The last three years have been formational years for marketing automation. What used to be a question in the mind of most marketers is now a must. While adoption rates are still low, the projected increase, user understanding, and the best marketing automation vendors flooding this space are evidence that marketing automation is rising.
What Is the Purpose of Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation technology manages marketing processes and multi-channel campaigns using automation. To nurture leads, businesses can target customers with automated marketing messages across email, website, social media, and SMS campaigns. With automated instructions for workflows, templates, or customized campaigns to automate online marketing and improve sales while maximizing efficiency. Without the hassle of employees attending to repetitive tasks, marketing automation software can free up employee time to take on more significant challenges while reducing the rate of human error.
Marketing automation software helps with lead generation and scoring and measures the overall ROI of marketing campaigns to create cost-effective marketing campaigns. The lead qualification process of marketing automation software enables businesses to create compelling sales pipelines to maximize conversion.
Marketing automation software lets your business implement a complete digital marketing strategy without intervention and without having to hit send on any email, message, or campaign post.
Marketing automation software can also identify your ideal audience, design the correct type of content to appeal to each customer demographic, and automatically send personalized messages to potential customers. This also helps businesses scale their marketing automation efforts with better data from each subsequent campaign to improve the ROI.
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What Are Different Types of Marketing Automation?
There are eight essential types of marketing automation to streamline your marketing campaigns:
CRM Automation
Customer Relationship Management software is an excellent tool for organizing and managing all customer data. It can also help with lead scoring efforts of marketing automation software to drive the sales to funnel and nurture each according to which stage it is in the sales funnel.
Social Media Marketing Automation
Social media marketing ROI and engagement can be automated directly via marketing automation software. It can schedule and publish content consistently across all your social media channels and be integrated with your website to identify your customers on social media platforms.
Advertsing Automation
Advertising automation features of marketing automation software help you customize and create a dynamic ad strategy based on different segments of customers. You can connect your social media advertising tools using marketing automation software.
Mobile Marketing Automation
You can target mobile users more effectively using marketing automation software. With notifications, in-app messages, custom offers, and product recommendations, your business can incite more interest in your customers based on their stage in the sales to funnel. Mobile marketing automation is a highly scalable form of marketing when done right.
Email Marketing Automation
Drip email campaigns can help spread valuable information to potential customers about your products to sway their purchase decisions. Again, depending on the buyer's stage in the sales funnel, marketing automation software can trigger emails based on predetermined rules based on your customers' actions.
Lead Management Automation
Lead generation and lead management in the era of instant gratification can be automated via marketing automation software. You can automate the lifecycle of acquiring and qualifying leads once you have your lead qualification criteria predetermined with marketing automation. Based on the customer's level of interest in your services, the lead management tools will alert your sales staff of high-quality leads and continue to nurture low-quality leads via marketing automation to lead to eventual conversion.
Omnichannel Automation
Omnichannel marketing automation helps your business create a unified brand image and positive buyer experience to influence sales throughout all your marketing platforms. Since not every customer will be reachable via the same platforms/forms of communication, marketing automation software identifies the best way to reach your customers based on segmentation data and decides when to deploy the type of content that is in line with your brand image.
What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?
Generate Better Leads
Automating lead generation and its advantages with marketing automation software gives your sales team more time to perfect their sales strategy and nurture the most qualified leads. With a better overview of customer buying patterns, marketing automation software can understand customer touchpoints and enable your business to address them. Trigger-based marketing messages with personalization can help influence buyers and drive more extensive marketing campaigns.
Personalization
Personalized content goes a long way in marketing automation. Automated data capture features of marketing automation software will always ensure that your marketing efforts are effective with your audience. By fully qualifying your leads, you can nurture leads effectively with personalized messages to customers.
Better Data
With data gathered by your marketing automation efforts, your business can make strategic decisions that can shape the whole industry. You can improve the ROI of your marketing efforts with better marketing data.
Align Sales and Marketing Teams
With marketing automation software and its product integrations, your sales and marketing teams are less likely to clash. As the marketing team passes down qualified leads, your sales team can follow up and do what is necessary to convert the leads. This cohesive and collaborative approach to improving revenue will make your employees’ lives more accessible.
What Is the Top Marketing Automation Software?
While there are many marketing automation software vendors on the market, there is one contender that always seems to stand out:
Marketo Engage
Marketo Engage is the most well-known marketing automation software that many industries prefer. Marketo Engage marketing automation software can provide your customers with sophisticated customer journey flows to ensure better conversion by engaging with the right audience with behavior tracking and assessing how different marketing channels improve revenue. By leveraging the power of AI technology, Marketo Engage allows businesses to take their hands off the steering wheel when it comes to marketing automation.
If you think investing in marketing automation software is the right move for your business, refer to our Marketing Automation Software Page and compare the best marketing automation software vendors in the market to make sure that you are making the right decision.
This infographic shows that the marketing automation industry is impacting small and large businesses alike.