What is the Purpose of Marketing Automation?
It seems like everyone in the business world is talking about marketing automation. If you find yourself wondering “what is is the purpose of marketing automation” when you hear people talking about it, we’re here to demystify the practice.
Technology has revolutionized the world of marketing, and one of the latest developments is quickly becoming a mainstay in the industry. If technology tends to intimidate you, don’t worry, marketing automation is not as complex as it may sound.
Consider this your definitive guide to the world of marketing automation. We’re going to cover what it is, how it could benefit your company, and what you can do to start using it.
Marketing Automation Defined
If you want to understand marketing automation, you need to think about the concept of automation itself.
Automation in its purest form uses technology to complete simple tasks, and we’ve been using it for centuries now. Factories could be considered our first foray into the world of automation, and as technology has improved, automation touches nearly every modern industry.
Marketing automation uses software and other web-based services to execute and manage marketing tasks. Essentially it can take over nearly any manual and repetitive task so you can focus on your high-value work.
A social media management tool you use to schedule posts or automatically follow people who tag your company is considered a form of marketing automation. A program that sends out email newsletters and deletes subscribers who don’t open messages is another example of automating marketing tasks.
You can leverage marketing automation tactics to handle repetitive tasks, but it can also help improve your entire sales and marketing strategy.
As marketing automation becomes more sophisticated, it can do more with predictive analytics and strategy. For example, business-to-business software like Pardot can deploy marketing landing pages to bring in more leads and sort through lead pipelines to determine the best ones to pursue. It can even generate reports that can tell you how your campaigns are performing.
The Benefits of Marketing Automation
Now that you understand how marketing automation works, we can start talking about how it can help your business.
You may not see the point in investing in a conventional marketing cloud if things are running fine in sales and marketing. However, businesses that truly want to innovate and grow need to spend their time developing an automation strategy.
Want to know why we recommend that every business gets into automation? Once you appreciate the purpose of marketing automation and all of the good it can do, you’ll wonder why you’ve taken so long to get started.
Save Time
How much time do you think it takes to deploy a simple email and social media campaign about a sales promotion? It may not seem like it would take a lot of time to send out a few emails and post a status or two, but the truth is that deploying a campaign can take a lot longer than you’d think.
One of the main benefits of automation is the time it gives back to your employees. Now employees will be able to spend most of their time on more important tasks while your automation programs handle menial work.
Who will be around to make sure emails and social posts are deployed at the right time? Do you know who will decide the best customer lists to use and the proper targeting for ads?
A person would have to spend a few hours determining send times and audience segmentations. However, a marketing automation program can manage all of that in a matter of minutes.
Personalize Your Marketing Message
Personalization is an essential factor in the marketing world. If you want to resonate with today’s consumers, you can’t take a generic approach. Everyone wants to feel like businesses and companies are producing things specifically for them. And leaning into a personalized approach to marketing could do wonders for your lead pipeline and sales numbers.
It would be impossible for one person or even a team of dedicated people to manage personalizing content for hundreds or thousands of contacts. Luckily for us, the right automation software can handle it.
Marketing personalization can be as simple as adding someone’s first name to a greeting on a newsletter. However, once you collect more data, things can get much more advanced. Imagine being able to push relevant information about promotions and special offers to people with a history of buying your products and services. Think about what you could do if you could automatically send people messages that let them know they still have items in your cart. The right software can do all of this and more!
Improve Strategy
How do you currently measure success with your marketing programs? Seeing sales numbers go up might be nice, but it doesn’t give you insight into what specifically is working with your current campaigns.
If you want to improve your marketing work on a more granular level, automation is a must. You’ll be able to gain deep insight into campaign performance and get specifics into what’s performing well.
A typical Google Analytics dashboard can give you basic information about bounce rates and time spent on pages. However, it can’t provide you with information on how to run a practical A/B test to improve your next round of ads. In addition, the dashboard won’t have integrated artificial intelligence (AI) that can show you demographic information around your best customers.
The beauty of modern automation programs is that you don’t just get a lot of data and analytics. They’ll also help you process the metrics into valuable insight and help you figure out what to do next by making data-based recommendations.
It’s Time to Bring Automation to Your Business
The purpose of marketing automation is to enhance operational efficiency to ultimately maximize revenue. Marketing automation isn’t a “fad” in the industry; it’s the next stage of evolution for marketing. The combination of automation and AI can help your business improve every aspect of your approach to marketing and sales.
Getting started in automation is virtually a requirement, but it’s even more critical to ensure that you manage everything the right way. Finding the right automation partner can do a lot to set you up for success. Fortunately for you, we’re here to help your company every step of the way.
Do you have questions about how marketing automation could help your business? Are you ready to start working with a trusted automation partner? Contact us today to discuss how your company can use marketing automation the right way.
