What is Marketing Automation?

The simple definition of marketing automation is using software to automate marketing tasks that you do on a daily basis, with the goal of improving efficiency across your entire marketing team without compromising the quality of the work being produced.

There are a number of areas where marketing automation can help streamline and measure some standard marketing tasks: email marketing, segmentation, lead generation, lead and customer nuturing, and measuring outcomes. It can help you understand your website traffic more closely, by identifying behaviors on your site, and communicating more personally with these visitors, versus just sending generic offerings or emails.

How Can Marketing Automation Help You?

1. Productivity: As noted above, an automated software process will help to reduce time-consuming and redundant tasks.  Do you dread cobbling together spreadsheets of various data to figure out who you need to contact and when?  May as well turn over the tasks you hate to a computer program who can do them for you, while you focus on work you’re passionate about.

2. Cost Savings: Compare the cost of an annual software license vs. the cost of an annual salary for a team member to do all of these mundane tasks manually.  Another bonus?  Marketing automation makes things more efficient, which means your campaigns can get up and running much faster, optimizing the overall spend on your marketing strategy.

3. Effectivness: As mentioned above, an automation program can help you to customize and tailor marketing tasks to your individual prospects, making your campaigns that much more effective.

4. Measurability: Marketing automation tools come equipped with detailed analytics and reporting tools, which will allow you to see right away what aspects of your campaigns are working and which are not working, giving you the information you need to make informed decisions.

So…What Can You Automate?

All of the benefits listed above can help your marketing organization in numerous ways…but what exactly will you be able to automate to actually see those benefits come to life?  Here’s a list of some of the tasks that you can manage through marketing automation:

• Email Marketing: anything from batch emails to workflow-triggered, lead-nuturing campaigns, to dynamic content and mobile optimization
• Lead Generation: this includes lead generation capacities, pay-per-click advertising, and online (webinars) and offline events (tradeshows) management
• Lead Management: automate list segmentation and management, which will help to ensure your generating leads are being followed up by the right people, at the right time
• Social Media Marketing: use the software to manage your profiles, manage your content, see how your content is being shared, and track and manage all of your social campaigns, including their results
• Content/Resource Management: most tools will help you to track and assign your content calendar topics, and manage your resources across tasks, budgets and campaigns

…And Where Do You Start?

Once you’ve made the decisiont to invest in a marketing automation solution, you’ll need to find the right one that will work best for your business. You’ll need to understand exactly what goals you want to achieve with your automation program, what your requirements are, and what your budget is. Make sure you read our last post on why software doesn’t get used in a business, and follow our tips to make sure the due diligence is done before you decide on which software you want to move forward with.

And to make sure your marketing automation efforts gel with your inbound marketing strategy, contact us for a free assessment by one of our Certified Inbound Specialists.