Marketing Automation Platforms: Put Your Campaigns on Loop

As marketers, we always seek new ways to work smarter, not harder, right? That’s where a marketing automation platform can help.

With marketing automation, you can streamline tedious marketing tasks and nurture leads more effectively. Choosing the right platform and knowing what it actually does will save you tons of money and stress later on.

In this article, you’ll learn what a marketing automation platform is, how it can streamline your operations, and what features to look out for when choosing a platform for your marketing team.

Table Of Contents:

• What is a Marketing Automation Platform?
• Who Needs Marketing Automation Tools?
• Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Software for Your Business
• Top Marketing Automation Platforms in 2024
• FAQs – Marketing Automation Platforms
• Conclusion

What is a Marketing Automation Platform?

Think of marketing automation as your very own virtual marketing assistant (only much less expensive).

A marketing automation platform uses software to automate tasks such as email marketing, blog writing, social media posts, and even ad campaigns.

These platforms do much more than scheduling; they track leads, score them based on engagement, and can even personalize a user’s experience.

The right marketing automation platform can truly be an all-in-one solution for your marketing strategy.

Benefits of Marketing Automation Software

Many marketers report seeing significant results in a short time. But why should you invest in marketing automation?

Improved Efficiency and Productivity

By automating those tedious, repetitive tasks (we’re looking at you, social media scheduling), you’ll free up valuable time to work on high-level strategy and creative campaigns.

Need to send welcome emails to every new subscriber? Instead of manually doing this for hundreds or thousands of leads, an email automation solution like MailChimp can automate this process for you.

Need to write a hundred product descriptions? Leave it to BrandWell, a powerful all-in-one brand growth platform that can produce any type of content — from long-form SEO blog posts to quick product summaries — without landing you in hot water for duplicate content.

Enhanced Lead Nurturing and Qualification

It can be difficult to “funnel” customers when they’re at different stages of the buying cycle. Marketing automation can segment audiences, deliver targeted content based on user behavior, and guide prospects through the sales funnel with little effort from your marketing team.

Data-Driven Decision Making

If your marketing efforts aren’t data-driven, are you even making a real effort?

A marketing automation platform provides marketers with vital customer data and insights. You’ll better understand what works (and what doesn’t), which campaigns are performing well, and can even see where leads are dropping off.

Powerful, right?

Personalized Customer Experiences

Marketing is all about creating a stellar customer experience.

These days, consumers want a more personalized experience. Personalization is more than simply addressing users by their first name in emails; it involves using data about their behaviors to anticipate needs and preferences.

Providing great marketing through relevant content is essential to keeping your prospects engaged.

By automating mundane tasks like scheduling posts or sending emails, marketers can free up more time for creative activities like developing content strategies or optimizing website pages for SEO purposes.

Source: 99 Firms

Who Needs Marketing Automation Tools?

Marketing automation tools are invaluable assets for a diverse range of individuals and organizations looking to streamline their marketing efforts, ensure efficient communication with their audience, and optimize the return on investment from their marketing campaigns.

The primary beneficiaries include:

Digital Marketers: They rely heavily on automation tools to manage large-scale campaigns across multiple channels, allowing them to focus on strategy over repetitive tasks.

Businesses with Complex Sales Cycles: Companies that have long sales cycles may find it difficult to manage the entire process manually. Marketing automation software can help by automating tasks such as lead scoring, nurturing campaigns, and email follow-ups. This allows companies to focus on more important aspects of the sales cycle while still ensuring leads are nurtured properly.

E-commerce Businesses: Automation is crucial for personalizing customer interactions at scale — such as cart abandonment emails or product recommendations — driving higher conversion rates.

Small Business Owners: Often operating with limited resources, they find that automating social media posts, email responses, and other aspects of digital engagement helps them compete more effectively without expanding staff.

Marketing Agencies: They leverage such platforms extensively to handle multiple client accounts seamlessly while offering sophisticated reporting capabilities back to clients.

Content Creators/Publishers: For those who generate content regularly (bloggers/vloggers), these tools help in scheduling publication times and managing subscriber lists efficiently.

B2B Companies: B2B marketers utilize these systems for longer sales cycles involving numerous touchpoints; it assists in nurturing leads until they’re ready to engage in a purchase decision.

Companies with Multiple Products or Services: Companies that offer multiple products or services often need to create separate campaigns to target different audiences effectively. Marketing automation software provides analytics so marketers can track how successful their campaigns are at driving conversions and revenue growth.

Event Organizers & Nonprofits: These groups benefit by automating invitations, follow-ups after events, or donation drives which would otherwise be highly time-consuming if done manually.

