Using marketing automation software is changing the way businesses craft their marketing strategies. Today, when companies talk about marketing automation, they are generally referring to a variety of software solutions that can do the job. But unlike some other business functions that have become reliant on software, marketing still requires a fair amount of human skill and strategy to be effective. Sure, using a tool to collect and analyze large amounts of data can help a company make better decisions. But those decisions are still only as good as the people making them. And when it comes to marketing, using automation is not so much about sending more messages but instead about crafting them with better precision and purpose.
An Overview of Marketing Automation
Marketing automation refers to the use of software to accomplish an essential set of marketing tasks and win the war of staying relevant in an ever-expanding digital universe. Research shows that 70% of companies that use marketing automation consider it a key driver of their business. At its heart, marketing automation is about engaging your customer in a meaningful way—using artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive those essentials tasks across channels and across teams. It accomplishes this while also giving your team more breathing room to think up the next great strategic marketing campaign.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Numerous advantages accrue to businesses, especially as they grow, from using marketing automation. It helps with: Lead Generation and Nurturing Identifying and engaging prospective customers is the name of the game when it comes to lead generation. And doing that effectively and efficiently is where marketing automation really shines. For us, identifying the “right” leads means not just finding potential customers but also finding folks we can and want to serve. Once we identify a lead, we engage it using a series of well-crafted, often automated, interactions and touchpoints. We also use segmentation, which allows us to smartly and effectively group leads into categories that make sense for us (and for them).
Keeping Existing Customers
Automated marketing isn’t just for winning over new customers—it’s also vital for keeping the ones you’ve got. Businesses can use Follow Up Boss to remind themselves, on a very personal level, to reach out to customers they might otherwise forget; to send them exclusive offers that, a month or so after a family rule was instituted, might be followed with the phrase, “I hope this isn’t triggering a parenting war within your household.”
Why Is Marketing Automation Important?
It matters because it has moved from being optional to being essential if you want your organization to perform at a high level. There are a few main reasons why it is important: First, you save time and money. The necessary but routine marketing tasks that we have to do, like sending out emails, tracking our campaign performance, and posting on social media, take a lot of time. And time is money. So if we can save time, we are also, in effect, saving money.
Enhanced Preciseness
Tasks such as customer segmentation or data collection suffer from costly human errors. Automation guarantees a greater level of precision, yielding more dependable results and improved targeting.
Growing with Your Business
When businesses scale, so too should their efforts in marketing. Otherwise, it becomes impossible to manage campaigns over hundreds or millions of customers. Marketing automation means your campaigns can grow in size and continue performing well.
Basic Characteristics of Marketing Automation Systems
Selecting the appropriate marketing automation system for your business requires comprehending the features that are most consequential for your objectives. The fundamental capabilities you should seek out are listed below.
Duplicating Delight with Automation in Email Marketing
In the realm of marketing automation, one of the most popular and powerful applications is personalized and behavior-triggered email sequences. You might think of it as email marketing on steroids. Why? Because no matter how many delightful emails you send to your customers and prospects, it is not nearly enough if you’re trying to engage with your audience at every stage of their customer journey.
Social media management remains consistent with the automated posting of social media content. Marketing platforms can now schedule and post not only to Facebook and Twitter, but also to LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram. These platforms also serve up far more useful analytics than were available even a couple of years ago.
Integration with CRM
Having a customer relationship management tool coupled with a marketing automation tool allows you to see a comprehensive overview of your customers, which is an essential element of both tools. Yet in about half of US companies, the marketing and sales teams do not use the same tool for automation or intelligence.
How do modern tools enable businesses to optimize marketing campaigns and improve customer engagement? By tracking and analyzing customer behavior, for starters. Businesses now can keep a close eye on what their customers are up to in real time, and they can do it on a massive scale. This is partly because the internet and the aforementioned tools allow for an unprecedented scale and speed of data collection. But that’s not all, as we’ll soon see.
Omnichannel Campaigns
Omnichannel automation tools help ensure a consistent customer experience across channels—be it email, text, or social digital ads. They allow for real-time updates to optimize campaigns on the fly.
Optimal Strategies for Deploying Marketing Automation
For marketing automation to function effectively, it requires a strategic approach. Here are some optimal strategies.
Set Obvious Targets
Explain what exact parts of your marketing you want to automate and why (i.e., for what benefit). Assign numerals to your objectives, and use concrete nouns and verbs in your phrases. This is not a pep talk; it’s a mission statement.
Align Teams
Marketing automation reaches beyond just marketing. It’s used by sales and customer service to ensure that workflows are seamless and that all of your teams are working together to create a single unified experience for your customers.
Make it Your Own at Every Stage!
Today’s competitive landscape requires so much more than the old “one-size-fits-all” mold. We use performance data—who’s coming to our site, who’s interacting with our content, who’s buying our products—to make decisions about our website and our messaging. This data informs our on-site, in-message, and even in-product personalization. And it’s become integral to both our strategy and execution.
Key to Reaching Your Audience: Segmenting
In order to segment your audience properly, base it on behavior, demographics, or purchase history. When you maintain this level of detail within your segments, you can reel off some very diverse and specific campaigns. These are what I call “direct” campaigns because they go straight to the target and are much more likely to hit it than the average campaign.
Dynamic Content Automation tools enable real-time customization of emails, landing pages, and advertisements. Use them to add truly personalized touches to your content. While you may be tempted to think of personalizing content as a one-way street—going from your brand to an individual consumer—remember that real human interactions are conversations.
Examine and Improve
Leverage analytics to gauge just how well your automated workflows are doing. Make it a habit to look over key performance indicators—like how many people seem to enjoy what you’ve sent them or how much money your campaign is making—and see if there’s anything you could change to make your campaign not just work, but work better.
Marketing And Automation In Customer Relations
Marketing automation doesn’t seek to replace human interactions; it seeks to enhance them. Here’s how it can forge better relationships with customers:
Tailored Messages for the Individual Customer
When it comes to automation, the messages really do come across as much more personal. Although they may be triggered by a specific action on the customer’s part, the content speaks directly to the customer’s particular interests and needs. Be it automation with email, SMS, or social posts, people trust personalization.
Speedier Replies
Automation ensures that each inquiry receives a response. It does this by quickly and efficiently routing customers to the correct department or resource—usually the right one, to the customer’s benefit. Automation makes it possible to maintain a high rate of resolving customer inquiries and to maintain an equally high figure representing customer satisfaction.
Uninterrupted Experiences Across Channels
Customers interact with businesses at all hours, across an increasing number of channels—from the social media platforms they frequent to their email inboxes. Automation ensures that these sales and service channels send the same consistent and coherent brand message to the customer across all the touchpoints they use.
WoopSocial is an extraordinary tool for social media management that businesses can use. With WoopSocial, companies can schedule and publish posts on various platforms, including but not limited to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This web service provides not just one, but multiple, layers of opportunities for businesses to interact with and understand their target audience(s). You can even automate the tasks you find yourself doing far too often if you hope to keep engaging with your audience and growing your impression count.
Conclusion
It is no longer an option for businesses to automate their marketing; it is a must for retaining today’s customer base. Customers are demanding “seamless and personalized experiences at scale,” and the only way to achieve that is by automating your workflows, integrating your platforms, and deriving actionable insights from your data. First, pick your tools. If your business is social media-based, you might already be using something like WoopSocial to manage your way through the social media landscape. WoopSocial and platforms like it are for making social media automation simple. So, to recap, marketing automation is about tools, teams, and strategies. Pick an automation tool, assemble an awesome cross-functional team, and strategize your way to the future.
