Discover top guides, trends, tips and expertise from AIO Writers
What is Marketing Automation: The Boost Your Campaign Needs
Julia McCoy
Friday, 28th Jul 2023What is marketing automation? It’s a term that you’ve probably heard, but do you know what it means and how it works?
Let’s dive into the world of marketing automation and see how it works!
What is marketing automation and is it for you? Let’s find out.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation means letting computer software handle manual tasks such as updating websites, sending out emails, and engaging on social media. By leveraging automated tools and technologies, marketers can free up time for more strategic initiatives while achieving results faster.
Here are some of the processes that marketing automation software can help you with:
- Manage customer relationships across multiple channels.
- Manage customer data points.
- Create marketing content.
- Categorize customers into groups based on interests or behaviors.
- Build personalized content experiences tailored to each customer.
- Monitor engagement through emails or other forms of communication.
- Optimize campaigns for maximum return on investment.
- Analyze performance metrics.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
The primary benefit of marketing automation is increased efficiency and productivity – allowing marketers to do more with less time.
If you typically spend four hours writing a blog post, AI can cut that down to minutes!
Watch how we created an entire newsletter with AI in just 16 minutes:
Marketing automation also provides better insights into customer behavior which helps inform decisions about product development or promotions that will drive higher conversion rates.
Lastly, automated systems allow businesses to scale operations without hiring more people.
In the next section, we’ll explore how marketing automation works and strategies for optimizing this tool.
Key Takeaway: Marketing automation provides increased efficiency and productivity by automating repetitive tasks, allowing marketers to focus on more strategic initiatives such as managing customer relationships and cost-effective scaling of campaigns.
Screenshot from FinancesOnline
How Marketing Automation Works
Identifying your goals is the first step in setting up a successful marketing automation system. This could include increasing sales leads or improving customer engagement and retention rates.
Once you have identified your goals, start creating an automated workflow that outlines each step as well as any necessary triggers or conditions that must be met before certain actions are taken.
There are many different types of tools that can help businesses implement effective marketing automation strategies. The most popular are:
- BrandWell for content marketing.
- MailChimp for email campaigns.
- Hootsuite for social media management.
- Optimizely for website personalization.
- HubSpot for lead scoring.
- Google Analytics for data analysis and reporting.
Once you have chosen the right set of tools for your marketing needs, you can start developing strategies such as segmenting audiences, personalizing messages, testing different email versions, automating follow-up tasks, and tracking performance metrics.
All of these tactics are essential elements of a successful marketing strategy, which can get a huge lift when supported by marketing automation platforms.
Marketing automation solutions can help businesses save time, money, and resources allocated for their digital marketing campaign. By understanding what is marketing automation and exploring different strategies for optimizing its use, businesses can make sure they are taking full advantage of this technology.
Next, let’s look at why automated marketing is important.
Why Marketing Automation is Important for Businesses
Marketing automation solutions help streamline marketing processes while improving customer engagement.
A marketing automation platform takes repetitive tasks off human hands so you have more time for R&D, customer support, and other aspects of the business.
Automation also helps marketing professionals reduce human error which could result in costly mistakes or missed opportunities if done manually.
Automated digital marketing tools allow companies to personalize their messages based on customer data collected from various sources such as website visits or past purchases.
Marketing teams are also able to send follow-up emails automatically to stay on schedule.
Investing in marketing automation software can pay off quickly due to its ability to reduce manual labor costs associated with traditional methods such as direct mailings or telemarketing campaigns, while still providing effective results at scale.
Lastly, many marketing automation platforms offer detailed analytics so you can track and measure results and ensure maximum returns from your marketing investment.
Top benefits of marketing automation according to Statista
All these benefits sound good, but is marketing automation for you?
Key Takeaway: Save time and money with marketing automation while improving customer engagement and retention.
Who Should Use Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is not for everyone. Who is it for?
Small Businesses
Small businesses can take advantage of marketing automation to optimize their campaigns and improve efficiency. Automated tools such as email marketing software enable marketing professionals to create personalized emails for each customer segment, while also allowing them to respond quickly to inquiries or feedback in real time without having to constantly monitor the system.
Furthermore, analytics data collected through automation can be used by small businesses to gain insights into each customer journey so they can make more informed decisions about future campaigns.