Enterprises Engaged In Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Targeting specific accounts requires personalized outreach at scale that’s only feasible through the effective use of automation technologies.

With automation tools, you can simply set your campaign parameters and put marketing tasks in a loop to achieve speedy results from your digital efforts.

Now let’s take a look at how to choose the best automation software for your business.

Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Software for Your Business

With so many options available, it’s important to understand what you need and how each marketing automation solution can help you reach your goals.

Before you shop for automation software, you must first identify your goals and objectives.

What do you want to achieve by investing in the marketing automation space? Are you looking for increased lead generation, improved customer engagement, or better data analysis?

Next, consider your budget and resources. Some automation software solutions are more expensive than others but may offer features that make them worth the investment.

When calculating cost, you should also factor in the implementation of the app such as training employees on how to use the system.

Finally, look for flexible marketing automation functionality and integrations before making a final decision. Consider things like email marketing capabilities, analytics tools, social media integration options as well as any third-party applications they support. Most importantly, choose a marketing automation service with strong security measures to protect sensitive customer data from malicious actors online.

Top Marketing Automation Platforms in 2024

To help you decide which platforms can help your marketing automation efforts in 2024, here’s a look at top-tier automation tools that are best in class.

BrandWell

• Best for writing content.
• $249/month with 7-day free trial

BrandWell is a powerful brand growth engine that puts our entire content marketing process on autopilot. Create blog posts, ad copy, marketing emails, landing pages, product descriptions, sales letters, and social media posts within minutes!

Long-form content is where BrandWell truly shines. Everything is done for you – title, meta description, headers, table of contents, internal and external links, and even an intro hook and custom call to action. All you have to do is type in the long-tail keywords you want to rank for and you get your first draft in five minutes instead of five hours.

You also have access to an entire array of SEO tools right inside the app so you can optimize your post while you are editing. These include keyword research, topic clustering, tone checker, NLP salience scores, optimization audits, a free plagiarism scan, and AI detection.

BrandWell syncs directly to WordPress and Shopify so you can publish your blog post in an instant.

BrandWell also has a generative AI component. The AIMEE chatbot and 40+ specialized AI Agents are all at your fingertips, ready to churn out any type of content for any topic you may need.

I use BrandWell to write almost ALL of my LinkedIn posts. Here’s one that was written recently by the AI Agent for LinkedIn Stories:

HubSpot

• Best for customer relationship management (CRM).
• Plans start at $360/month with a free 14-day trial.

HubSpot is one of the leading players in the marketing automation space. This all-in-one software helps companies manage their entire customer lifecycle — from lead generation to conversion. With its intuitive user interface and powerful analytics, HubSpot makes it easy to quickly create campaigns and track results.

Additionally, HubSpot integrates seamlessly with other popular applications such as Salesforce CRM and WordPress CMS so users can easily sync data across multiple systems.

Marketo

• Best for marketing campaign management.
• Plans start at $895/month.

Marketo is another well-known name in the industry. It offers a comprehensive solution for automating email, socials, search engine optimization (SEO), and events management.

Marketo also offers powerful segmentation capabilities that allow users to target specific audiences based on criteria such as demographics or interests. This makes it easier for marketers to tailor content specifically for each individual recipient – increasing engagement rates while reducing overall costs associated with running campaigns.

Pardot

• Best for B2B marketing.
• Plans start at $1,250/month.

Pardot is a B2B-oriented sales automation platform created to assist sales teams in automating lead nurturing activities such as email outreach and website personalization strategies. It has features like automated scoring models that assess how prospects interact with your brand over time, dynamic lists that enable you to categorize contacts, advanced reporting, A/B testing, and integration with third-party services including Google Analytics.

If you’re looking for an all-inclusive solution, then Pardot may be the right choice for you.

Eloqua

• Best for B2B marketing campaign management.
• Plans start at $2,000/month.

Eloqua is a powerful marketing automation platform designed for enterprise-level businesses. It’s one of the most feature-rich and expensive solutions on the market, but it comes with exceptional customer service and plenty of integrations.

Eloqua offers email marketing, lead scoring, analytics, A/B testing, automated campaigns, landing pages, CRM integration, and more. Plus, they offer 24/7 support via phone and personalized training sessions that demonstrate their commitment to customer service.

Customer.Io

• Best for email marketing.
• Plans start at $100/month.

Customer.io helps businesses send personalized emails and messages to their customers. This beginner-friendly app stands out for its easy-to-use interface and fast customer support.

What makes Customer.io unique is its ability to send trigger emails based on events rather than just pageviews or time-based intervals. This makes it much easier to personalize your messages and target them more accurately according to user behavior or preferences.

