Marketing Automation 101
For anyone involved in digital marketing, automation has the potential to be a game changer. Join us for an introduction to a suite of tools and tactics designed to mitigate the data drudgery and make marketing fun and creative again.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation gives you the big picture of your relationships so you can understand your customers better, connect with them in ways they enjoy, and keep the conversation relevant and alive. By automating parts of your marketing and sales engagement, you’re able to liberate your time from manually executing repetitive tasks to focus on generating and evaluating more leads, nurturing your most promising prospects, increasing conversion rates and driving revenue growth.
A marketing automation platform commonly includes the following features:
Built-in CRM
List management, buyer personas and market segmentation
Email marketing and automation
Landing page builder
Social media management
Nurture campaigns and workflows
Website interaction tracking
Campaign tracking
Dynamic content capabilities
Lead scoring and prioritisation
Sales notifications and lead distribution
End to end reporting and analytics
Revenue attribution and ROI
Forecasting
Planning and resource management
What marketing automation can’t provide is your intelligence, creativity and insight - the things that your customer truly values.
Why use Marketing Automation
The value of marketing automation is evident. Let’s look at some of the main sources of benefit.
Time Savings
Freeing your team from the tyranny of repetitive tasks is one of the most immediate and visible benefits of implementing marketing automation. Liberating their resources for more creative, strategic and insightful work increases the value you get from your staff costs and allows you to scale your operations.
Lead Generation
If you’re already attracting a good level of attention using a solid inbound marketing strategy, marketing automation can help you to capture your visitors’ details, and evaluate and nurture their level of interest, increasing their quality as a lead before converting and closing the sale.
Increase in Revenue
Marketing automation tools allow you to offer a highly tailored and personalised customer experience that helps you to centre your marketing around a real human instead of just an avatar. Companies see an uplift in conversion rates when they implement personalisation.
Customer Retention
Treating your customers as individuals and understanding and serving their specific needs is the cornerstone of any strategy for providing exemplary post-sales service, strengthening your relationship, and increasing your Customer Lifetime Value. Marketing automation makes it easy to request reviews and feedback, reward highly valued or loyal customers with offers based on robust behavioural or transactional data, and trigger re-engagement campaigns.
Tracking and Monitoring
Comprehensive reporting and analytics allow you to organise and structure an unwieldy mass of data and transform it into actionable information for a truly data-driven marketing strategy. You’ll be able to see how your marketing activities support sales, monitor how you’re serving your existing and potential customers, enable the evaluation of campaigns, and foster the development of a culture of experimentation and learning through testing to discover what truly works for your company and your audience.
Shortened Sales Cycle
Providing your leads with the opportunity to educate themselves through the content your automation platform serves to them based on their behavioural inputs, and only passing qualified leads to your sales team when they’ve signalled they’re interested and ready to buy, accelerates your sales cycle and makes life easier for your busy sales team.
The Limitations of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is not a ‘set it and forget it’ solution, nor is it a substitute for the marketing and sales functions. It is designed to support and enhance. It will not do the marketing and lead generation for you, and it takes the investment of time, effort and resources to ensure that the right processes and strategies are implemented and maintained to achieve the desired results.
The ROI you’re looking for might require organisational and cultural changes. When considering an investment in a marketing automation platform, it is worth planning for a broader readiness audit and for your implementation to include not only the software set up and training but also projects such as sales and marketing alignment, inbound strategy development and campaign planning. Without the strong foundations of an aligned sales and marketing team working to shared objectives and a solid inbound strategy generating a steady flow of organic traffic, marketing automation will likely fall short of your expectations.
Marketing automation will also fail to generate the desired results if you treat it purely as an email engine with augmented capabilities. It is capable of so much more and has the real potential to enhance your customer’s experience if you deploy the breadth of tools it can offer to reach your audience across multiple channels and contextualise your leads’ needs and different points in their decision-making process.
What does functional marketing automation look like?
Marketing automation is most successful when you centre your focus on improving the customer experience as you move a lead through your inbound marketing funnel. Inputs from multiple channels - social clicks, mailing list subscriptions, viewing a particular product or pricing page, consuming pieces of content on specific topics - gives your marketing team the context they need to guide each lead through each step of their customer journey.
As you work to capture and convert leads, you use the information you gather to understand a prospect’s evolving wants and needs fully so you can build a relationship with them, craft targeted campaigns, and only deliver information that they’ll find relevant and resonant. Instead of hoping to convert sales from spammy and disruptive marketing, you operate from a position of wanting to demonstrate that your offering is a good fit in terms of both value and service.
How to Get Started with Marketing Automation
All of this sounds like a lot to take in but seeing is believing. If you only take one thing away from this article, it should be that the real point about marketing automation isn’t about technology and automation. It’s about relationship building and marketing. Marketing automation allows technology and your team’s talent to flow together to make your marketing better.