Corporations
For larger companies with multiple teams, marketing automation provides an easy way to keep everyone organized while ensuring consistency across all channels. Automated systems allow teams to track progress on various tasks in one place while providing insights into how well certain strategies are performing. This type of visibility helps managers identify areas where improvements need to be made so resources aren’t wasted on ineffective tactics.
Nonprofit Organizations
Nonprofit organizations fund their operations through charity. Marketing automation makes it easier for nonprofits to generate and send thank-you messages to donors as well as track donor information for follow-ups.
Automated systems also help ensure compliance with laws related to fundraising activities which are essential for maintaining credibility within the nonprofit sector.
Now let’s look at best practices for implementing a successful marketing automation strategy.
Key Takeaway: Marketing automation is an invaluable tool for businesses of all sizes, enabling SMBs to streamline marketing processes while also helping nonprofits track donor information to ensure compliance with fundraising laws.
How marketing automation works for small businesses
How to Automate Your Marketing Effectively
Marketing automation software gives you the ability to save time and human resources. By automating repetitive marketing tasks such as email, socials, and content, marketers can free up valuable time for more creative tasks or higher-level strategic planning activities.
Marketing automation tools can also help businesses increase sales by providing personalized messages tailored specifically to each customer’s needs and interests.
Where can you use marketing automation?
You can automate your content marketing, SEO strategy, advertising campaigns, lead generation, welcome series, promotional offers, loyalty programs, and more.
All of these automated systems work towards helping businesses build relationships with their customers through consistent communication and personalization efforts aimed at driving conversions — with minimal human effort.
Now let’s break down the different ways how to automate your marketing effectively.
Content Marketing Automation
Content marketing is one of the most time-consuming, and expensive, tasks in marketing.
Automation allows you to produce and distribute high-quality content to target audiences at unbelievable speeds. This means you could create, publish, and distribute content at scale even with a small team.
For example, BrandWell can generate a 4,000-word blog post in under 5 minutes. That’s speed that no human writer can match!
So how do you use content marketing automation technology?
Automate Social Media Posts
Scheduling social media posts in advance allows you to post regularly without having to manually log into each platform every day. Marketing automation platforms like Hootsuite or Buffer allow you to schedule posts across multiple platforms at once, while also tracking the performance of these posts once they go live.
Automate Email Marketing Campaigns
Setting up automated email marketing campaigns allows you to send special offers or discounts to your email list without having to write them one by one. With email automation, it’s easy to personalize each email message based on customer preferences or past purchases, making them feel valued and increasing engagement with your brand overall.
Automate Long-Form Content Creation
Writing a 2,000-word article takes a lot of time and effort. According to Orbit Media, an average blog post of a thousand-plus words takes around four hours to write manually.
But automation has now made it possible to do this job faster. As I mentioned earlier, it only takes 5 minutes for BrandWell to accomplish this task. And because its output is so good, you barely need to edit the draft before publishing.
BrandWell also takes care of all the research you need. Instead of going through every link on a Google SERP, you only need to enter a seed keyword into the app and it will crawl Google for top-ranking information about the topic at hand. This way you can quickly generate blog posts with just a few clicks instead of starting from scratch every time you need new content.
See how we created an entire 8,000-word ebook with BrandWell in just 25 minutes:
An AI-powered writing assistant like Grammarly also saves you valuable editing time as it automatically checks your grammar and spelling while providing helpful suggestions on word choice or sentence structure.
Key Takeaway: Content marketing automation can save time and resources while still delivering high-quality content. Automate social media posts, email campaigns, and content creation to improve accuracy and efficiency.
Marketing Automation Solutions for SEO
How does content marketing automation apply to search engine optimization?
Automate Keyword Research
Doing keyword research manually can take forever, which is why marketers have long been using software to accomplish this task.
Automated keyword research tools are important in any content marketing strategy. Keywords are the foundation of good SERP ranking.
Additionally, content marketing automation software can track changes in keyword popularity over time, allowing you to adjust your strategies accordingly.
BrandWell has added keyword research to its AI writing tool so you don’t have to switch between browsers (and pay for extra software) to find those golden terms and phrases. With a unified editor, you can generate blog posts for each keyword by simply clicking “Create Content” on the Action panel.
Automate Link Building
Link building is an important part of any SEO content marketing strategy, but it’s often time-consuming and tedious work. Fortunately, there are several marketing automation solutions available that make link-building easier.
