Marketing was widely believed that it is a job that is focused on raising profit for the organisation, or at the very least bringing awareness of the company’s brand to as many eyeballs as possible. However, there are plenty of menial tasks that hinder their progression. It does seem endless, so how do they go about achieving the main objective? 

That’s why it is pivotal to establish an effective marketing automation strategy early on, by leveraging software or tools that can help automate marketing efforts. Automating the marketing department, in short, is the key to streamlining processes, and in turn, boosting the bottom line.

but wait…

What exactly is marketing automation?

Basically, marketing automation integrates data and processes from other sales and marketing channels into a simple platform. From there, marketing teams are able to complete time-consuming manual tasks and categorise a large abundance of data into simple insights that can be used to create business decisions and strategies.

For example, customer profiles. A marketing automation software is able to record all customer interactions or profile information should they provide it. From there, all these can be turned into a consumer’s journey in an analytic report. 

How will marketing automation benefit businesses?

Enhanced marketing plans

A cohesive marketing plan empowers a business to better reach its goals, and marketing automation enables that. Visual builders and comprehensive integrations like Nexent Dashboard can help support those plans, with projections and research based on quantitative and qualitative data.

Simple visual road maps offer a transparent “full picture” that can help achieve buy-in from leadership unfamiliar with certain marketing practices.  It also helps collaboration efforts across different marketing platforms such as SEO, PPC & social media.

Work efficiency

Most businesses spent more time managing work than actually working.  With automation tools, we can manage workflow easily & spend more time getting actual work done. 

Automating tasks such as email scheduling and lead generation simplifies things and allows the marketing team to focus on the most important matter: bringing profit to the business. Automation also mitigates human error. Less error translates to more savings, and more savings can help push the growth of the organisation.

Builds customer loyalty

Highly targeted, personalized messaging that adds value for each customer allows them to engage with the brand at their own pace. But constructing personalized messages one by one is too cumbersome & not efficient, this is where marketing automation comes in. 

Marketing automation tools can utilize collected data to construct a highly personalized message which encourages engagement and improves conversions.  Remember: a happy customer is a loyal customer who would spread the good word. 

What are the features of Marketing Automation?

Email campaign management

The average professional spends 28% of the workday reading and answering email, according to a McKinsey analysis. But it is an important factor in customer loyalty & retention. This is why email marketing should always be the first task to automate.

Managing email campaigns is now easier than ever. It can be prepared, created, and scheduled way ahead of time. Pairing with customer interactions, it’s easier to create emails that are personalised just for them. 

Social media dashboards

With so many accounts and networks, it can be difficult to juggle the slight variations on campaigns or track customers across networks using different usernames. The social media dashboard displays all social networks and their marketing calendars. It can also automate data updates, process data automatically from different social media accounts into one place, schedule posts, and upload them to all platforms allowing a non-technical person to filter & explore data using the onboard user interface.

Automate Marketing Workflows

Most of the time, one project involves many parties from marketing to web development or even the IT department. With workflow automation, businesses can involve all the parties in one place with shared information & updates. 

Users guide all automation processes with workflows. These are simple coded instructions that are the building blocks of automation. Whenever a team member completes a task, an alert will be triggered & sent an email to the next person in charge to kickstart the next step of the project. Project management tools often map these workflows to demonstrate their effects in the context of the overarching marketing campaign. 

Customer segmentation

Not all customers are the same, hence you need different strategies for different types of customers. Businesses can use the integrated data from automated marketing to improve their customer segmentation strategies. There are marketing automation tools that can tag & segment customers according to certain traits: age, location, interest & more. 

Automated marketing can run and track different campaigns targeted to different segments of customers. It can also deliver detailed analytics such as conversions, click-through rates, and website statistics. These behaviors inform new criteria for customer segments & further refine them. More precise segments boost the personalization of every customer interaction. Many automation platforms include advanced segmentation tools that organize much of this data. 

Landing pages and forms

Some businesses might run multiple campaigns at the same time, and sometimes these campaigns’ landing pages can look similar. For example, a company would have run two labor day 2022 campaigns to A/B test the effectiveness of different lading pages, the URLs could be similar with a tiny bit different. Remembering 2 URLs should be easy right? But what if 10 URLs or even 20? This is when marketing automation comes in handy.

marketing automation tools make it as easy as possible for customers to download your content and subscribe to your newsletters with landing pages. Automation tools can generate different versions of landing pages depending on the links or ads the users clicked on. Some tools even fill out a sign-up form for previously registered customers, removing the need for them to input any information. These downloadable assets and pages can be stored within the database. Even if hosted independently, they can be tagged with tracking URLs generated by the software.

Reap The Fruit From Marketing Automation

Automation if used correctly in Marketing Automation can cut costs and raise revenue by expanding your marketing plan, connecting all brand touchpoints, and increasing the value of each channel and customer.