Marketing automation is nothing short of a game changer for eCommerce businesses and digital marketers. It’s no wonder that it’s seeing an increased adoption rate. In fact, a recent study forecasts that the value of this industry could grow to $8.42 billion by 2027. But what is marketing automation, exactly? And how does it work?
Marketing Automation Overview
Marketing automation utilizes specialized software to manage routine marketing tasks that support digital marketing campaigns. Teams can schedule and monitor these repetitive tasks such as social media posting, email marketing, and ad campaigns to increase the efficiency of their marketing efforts and deliver a more personalized experience for their customers. Indeed, it isn’t just ease of use that has led to the growing prevalence of automation: 80% of users have seen an increase in the number of leads using automation software, and 77% have reported an increase of conversions.
The main features of marketing automation software include:
- Analytics for CRM
- Account-based marketing
- Inbound Marketing
- Campaign management
- Targeting and segmentation
- Lead management
- Marketing ROI
- Social marketing
How Marketing Automation Can Help Your Business
Most businesses treat marketing automation as a ‘middle-of-the-funnel’ solution for nurturing leads through automated email campaigns. And while automating email marketing is an excellent use of automation software, this approach could result in your prospects and customers having disjointed experiences as they move through their buyer’s journey.
To get the most out of automation, it should ideally be deployed across the entire customer lifecycle, and not just used as a middle-of-the-funnel one-off tool. When properly implemented, marketing automation can deliver the following benefits to your business:
Streamlined Processes
Marketing automation can nurture harmony in your organization with streamlined processes geared toward providing customers with a satisfactory experience across their entire lifecycles. Done carefully and efficiently, it can break through silos and integrate your teams to work together to deliver a unified experience for your customers. Automation also helps marketers develop processes that work across various functional teams so you can minimize customer effort at every stage of their journey.
Automation also eliminates the need for complicated hand-off procedures between departments, given that everything is saved automatically in your central data storage. Moreover, internal workflows can help you prioritize tasks based on how urgent they are.
Personalized workflows
Marketing automation provides a richer, more detailed view of potential customers than manual methods. Automation software allows businesses to use customer data points across multiple channels to gain a deeper understanding of what their customers’ needs are and deliver the right content at the right moment. In doing so, it helps drive qualified leads to helpful content. This results in warm leads that can be nurtured strategically into buying customers.
This also allows businesses to continue engaging with customers beyond their purchase with personalized workflows that lead to the cultivation of loyal, repeat customers that can refer others to your business.
Data Management
Marketing automation software can track your leads and their engagement throughout their journey. This means that managing your data is much easier. Moreover, it automatically updates your data throughout the course of marketing campaigns, which allows administrators to gauge effectiveness and pinpoint opportunities for growth.
Free Up More Time to Focus on Strategy
Marketing teams are constantly brainstorming new marketing ideas and campaigns to help their companies remain competitive in the ever-intensifying war for customer attention. Automation software can help free up time for your marketing team so that they can spend more time on creative thinking and the strategic bigger picture and less time on mundane day-to-day tasks.
Marketing Automation Best Practices
Here are some best practices you should keep in mind when deploying your marketing automation strategy:
- Think Quality Before Quantity: You should focus on quality in terms of tools used, messages sent, and leads generated. Remember, there are some instances when using fewer tools is better for connecting that data between the silos formed throughout your customers’ journey. Sometimes thinking smart trumps thinking big.
- Create Content that Resonates with Your Audience: Ensure that the content you use is valuable to your audience. Automation can offer insights into the performance of your content, but it can’t create it for you. Deliver useful information to customers and automation can guide you towards .
- Develop Personalized Buyer Journeys Across Channels: Promptly responds to customers using their past behavior as a guiding principle. This shows you know them and understand their needs.
Start Growing with Marketing Automation
Hot Dog Marketing is a platinum-level HubSpot partner, which means that we are certified and authorized Hubspot consultants with proven customer engagement and retention. We know how to get the most out of the platform to help our clients get scalable marketing automation that’s nearly 100% hands-free. This way, you can better qualify leads and improve your bottom line. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you.
Gabe Ruzin is a content creator and digital marketer who enjoys writing blogs, solving the mystery of SEO, and working towards creating the perfect social media post someday. He lives in Colorado with his wife, teenage son, four cats, and lots of cat hair. A former movie theater programming director, Gabe loves watching movies, writing film reviews, and wondering why Michael Keaton has never won an Oscar.