Marketing automation is a kind of technology that automates specific marketing actions. Automation allows marketers to effectively manage multifunctional campaigns across multiple channels without manual labor.
Automating can help streamline repetitive tasks like publishing social media content, sending emails, and texting customers. It is what allows marketers to focus on more important marketing tasks like developing long-term strategies, informative content creation, and tracking trends and monitoring the competition.
Marketing and sales departments use marketing automation to automate online marketing campaigns and sales activities to both increase revenue and maximize efficiency.
How marketing automation works
We all have that list of manual, repetitive tasks: reminders, follow-ups, reporting, drafting emails. These tasks aren’t difficult, but they distract you from the more meaningful to-dos that can have a bigger impact on the bottom line. Nobody wants to spend their days doing the same thing over and over and over again. Unless you’re into that.
When you invest in marketing automation practices, you’re allowing yourself to set those manual processes up once and forgetting about them. You’re giving yourself more time to focus on the tasks you really need to be focusing on. Your automated campaigns can continue to run in the background while you focus your attention on bigger projects.
But how does it actually work? At the highest level, marketing automation campaigns send specific content to leads based on behavior and data to accomplish whatever business goals they have in mind.
Finally, once your prospects take whatever action you were wanting them to do, they are automatically routed to your sales team so they can follow up with them. That’s about it!
Marketing automation can work in any medium. You can automate tasks in:
- Email newsletters
- And more!
Benefits of marketing automation
- Increased marketing efficiency. You can automate time-consuming, manual tasks like scheduling social media posts to give yourself more time to focus on more important tasks to help you accomplish your goals.
- Enhanced ability to generate more and better qualified leads. Combine multiple criteria with a lead scoring system to generate and identify sales-qualified leads.
- A multichannel view of prospect behavior. Integrate multiple channels and devices to create more comprehensive prospect profiles.
- Better alignment of sales and marketing goals. By working cooperatively to set scoring parameters and define qualified leads, sales and marketing become one team.
- Increases revenue and average deal size. By automating your cross-sells, up-sells, and customer follow-ups you’ll likely notice an increase in your customer lifetime value. When you combine this with better lead management and prioritisation, it’s likely that your sales activity will produce a better ROI.
- Improve accountability of marketing and sales teams. Marketing automation makes it very clear where the bottlenecks in your company are, thanks to having clearly defined processes, and birds-eye view reporting of the company’s pipeline.
- Repurpose existing content to nurture leads. Through marketing automation, you can give your existing content a second life by setting up automated rules to recommend content that educates your leads and customers over the customer lifecycle.
