What is Marketing Automation? Definition, Benefits, Best Practices, and More

In today’s digital and competitive space, working smarter is the buzzword! Marketing is the livelihood of every prospective brand or customer relationship and when it comes to dealing with today’s smart customers, automation is crucial to modern marketing teams.
Marketing automation is the use of software to automate repetitive tasks that usually consume considerable time, such as social media posting, SMS, online advertisements, email follow-up and drip campaigns. With marketing automation tools, such tasks can be easily accomplished. It helps save time and money and eventually helps any business to be successful.

For a business, a marketing automation strategy with a well-executed campaign can prove to be a game-changer. It can help a business stay organized, boost leads, drive increased conversion, save time, reduce costs, improve sales and increase revenue.

So, what is marketing automation? How does it help?

It is an effective software platform that aims to automate marketing and sales engagements to generate and close more leads. It helps better measure marketing processes. The best marketing teams make use of marketing automation to improve their campaign accuracy and thus, to strengthen their sales team with better leads, and increased ROI.

When a business has marketing automation tools, they are not just more creative, smarter and better, but they have the right tools. The tools that provide them with greater insight into the entire sales funnel. It lets them evaluate the leads more efficiently and when are they ready to buy. In present highly competitive marketing era, such abilities are simply essential and help the business to stand ahead in the competition. With marketing automation, it becomes easy for marketers to qualify leads and pass them onto sales in a better way. It leads to improved revenue and growth.

Where marketing focuses on attracting customer attention and create interest, sales aims to convert this interest into a deal and interacts with the customer more directly than that of the marketing through various activities like emails, phone calls, meetings, text messages, etc. Thus, sales automation combined with marketing automation gives sales marketing automation. This CRM marketing automation enables sales and marketing divisions to be on the same page and work in alignment. It is way more crucial for small companies where getting the best out of a single lead is of paramount importance.

However, sales automation and marketing automation are two different terms, each having its benefits and when combined, they provide the best fit for the business.

• Marketing Automation Vs. Sales Automation

Marketing automation enables a business to automate processes like message broadcasting to a group of people to generate new leads, whereas sales automation facilitates a sales representative to communicate to a group of individuals while maintaining a one-to-one relationship. Thus, though these two processes work in conjunction with each other, they perform specific tasks that cannot interchange each other.

So, what are the benefits of marketing automation?

• • It is a huge time saver –

• • With marketing automation, one can create multiple posts and campaigns beforehand and set them for future time and date. Thus, for example, creating and scheduling even a complete month’s FB posts in a day becomes simple.
  • Effective resource utilization – With an automated marketing solution, you can effectively use staff and resources. Executing complicated and ongoing campaigns become easy with automation marketing tools. It facilitates to connect with lots of customers than done manually.
  • It lets you maintain consistency – In today’s digital era; no one is interested in a stale or inconsistently updated social media account. When you are planning your campaigns and posts on time and updating your accounts well, it simply portrays how well you are managing your customer communication.
  • Monitoring and tracking – By keeping track of each text message, email campaign or social media posts, marketing automation provides detailed reports. Thus, it becomes easy to review, analyze and optimize your future campaigns.
  • Cost optimizer – Marketing automation lets you manage your budget effectively. Automated tasks mean a reduced need for staff to invest their effort and time in a lead generation and nurturing leads like creating and distributing emails/messages, etc. thus, a business makes the most of the resources and saves costs.
  • Marketing automation means reduced human errors.

• • Channel independent – With channel marketing automation, a business can create a consistent brand presence on multiple channels with properly automated sales and marketing tools. As it saves time and resources, marketing automation makes it possible to expand your campaigns across manifold channels. Maintaining brand also makes it easy for customers to identify your business and connect with you.
  • Ease of use – Marketing automation is easy to use for people who are not tech savvy. Most platforms feature easy to use editors, ready-made templates and helpful information guide that are helpful in the creation and distribution processes.
  • It helps you to build more useful and detailed customer profiles.
  • It lets you focus on customer loyalty and retention.

• Marketing automation tools

simply change the way businesses communicate with customers. It helps improve the profitability of different businesses of every aspect. It lets you narrow marketing efforts to well-defined prospects. Marketing automation is going to stay and the technology is important to your success. Here are some best practices to follow.

• • Take baby steps – Avoid deploying a huge campaign at the beginning: it is better to start small and build. There is no point in running multiple campaigns in a hurry. Remember, it needs time to master.
  • Focus on marketing automation campaigns to strengthen marketing efforts – Marketing automation helps in identifying market behaviors. Effective automated marketing campaigns should qualify leads. It will help define and develop your buyers’ persona, which can be further used to strengthen campaigns.
  • Campaign management – A big no-no for setting it and forgetting. Though, automated functions mean increased efficiency; it is essential to be keen on ongoing campaign results and tweak messaging, app settings, etc.
  • Measure – Keeping track of everything you do, testing it repeatedly and making necessary changes is the key. Use A/B testing for every asset deployed through your Marketing Automation platforms to measure conversion, click through, site time, and other KPIs.

Marketing automation offers manifold benefits. It saves time and money, increases revenue while increasing productivity. However, remember, it will never replace human hard work. It is essential to understand it clearly to make the most out of it. Boosting your marketing strategy with these practices will let you scale up your campaigns, generate revenue and higher ROIs as well as stay on the cutting edge of the field.