What is Marketing Automation? The Complete Guide

Creating an automated marketing campaign on a good feeling can work, but you don’t know that till you’ve already blasted your database or spent your budget. A lead could be in your contact database for years before finally making a purchase. Imagine having to contact a lead manually every 10 days for 2 years — no business has time for that. Buffett is famous for seeing a dollar’s value for its worth when compounded annually for the next twenty years. Likewise, marketing automation multiplies to the value of leads by nurturing and “reactivating” them, over and over, until they become customers.
With marketing automation, you can be specific about what each customer sees. From advertising to email marketing, use your buyer personas along with behavioral targeting to only send the information each prospect or customer needs. Marketing Automation are short of time – automation helps cut to the chase by using the data you’re already collecting to highlight the most pertinent content at the right time.
It’s a valuable tool for automation marketers since it helps them predict how customers might behave if they tweak different marketing techniques to appeal more to their natural purchasing instincts. Each one has its advantages and, in some cases, it may be beneficial for your business to use more than one. Whether your brand is large, mid-size or small, automated marketing can generate and manage higher-quality leads, streamline processes and increase your campaigns’ returns. Many webinar solutions offer an installed package that connects with the marketing automation platform. The automation platform can then access the webinar tool’s engagement data.
The result is saved time and increased security since social media account managers don’t need access to underlying login credentials — just access to the automation platform. Interest in marketing automation tools has increased over the last few years, and that trend looks set to continue. Enterprise companies also generally have the option to spring for more customized tools. Software with integration and API capabilities is great for enterprise companies that want to connect their MA software with other tools they use regularly, like project management or BI software. Enterprises might also want to create custom segments for their email marketing campaigns or track custom KPIs in their dashboard.
If you have a WordPress site, try one of these lead generation plugins. Keep this in mind, if you’re going to be reviewing different platforms and looking for the best marketing automation software for your business. While these are most common, some marketing automation platforms specialize only in certain marketing processes. Below you’ll find the essential theory, real-life examples, and answers to some of the most burning questions regarding the process of automating your campaigns and using marketing automation platforms. Connecting with customers across several channels and an ever-increasing number of touchpoints is a data-intensive exercise. The average enterprise-grade marketing team relies on 91 marketing cloud services, and making sense of the data this software structure generates can be daunting sometimes.
Other features of automation tools that offer optimizations include product recommendations. In this case, if a customer clicks on a product, the automation tool will automatically show them other similar items they may be interested in purchasing. Now that you know the industry’s marketing automation definition, the tech’s advantages, some best practices and top platforms in use, it’s time to implement automated marketing in your organization.