Constant Contact

• Best for email marketing.
• Plans start at $9.99/month with a free 30-day trial.

Constant Contact is designed to help small businesses quickly get started with organized email campaigns. It provides basic functionality in a way that’s easy for non-technical users to take advantage of, making it ideal for those who don’t anticipate needing any advanced features later on.

Constant Contact makes it simple to create and send emails, manage contact lists, track performance metrics, and more—all from one intuitive dashboard. With a drag-and-drop editor, you can build your own designs based on customizable templates even without coding knowledge. Plus, it has a mobile version too!

Userfox

• Best for ad retargeting.
• Plans start at $100/month.

Designed for tech companies, Userfox offers a lightweight interface that sends trigger emails based on events like website visits or online purchases. From there you can customize each workflow according to your needs using user-friendly drag-and-drop tools within the platform itself.

Userfox also has several advanced automation features such as segmentation, dynamic content personalization, and detailed analytics reports for measuring performance and optimizing campaigns. The acquisition by AdRoll means even more powerful features are likely coming soon.

Mailchimp

• Best for email marketing.
• Plans start at $13/month with a free 30-day trial.

Mailchimp is the most popular email marketing tool today. But it’s more than just that.

Mailchimp lets you manage your entire marketing workflow from one central location. From email campaigns and surveys to e-commerce and CRM features, Mailchimp has everything you need for effective digital marketing.

With Mailchimp, you can create highly personalized emails with ease. Design custom templates or choose from pre-made ones from the library of professionally designed options. You also have access to advanced segmentation tools so you can target your messages more precisely.

Plus, with AB testing capabilities, you’ll be able to measure the effectiveness of each campaign quickly and accurately.

Campaigner

• Best for email marketing.
• Plans start at $59/month with a free 30-day trial.

Campaigner is a powerful email marketing solution that allows users to create highly customized workflows, enabling them to precisely manage and track the success of their campaigns. Campaigner also provides additional marketing automation tools such as purchase behavior analytics, giving users insight into how customers interact with their emails.

The Campaigner UI is more complex than some other email marketing solutions due to its wealth of options and customization capabilities. This complexity can be daunting for novice users, but experienced marketers will find it easy to navigate once they become familiar with the platform’s features.

GetResponse

• Best for email marketing.
• There’s a free plan with limited features. Paid plans start at $15.58/month.

GetResponse is an all-in-one marketing automation software that offers powerful email, web chat, and SMS marketing tools. With its automated workflow capabilities, GetResponse makes it easy for marketers to set up complex campaigns without having to manually manage each step.

GetResponse has a drag-and-drop editor that allows users to customize emails with images and videos as well as design attractive landing pages in minutes. And with integrated e-commerce capabilities like shopping cart integration and payment processing options, GetResponse makes it easy for businesses to accept payments directly from their website or blog posts without having to redirect customers elsewhere for more secure transactions.

Zoho Campaigns

• Best for customer relationship management (CRM).
• There’s a free plan with limited features. Paid plans start at $49/month.

Zoho Campaigns is a comprehensive marketing automation tool that offers businesses the ability to create and execute automated workflows for onboarding new contacts, re-engaging lost contacts, and keeping customers informed of current deals.

Although its primary focus is email marketing, Zoho Campaigns offers other marketing automation capabilities such as trigger-based workflows, segmentation options, A/B testing, real-time analytics tracking, dynamic content insertion into webpages, and detailed reporting dashboards that provide insights into customer engagement. The platform integrates seamlessly with other Zoho products such as CRM Plus and Desk so it’s easy to manage your entire business from one place.

FAQs – Marketing Automation Platforms

What are examples of marketing automation?

Email marketing software is a good example of an automation platform. Email automation tools allow you to analyze customer data and patterns and send birthday emails and reminders, trigger lead-generation content, and schedule emails.

Is marketing automation a CRM?

No, marketing automation is not a CRM. Marketing automation is a software platform that helps businesses automate their marketing efforts while CRMs work hand in hand with sales automation to manage customer relationships.

Conclusion

In 2024, it’s almost impossible to run a marketing campaign without marketing automation platforms.

With the right marketing automation platform, you can speed up tasks while reducing payroll — which means more free time to focus on your customers. Ultimately, this will help ensure that your business is successful in 2024 and beyond.

Did you know it’s possible to simply add up to 100 keywords and within a few minutes get back 100 blog posts ready to go just like this? For as low as $0.01/word you can have your own content marketing engine without needing to handhold an AI writer through the creation process.

Check out BrandWell to see how easy it is to automate your entire content marketing process and publish content that ranks well.