Save plenty of man hours by automating the process of finding relevant websites to link back to yours as well as monitoring existing links for quality assurance purposes.
Automate Website Audits
Regular website audits are another content marketing strategy that takes too much time to do without automation. With marketing automation technology, you can now quickly scan through all pages on your site and look for potential issues such as broken links or missing meta tags which could affect its ranking.
If you’re using BrandWell, you can audit an entire website by simply entering its URL. BrandWell will crawl its content, build a comprehensive brand graph, and analyze what it is about, how the content is written, and which pieces need to be improved.
Now how about advertising? Can you use technology to automate your PPC campaigns?
Marketing Automation for Advertising Campaigns
Automation can help enhance your advertising campaign by targeting the right people and placing your ads where they can see them.
Automating A/B testing and optimization is also an important part of your marketing automation strategy for advertising. This process involves creating multiple versions of an ad with slight variations in order to test which version performs best with your target audience.
Now let’s look at how to automate your lead generation.
Automating Your Lead Generation Processes
Marketing automation efforts for your lead generation strategies can be a huge time saver, not to mention financial resources when trying to capture leads from your target audience.
Here are a few marketing automation examples for lead generation.
Automate Lead Capture and Nurture
Lead capture involves collecting contact information from potential customers in exchange for something of value, such as an ebook or webinar registration. You can embed forms or pop-ups on your website to ask visitors to provide their contact information before they access more content. Once you have collected the contact information, you can use automated email campaigns to nurture those leads with relevant content and offers tailored specifically for them.
Automate Lead Scoring and Segmentation
Lead scoring and segmentation processes can be automated by assigning points (or “scores”) based on certain criteria such as demographics, interests, and behaviors to prioritize which leads should be contacted first. Segmenting contacts according to common characteristics also makes it easier for sales teams to reach out to prospects with the legwork already done by automation tools.
Automate Lead Qualification
Lead qualification is another component of marketing processes that can benefit from automation. Sales teams can focus on closing deals rather than researching prospects manually.
By setting up qualifying rules within a CRM system, sales reps no longer need to determine if a prospect is worth pursuing. Automation technology solutions allow them to accurately qualify each individual according to their predetermined standards.
Key Takeaway: Automating lead generation processes can save businesses valuable time and resources while ensuring that sales teams only contact qualified leads. Marketing software platforms can capture, nurture, segment, and qualify prospects for higher conversion rates.
Implementing a Successful Marketing Automation Strategy
Before you begin implementing your marketing automation strategy, it’s important to establish clear goals and objectives.
What is the purpose of your campaign? Are you looking to generate more leads or increase sales? What type of marketing tools do you need?
When choosing marketing automation tools, consider factors such as budget constraints, app features, ease of use, integration capability, and scalability options when making this decision.
The keys to successful marketing automation lie in knowing your customers, setting clear goals, identifying the right tools, creating killer content, and testing your strategies.
Automating content creation is a smart idea for any business, but especially so if you’re a content agency. The power of automation can help you build a thriving company without sacrificing quality. Watch how to use BrandWell to get it done:
FAQs – What is Marketing Automation
What is an example of marketing automation?
Surveys are an excellent example of automated marketing. You can conduct surveys after an event like someone purchasing from your store or after updating your product.
What is the main task of marketing automation?
Marketing automation starts with handling prospect interest, lead generation, and lead nurturing through campaigns across a wide range of online and offline channels. Then CRMs take these prospects, track sales and sales opportunities, and manage the customer journey.
What is Marketing Automation? The Future of Marketing
The benefits of effective marketing automation strategies are numerous.
For starters, they provide increased efficiency by freeing up resources that would otherwise be spent on manual labor or tedious tasks like data entry.
Automated systems also allow you to respond to your customers faster — even after office hours.
Improved customer engagement is another benefit associated with effective marketing automation strategies because it enables companies to target specific audiences with tailored messages based on their interests or behaviors. This helps create stronger relationships between brands and consumers which leads to higher conversion rates and increased loyalty.
By understanding what is marketing automation and following best practices for a successful digital marketing strategy, businesses can create personalized experiences for customers while saving time and money and driving growth.
UNLOCK YOUR POTENTIAL
Long Headline that highlights Value Proposition of Lead Magnet
Grab a front row seat to our video masterclasses, interviews, case studies, tutorials, and guides.