What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a software tool, or web application, that automates communication campaigns on various online and social platforms. This method of marketing prioritizes communication strategies and then begins to execute the marketing objectives on the designated outlets. Redundant and tedious tasks can now be automated to enhance productivity, organization, and increase efficiency for online marketing teams.
Why Use Marketing Automation?
A great purpose of marketing automation is to build well crafted strategies with in-depth audience insights that can generate stronger leads. This feature is ideal when working with additional marketing tools to build customized campaigns that generate stronger relevancy among users. The advantage of using features through other marketing tools, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, can allow marketers to collect key demographic and behavioral insights from target audiences. With that data, campaigns can then be streamlined to reach all segmented markets all while featuring content that personally resonates with the target audience.
Categories of Marketing Automation
- Marketing Intelligence: A great feature within marketing automation is the diligent tracking of a user’s behavior that is recorded and used as data to assess their level of intent. Based on a user’s session, or history engaging with the website, marketers can draw patterns and begin to customize content for qualified leads. Monitoring these behaviors can indicate the type of follow up campaigns that marketers can then push to each segmented group of users.
- Business Development: Within the segmentation of target audiences, an important element of marketing automation is transitioning frequent users into customers. Cultivating a catered strategy to nurture qualified leads based on their behaviors and interest can develop customer relationships and increase customer retention.
- Workflow Automation: While external communication is the main objective for marketers, marketing automation can also serve the needs of internal functionalities as well. For businesses working to advance marketing campaigns for their target audience, it’s necessary to utilize efficient tools to automate campaign processes such as budgeting, synchronizing marketing calendars and overall content organization.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
- Emphasis on Strategy: With the automation of marketing campaigns, the focus for marketing teams will gear towards developing detailed strategies with content streaming on various communication portals. Digital marketing can offer many options to place innovative marketing campaigns, which means countless opportunities to reach various target audiences. Once a solid strategy has been developed, campaigns can then be curated to adapt to different communication platforms and automated to maximize their coverage.
- Increased Efficiency: An automated tool can provide ample time and energy for marketers to develop other areas of marketing research. Marketers can continue to focus on gathering user data, improving insights to personalize the content for their marketing strategies.
- Eliminate Redundant Tasks: Creating marketing campaigns can involve redundant tasks that can painstakingly consume unnecessary time. Important, yet monotonous, jobs such as social media postings and sending email campaigns can all be conducted through marketing automation.
- Measure Results: Marketing automation is an additional resource that marketing teams can use to track the progress of their campaigns. With a strong ability to measure strides and impact, this feature is able to report on the ROI, session time, click rate and other metrics generated by the campaigns.
