Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online such as email, social media, websites, etc and automotive repetitive tasks.
The automation system plays a vital role in understanding how business can leverage and in place allows an individual to increase your customer size without having to grow your number of employees.
Now this will make you think what exactly marketing automation is? And in this blog, we will discuss the definitive guide of marketing automation.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a vast term to explain from setting a relationship between the buyers and sellers to promoting the business there is a lot to discuss it. Marketing is the lifeline for the brand-to-customer relationship and this consists of no segregated sales in this field. During the initial times, the company is taken care of by the builders and sellers and in this case, builders become the creators of the product and sellers trying their best to convince the customers regarding the product for the best sales. Sales are the developing and most essential part of marketing.
Eventually when the company starts prospering it becomes difficult to cope up with every customer and it is quite important to keep in touch with the customers. Therefore, the company hires a Marketing Director who can handle the customers in accordance with performance-driven, conversion-centric programs at scale.
And that will surely make your marketing company go big and you won’t be able to manage it via Word, Outlook, Excel spreadsheet.
You need a team to manage the marketing strategies for better performance and management adding to this you will spend so much time and money in emailing customers and setting relationships with the media-to-email programs as well as posting the blog content.
During this time marketing automation come in play to help you at its best.
Marketing automation is a tough concept to capture and the best way to understand the concept is to survey the landscape with the most descriptive and comprehensive definitions are:
- Marketing automation is the use of software and Web-based services to execute, manage and automate marketing tasks and processes. It replaces manual and repetitive marketing processes with purpose-built software and applications geared toward performance. – Techopedia
- Marketing Automation a subset of customer relationship management (CRM) that focuses on the definition, scheduling, segmentation and tracking of marketing campaigns. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient and make new processes possible. – Marketing Automation Times
Differentiating facts from myths:
Email marketing is a constituent of marketing automation both marketing automation and email marketing are two divergent as well as a morsel of disparate customer acquisition and retention channels to confirm your company’s conversion funnel.
The code is easy to decipher as for instance if a user or customer likes your Facebook page and later visit the page coming across some interesting content like the blogs and articles convincing the user to be an email subscriber.
The conversion paths are idiosyncratic and it is unfeasible to chase every user and that is exactly when marketing automation comes into play.
The myth is that marketing automation is severe, neutral, and not apt, but basically spamming people is what we call Automation, and the fact is that marketing automation connects multiple touchpoints and marketing channels including social media, email marketing, and content marketing. One of the core goals of marketing automation is to nurture prospects for the long terms which means focusing on the goal beyond direct sales. The fact is that marketing automation makes it easier to send personalized and targeted messages.
The fact is that marketing automation makes it easier to send personalized to targeted messages and makes communication stronger. During the automation of marketing, it is important to focus more on the quality of your campaign and messaging. Marketing automation gives the team the ability to add more personal touches to your campaign by collecting data on a prospect’s interest and goals, you will be the custom-tailor future empower your organization to do following. It is a dynamic content based on an individual’s specific user profile like sending targeted offers based on website patterns to categorize customers and prospect by common behavior, interest, and demographics details with dimensions for segmenting your customers.
Marketing automation helps your company test different variables like email send times, subject headings, and ideas for personalization. These are integrated marketing channels to deliver comprehensive, cross-platform user experience, every touchpoint is carefully planned for optimal conversion optimization.
The myth is that marketing automation is spam but the fact is automation is one of the most user-friendly marketing channels out there because it’s tailored around personalized user experience that is nurturing leads and guiding prospects through the sales conversion funnel.
How does marketing automation look like?
A platform for marketing automation is called Act-On and it is designed for small businesses with limited marketing resources because they do not have dedicated IT staff for dedicated database maintenance who need a cloud-based solution and a flexible, tiered pricing structure with month-to-month agreements.
Act-On simplifies performance by focusing on three key metrics by sent emails, open an email message, and clickthrough’s to the marketer’s website.
Marketing Automation, not only a Software:
The most important role is played by the software companies during marketing automation. When companies like Hubspot, Marketo(and others) are impressive but the emphasizing and re-emphasizing makes the software skeptic.
The well-proclaimed experts are actually the people sound and having exceptional knowledge regarding the software and the automation begins with the understanding to differentiate between strategies and tactics with a marketing framework with creative and structured strategies.
Tactics are basically effective intelligence to implement specific marketing techniques like whether you want the email subject headings to contain action verbs.
Inbound Marketing:
Inbound marketing means building a human-to-human relationship where Hubspot pays a significant role in content marketing and the automation platform is one of the companies to popularize the term.
