Marketing Automation

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation (MA) is a term used to describe the replacement of repetitive manual marketing processes and tasks with solutions that are automated, especially in regards to e-mail marketing.

Marketing automation nurtures sales prospects with personalized content that is designed to convert them into customers through drip campaigns and nurture campaigns that help educate prospects about your products.

Why is Marketing Automation Important?

Personalized, targeted messaging is critical for customer engagement, yet as companies scale, one-to-one marketing becomes less feasible.

Marketing automation makes it easy to send personalized targeted messages to your prospects (no matter how many there are) in a timely fashion, strengthening engagement.

Due to its focus on operational efficiency, marketing automation can offer an excellent ROI to your company.

Common Features Of Marketing Automation Platforms

Although different marketing automation platforms offer different features most offer the same core functionality. Below is a list of some typical features you can expect in a MA platform:

• Campaign Management - Automated relevant messages sent based on user behavior
• Content Creation - An easy way to add new content tailored to relevant audiences
• Email Marketing - Automatically triggered and in batches
• Forms - Built in registration forms that connect to your database
• Landing Pages - Customized per campaign
• Lead Management/Scoring - A way to qualify leads based on behavior
• CRM Integration - Automatic data syncing
• Social Media - Social sharing, social listening and tracking
• Analytics - Basic reporting dashboards and measurement of impact on revenue

Basic Marketing Automation Strategy

Step 1: Outline Your Goals

Begin by stating your end goals and desired outcomes. Which is more important to you: increased brand awareness, increased customer engagement or increased loyalty?

Identify and document desired goals to ensure that your marketing automation strategy maximizes all of your assets.

Step 2: Map the Customer Journey

The three basic customer stages are awareness, consideration and decision.

Identify the various stages of your customer journey, noting customer emotions and experiences during each stage and identifying how your product can help or solve problems.

Step 3: Define Your Customer Segments

Depending on the size and complexity of your content library, your segments should be various combinations of your buyer personas and customer life cycle segments. Don’t overcomplicate your segments; minimizing scope will allow you to get started sooner.

Step 4: Assess Your Content

Since good content is an integral part of successful marketing automation, an assessment of your existing content is a necessary step in the process.

You may need to create new content if you find that there are gaps between what you have and what you need.

Step 5: Map Your Message Content to Specific Segments

The final step is to map your content (some of which may not yet exist) to your various customer segments so you can see the various pieces in your marketing automation. It may help to map this out with a flow chart for easier visualization.

Examples Of Popular Marketing Automation Software

Below are some examples of popular marketing automation software on the market:

• ActOn - Cloud-based email automation software for small and medium-sized businesses.
• Bronto - Marketing automation platform specifically for retailers and ecommerce companies.
• Customer.io - Startup focused on behaviorally-triggered email automation for small and medium-sized Internet companies.
• Eloqua - Robust marketing automation and email marketing system for enterprise customers.
• HubSpot - Highly-rated marketing automation for small and medium-sized businesses, strong on content management, product education and training.
• Marketo - Popular with enterprise, CRM and inbound marketing platform known for its powerful (somewhat cumbersome) process-driven automated campaign builder.
• Pardot - Robust and powerful marketing automation for enterprise (said to be more intuitive than Marketo).
• Zoho - Inexpensive and elegant email marketing platform from a company with many different business productivity software tools.