process is done in the background by marketing automation software tools working together. This can be done on a large scale, at all hours of the day…something that, without automation, could potentially require a dedicated department of employees performing repetitive tasks.
It allows you to create intricate campaigns
A successful marketing strategy is about more than just regularly bombarding your contacts with information- no matter how relevant that information is to them. When developing campaigns, it’s important to also consider when and how you deliver your marketing content.
Modern automation tools allow you to specify when to reach out to your prospects at times when touch points are the most meaningful. This could be as simple as contacting them during a predetermined time when your product or service may be especially useful, or as complex as triggering an email campaign to be delivered when your automation software recognizes a contact visiting your website again and performing specific actions.
Marketing automation offers the opportunity to get creative and granular with your outreach and follow-up strategies without stretching your resources too thin. If you or your marketing team come up with an idea to engage and interact with your leads, there’s likely a marketing automation solution to make it happen.
It saves your team time and your business money
Your team’s time is better spent focusing on strategy and ideas, rather than performing repetitive tasks like adding names to lists, keeping track of individual contacts, and manually pushing “send” on emails. Utilizing marketing automation tools will help them focus on the bigger picture and keep your sales and marketing efforts moving forward.
Common Marketing Automation Processes
Marketing automation is constantly evolving and allowing businesses to develop more streamlined lead capture and conversion systems, but here are some of the most common ways that we, and our customers, find success with our marketing automation strategies:
- Lead capturing and qualifying: Using automation tools to recognize where leads are coming from on website pages or social media accounts (what piece of content made them take the next step in the buyer’s journey), automatically adding these leads to our CRM and assigning them a score based on how likely they are to convert in the future
- List segmentation: Automatically separating contacts into specific lists based on where they came from, what their needs are, and what type of marketing content will be most effective to communicate with them
- Personalized email marketing: Automatically delivering specific content to segmented contacts to create meaningful interactions
- Lead nurturing: Sending continuous (but not overbearing) automated email campaigns to keep contacts engaged with your brand
Businesses that effectively leverage software tools to implement marketing automation strategies often see their lead generation and overall conversion rates rise while their teams’ schedules open up to focus on higher level tasks.
If this article got you thinking and you’re interested in learning more about how you can use marketing automation for business, click the contact button below. We’ll use our marketing automation tools to get in touch (but after that, a human will help you evaluate your marketing needs).
