Marketing activities are essential for any business to promote their products and services to their target customers. Other functions in the organization won’t get a certain business very far without marketing. As the competitive environment gets even tougher in the business landscape, marketing also gets its share and is no exception. And while marketers seek new approaches to put their products and messages in front of their customers, marketing automation technologies facilitate the processes immensely in terms of data management.

Generating more revenue is the ultimate goal for many marketing activities and to achieve that, businesses have to drive more traffic to their websites. By driving more traffic, the chances of converting those users to buying customers get higher and this is where marketing automation plays an important role in the conversion process.

Marketing automation enables businesses to increase their customer reach without the need of growing their sales team. It also allows to nurture prospects and converts them into buying customers with quality content that can be personalized.  Implementing marketing automation systems will make businesses more effective rather than making some tasks irrelevant such as in the automated manufacturing processes. It will help marketers reach their goals faster and in a more effective way.

But what is exactly marketing automation?

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to using software to automate marketing activities that will nurture sales leads and personalize marketing messages. These types of software are usually designed to prioritize marketing tasks and execute them in a more effective way.

Some repetitive tasks of marketing activities such as posting on social media or running ad campaigns can be done more easily when automation tools are used. Also, many marketing tasks can be automated to provide also more personalized content for customers using these softwares. By automating marketing tasks such as personalizing messages and content, these softwares save marketers a lot of time and effort.

Source: Business2Community

In summary, marketing automation is the combination of software and strategy to complete some of the marketing tasks in a more efficient way. And the goal is to help marketers spend more time on important tasks and creating strategies.

What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

By using marketing automation tools, marketers can target customers with personalized and automated messages on email, social media and web channels. The main goal of using automation software is to help businesses prioritize leads and nurture them across multiple channels.

It’s also a great way to automatically send messages using workflows that can be custom-built for certain customer personas and campaigns to achieve better results. These automation softwares also have the capability to measure the overall ROI of campaigns and provide more in-depth data for each customer group.

Marketing automation is not about selling but rather about nurturing leads with personalized content avoiding the hard-sell approach. When high-quality content that is relevant to the customer is used, marketers can achieve better results a lot easier.  Strong automation strategies will enable better customer funnels and help marketers nurture their customer experience while also increasing the chance of converting prospects into customers.

Marketing automation is considered also to be an effective tool for relationship marketing to achieve higher customer satisfaction. It allows businesses to personalize their messages to the different type of prospects and build relevant strategies for each lead that involve nurturing campaigns for the level of their scores. This is especially important because not all leads are the same and each stage of the customer journey would require different content.

This is where one of the tools that marketing automation allows which is lead scoring plays an important role. Lead scoring depends on your business’ product, industry and buyer persona and it allows you to automatically score your leads by their actions such as their engagement level, page views, submissions, etc and evaluate your lead’s level of interest before assigning them new email workflows or with your sales representative.

About the Author

Hande is a multi-award-winning entrepreneur, Principal of WSI London, founder of Quattro Business Consulting, co-founder of Think Neuro and Buddy Performance. She is independent Board Member in verous companies and institutions. She has studied Industrial Engineering, has worked with 200 clients from different parts of the world and she has 20 years of consulting experience.