Marketing automation is; using technology to automate, streamline and improve marketing activities. It includes everything from customer data management and lead nurturing to email triggers and segmentation. 75% of enterprises already use some marketing automation software, (according to Social Media Today’s 2019 State of Marketing Automation survey). The global market for marketing automation, estimated at $3.9 billion in 2020, is projected to reach a much larger size of $6.3 billion by 2026.
Common marketing automation tools include customer relationship management (CRM) software, different marketing platforms, and customer engagement platforms. By automating these processes, your marketing team can focus on more creative and strategic activities, increasing efficiency and reducing costs, whilst the technological solutions take care of the tedious tasks.
Marketing automation can solve many problems, but it’s just a tool. It doesn’t know what your brand needs and why. Marketing automation platforms merely reflect the strategies, goals, processes, and people you set in place; it is a collaboration of IT and marketing.
You Can Automate A Plethora Of Your Marketing Activities
- Customer relationship management (CRM) automates sales processes and manages customer, order, and product data.
- Sales force automation handles sales processes, manages data, and offers analytics.
- Email marketing, which facilitates the entire email marketing process. This includes the setting up of lead generation forms, as well as a variety of reports to track success. More than 65% automate their email marketing.
- Social media automates many aspects of social media marketing, including content publishing, scheduling, monitoring, and analytics. 78% of content marketers already rely on automation to plan and deliver their content at scale.
- Lead management automates generating, scoring, and using sales or marketing leads.
- Analytics show the data in a visual format and identifies patterns in market and customer data.
- Pricing assists with setting competitive pricing structures, usually within an e-commerce environment. Examples include A/B testing or demand estimation.
- Digital advertising and promotion refine and automate much of the ad creation process and bidding strategies across digital channels.
- Customer loyalty automates critical components in the promotion and administration of loyalty programs.
“Where Could I Benefit Most From Automation?”
Marketing automation platforms are more effective for data analysis and processing information & knowledge. 17% of marketers are even integrating AI-powered automation or segmentation into their strategy. In detecting noise, comprehension, and wisdom, humans are more effective.
Most marketers are making the most of automation by utilising it for repetitive, mundane tasks that take long working hours. By doing so, they minimise the time required to spend on a repetitive task that may be high in value for the company, but low in requirement of intellectual capital; thus, saving more time for creative, strategic & intellectual tasks.
The Undeniable Unique Benefits Of Automating…
Marketing automation creates a win-win scenario, where both the brand & the consumer enjoy different benefits. You, as the brand side, get to reap the benefits of optimising your cost & time capital by drastically reducing the work time you may have to spend on a project. The consumer side enjoys an automate, simpler, smoother and faster user experience provided by technology.
Moreover, in data collection and interpretation, machines are very efficient. You also get a plethora of information provided by all the data collected through automation, which will help you make more precise and informed marketing decisions, thus improving your brand’s long term market performance.
However, in deciding whether to keep or discard outliers in the data, human management judgement is needed.
The Key Factor When Deciding To Automate
If your profits and the scale of your business are not high enough, sometimes automating some functions is not worth the cost. The key is deducing whether a certain automation is ROI positive for your brand, or how you can turn it into an ROI positive situation.
You Can Succeed In Implementing Marketing Automation:
- Define your goals
Pick your key performance indicators (KPIs) and measure them. Choose a realistic growth outcome. Finally, identify the tools and timeline needed to reach your goals. Ask questions such as:
- Over the last month, have these leads increased?
- How do you explain stagnation in lead generation?
You might want to set a goal like this: “Achieve 25% more website-derived leads per month with social media advertising by the end of the year.”
- Research available marketing automation solutions
- Organise your existing data
- Align the automated marketing processes with the sales processes
- Create a timeline for the marketing automation software transition
- Train your staff to use the new marketing automation software
- Continually review results from the marketing automation effort
Consumer Engagement Is Highly Lucrative to Automate
Through digitalising your consumer engagement, you can automate certain processes to improve time & cost efficiency. For example, you can automate customer support up to a certain point through chatbots, allowing you to decrease costs significantly & providing a much smoother customer experience. However, the most intriguing point of engagement to automate seems to be brand activations.
By automating certain points of your brand activation, you can create unique new benefits. You can automate the purchase validation mechanism of your activations, which can help you scale up your audience and decrease work time spent. Automating your incentive management for digital reward based programs also helps a lot. This allows you to create cost & time efficiencies whilst also providing a significantly quicker journey for your participants. You can also automate cashback payment systems for your cashback campaigns, which can enhance consumer experience incredibly, whilst creating efficiencies for your brand.
You can also collect, analyse and utilise consumer data through the use of automation in your activations. You can segment your current and potential customers with respect to demographics, psychographics, and shopping behaviour profile and define persona. Furthermore, you can target and retarget a larger, high-user, current, or potential customer population with an ad hoc automation procedure that finds potential alike customers through Facebook and Google.
Automating lead generation with such campaigns through Facebook and Google would enable you to reach the profitable segment of potential customers.
You can increase your brand’s market share by increasing the usage of current clients, increasing the loyalty of switcher clients, and converting competitors’ clients to your brand.
Through data based automation, you can act on solid information gained from purchase data. For example, you can detect on a receipt that a consumer has bought your competitor’s product. Before he buys another product in this category, within a timeline, you can send him or her a CTA that will incentivise the use of your product.
If your business scale is large enough, you can use marketing automation, and machine learning for the processes that are tedious or that cannot be handled by humans easily. For optimising your campaigns, engagement development companies can help you succeed by providing you with the data points to send specialised offers to potential or current customers.
