What Is Marketing Automation and How Can You Leverage It?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just set your marketing on autopilot? It would certainly free up more of you and your teams’ time to do what you do best—your business. What is marketing automation, anyway? Is it the magic marketing autopilot you’ve always wanted?
Marketing automation isn’t quite as simple as that, but it does come close. Marketing automation is a digital marketing strategy that uses powerful software to automate some of your repetitive, time-consuming marketing tasks. (1) These tasks can include:
- Email marketing
- Social media posts
- Digital advertising campaigns
Much More Than a Time-Saver
With today’s new developments in automation technology, companies that automate their marketing can go well beyond saving time. Automation can create personalized messaging through retargeting, AI, and other cutting-edge digital tools. That, for today’s customers, is a game-changer.
With personalization, marketers can target each customer segment—and sometimes each customer—with content that meets their exact needs. That puts the customer in the driver’s seat. When that happens, the customer feels in control of the buying decision.
When you empower customers to examine the facts through well-crafted content, they can make better-informed decisions, resulting in less buyer’s remorse and more happy customers.
Customers who are thrilled with their purchase, in turn, want to tell others about their good luck in finding such an effective product or service. Instead of only making one sale, you have a customer-turned-brand-advocate out there singing your products’ praises. Now, that’s an efficient use of your marketing budget.
Automation Is Only as Good as What You Automate
Marketing automation, though, is only as good as the content you automate. Self-promotional material, no matter how slick and prescient your retargeting is, turns customers off.
What customers want is content that recognizes their needs, pain points, and goals. When a marketing team realizes what keeps their customers up at night, they can then craft content that helps those customers solve those challenges.
Solving those challenges builds the kind of trust that turns first-time customers into loyal, long-term ones that you can depend on for repeat sales, upsells, and new product sales.
Marketing Automation Empowers You to Scale Every Campaign
Putting that problem-solving savvy to work at scale is the beauty of marketing automation done right. So long as your marketing team does its research on your target customers and creates content that meets the needs that your research identifies, automation allows you to reach more people who need what you sell.
Digital marketing automation allows you to find all those leads that have eluded you. Leads that have never heard of your company—but have the exact challenges that your products and services can help them conquer.
Set Your Teams Up for Automation Success by Integrating the Right Software
One of the biggest roadblocks to a company’s success is when silos separate your marketing and your sales teams. Though they share a common purpose, namely increasing revenue, all too often they’re separated by strategy.
Integrating your sales and marketing software and encouraging collaboration between your teams can change the playing field. When your sales team knows what content your marketing team has published and to what customer segment, they’ll be on the same page when they discuss those features of your product that meet the customer's most pressing needs.
Conversely, when your marketing team hears some of the objections the sales team hears out in the field, they’ll be able to target their content to those customers’ exact objections. Both can benefit by looking over your analytics software—when it’s integrated into both the marketing and sales software. The insights they can gain into their customers’ interests, needs, and dreams through analytics integration can turbocharge both your marketing and sales results.
Get More out of Marketing Automation When You Leverage All Its Power
Even if you outsource your marketing automation, it still represents a significant cost to your company. Get the most out of your investment by leveraging all its capabilities. (2)
- Make the most out of your data: Data doesn’t only include customer preferences, online behavior, goals, and interests. It also includes the right times and places to reach your target audiences. When and where a potential customer sees a message matters. Use the right tools so you can maximize your messages’ impact with the right timing and placement.
- Repurpose effective content: When you have a piece of content that performs well, your team should brainstorm ways to repurpose that content for other customer segments and other platforms. An explainer video that tells how a new gadget works can, when expanded, turn into a white paper that takes a deep dive into the gadget’s workings and its benefits.
- Retain the personal touch: Automating certain processes shouldn't turn your marketing team into robotic, number-crunching machines. Respond to social media inquiries and blog post comments with personal, problem-solving advice and information.
- Keep tweaking: No matter how successful a campaign, you can do better. Refine each message to avoid any misunderstandings. Use customer feedback to deliver better, more effective content.
If you’d like to leverage automated marketing to catapult your business into high gear, we can help. To design an automated marketing program that leverages this technology to its greatest potential, get in touch with our marketing automation experts today.