The reasons for the popularization of Inbound Marketing:
Personalization:
A strategy to build marketing automation to empower your company to re-invest the data into refining your marketing strategy. Marketing software will assist you to streamline the process and build a connection with a lot of people and so many users.
Content Creation:
Addressing your customers’ demand where the content should be apt depicting the high-quality of work, engaging, and entertaining.
Integration:
Your marketing and analytics software need to communicate effectively with each other and integration will help ensure that your hand is delivering the right marketing messages to the right time in their journeys.
Attraction and Engagement:
Traffic acquisition is only part of the marketing equation. An organization needs to be qualified, targeted traffic to be successful in their marketing to attract an audience who will ultimately feel blissful and become long-term customers referring to other customers.
Conversion and Progression Through The Funnel:
When you have visitors on your website the strategy is to make them a permanent customer and you should start collecting their email addresses and start building an organic email list you can start reaching out to your customers and prospects so that you can re-engage them through your content like ebooks, whitepapers, and tip sheets.
Closing:
Becoming a lead magnet is not the only thing the next will be to seal the deal by fixing the opportunity by marketing messages that inspire users to take action and the need to transform leads to customers and existing ones to be permanent buyers. The techniques you can use are lead scoring, nurturing, mapping the buying process, and classic sales tactics.
Marketing automation is helpful to connect and simplify the seemingly disparate actions and in spite of reaching the customer directly, you can easily reach them through the software and establish a good camaraderie because this will decide the growth and the relations between the customers and company.
And content is the heart of inbound marketing. Therefore, it is important to motivate through the content to create a connection across the marketing channels.
Shopify is one of the most popular sites for powering e-commerce websites where an email to blog content campaign was launched marking that when the company publishes a new blog, post, the subscriber will receive an email. All the initiative depicts that the company is focused on nurturing brand to audience relationship. Focusing on the content being the root strength of the platform which makes it trustworthy, value-driven, and captivating. If the content and the marketing go hand in hand can easily glorify the relationship-building efforts.
Marketing Automation is psychological:
Marketing automation becomes psychological when there is a sound relationship between technology, sales, and marketing where people act according to their emotions and are incentive-driven. The ultimate success in the relationship can be attained when you will focus more on taking care of the customer and satisfying the needs and wellness of the customers by creating a connection taking care of the value of the work and giving the same value to the customers as well.
With the righteous approach, you can focus on the devoted customers and perform well.
The golden rule of marketing is that multiple conversations with the customer can help you make it through.Providing resources up-front, give your customers a sneak peek into your thought process, value, intelligence, and quality.
Feedback loops are helpful for marketing automation that notifies every action of their customers’ reaction. As there is immense pressure on you to sell under circumstances of demand generation so be very particular to respond to every basic email, newsletter, or complaint because customers are sensitive and have no idea regarding sales.
Another question that arises is that, what is more, important marketing or sales? Marketing automation is a solution that boosts the relationship on a scale, and it is ultimately linked with the sales process. Marketing automation provides an impressive insight into the community with the help of your sales team that provides a window into what your audience wants!
And selling with marketing automation is a boon as it is the biggest cognitive platform. Marketing automation is a decision, not an intuition will work but judgments will only make the process go on.
Simple Tactics to grow your business with marketing automation:
- Identifying and targeting high profile leads: A business providing marketing helps to companies that you can segment based upon where a lead opted into your sequence through Newsletters, Webinar, Videos, Blogs, Whitepaper. Other variables to take a glance are when your lead requires help for marketing the route is through reputation management, video marketing, corporate branding online, becoming an expert, content marketing, blog marketing, and SEO. The time you identify the high-profile leads and keep flow with them by nurturing them with questions, betas, recommendations, helping you craft your product to fit their needs perfectly.
- Improving conversations late in the funnel: A focused sales funnel is the best way to improve the conversation where you limit your choices with the exact information they are seeking and guiding them to the action you want to take and help them accordingly.
- Do not entertain poor leads: Digging into the analytics will help you monitor your leads to identify the worthless ones. You can do that by, removing the bad domains, distribution accounts, spam email address, inactive address, and use data checkers at points of signing up. (Diazepam)
- Reducing lose leads: Leakage is when good leads leave your sales. Marketing automation acts as a bridge that plugs the holes in the funnel causing leads to leave. Consisting of lead scoring model, sales alerts, lead nurturing process for decision-makers, monitor changes in leads, result in tracking and revision.
Constant communication between marketing and sales and highly optimized and automated marketing system help you plug any holes you have in your sales funnel.
Conclusion:
Implementing a marketing automation program can change the course of your business and when you complete it in a fancy and well-designed as well as organized manner delivering astonishing results is the best answer and proof for making business decisions. Because its impossible to decline good result and performance!