Consumers face a colossal influx of marketing messages - and that means you need your business strategy to stand out. Marketing teams are under pressure to create more innovative ideas than their competitors. But accomplishing this task on top of the regular marketing activities is not easy. 

Marketing departments need more time to focus on the bigger picture. And that's where marketing automation tools comes in - helping generate leads, driving sales, and nurturing customer relationships.

Today, over 51% of businesses are using marketing automation tools in one form or another. That's not all - a 2020 Gartner report predicts that the global automation market will be worth over $8.42 billion by 2027.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation refers to using software to automate tedious and repetitive marketing tasks. With new technologies, marketing teams can automate mundane marketing tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and ad campaigns. 

The benefit of marketing automation increases efficiency and renders a more personalized experience for the customers. Automation makes specific tasks faster and easier to complete.

Automation helps identify potential customers and automate fostering those leads until they are ready for sales. It automates all the processes which bring the prospects to a point where the sales team can approach them to close a deal. 

It also gathers information about the customers, which can drive the choice of marketing strategies. 

How does marketing automation work?

It's all about combining automation with digital marketing strategies. Businesses use social media sites, websites, and online advertisements to funnel potential customers to web pages and acquire their email addresses.

Once a business has the list, it can send promotional emails to the lead. They start using automation to nurture the leads into a paying customer.

The ultimate objective of automation is to deliver the right content to the right customer at the right point in time. 

At first, the customers need to know that your product exists. Now, customers need information about the product. They need to know about the benefits that the product offers. They might require additional information to satisfy queries they might have about the product. 

Early in fostering leads for lead management, automation can educate and create customer awareness. You can use automation to supply your prospects with educative and valuable content that instills respect for your brand. You may also provide them with testimonials or reviews by previous customers to generate their trust.

Digital marketing automation takes care of the essential day-to-day tasks in converting a lead to a customer. However, digital marketing automation does not cease after the deal is closed. 

After a business gains a customer, it continues to nurture the relationship by regularly providing after-sales services and information. When the company has other products to offer, digital marketing automation can repeat sales and help businesses to grow.

How can marketing automation impact businesses?

When we consider the everyday challenges of businesses, we find that discovering leads and keeping customers engaged throughout remains at the top. According to the Marketing Automation Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report published in 2020, the global marketing automation market size will be worth over USD 8.42 billion by 2027. It is expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 9.8% from 2020 to 2027.

Moreover, in the era of digital marketing, businesses generate significant data but use it properly to analyze it. Marketing automation platform can help you overcome this obstacle by putting data to use through streamlined workflows.

Most businesses consider marketing automation platform a tool for nurturing leads to automated emails. 

Although there are considerable email marketing automation benefits, this can lead to a discontinuous experience for the customers and potential clients as they move from marketing to customer potential. 

Potential clients are forced down an artificial sales funnel with erratic touchpoints and unimportant content. Rather than responding to individual customer requirements, businesses serve up the same thing on repeat.

Nevertheless, you can use automated marketing techniques throughout the customer lifecycle. When carefully integrated, marketing automation creates a fertile field for robust, long-standing relationships with your customers. 

When done right, marketing automation serves three primary purposes:

Personalization of Workflows

Your prospect's actions are an added data point that will help you decide your marketing strategy. They will tell you what customers are looking for at that very moment. While this information is beneficial, it is almost impossible to generate it manually. 

However, with the help of marketing automation, marketers can track customers' behaviors across multiple channels and deliver them the right content at the right time. However, this requires a deep understanding of the client's requirements, which is possible through marketing automation.

These workflows help to drive authenticated prospects to relevant content. And it helps to nurture leads into actual customers. However, this is not where the effectiveness of marketing automation stops. Businesses can supply customers with personalized content, which leads to loyal, repeat customers that are good for the company.

Streamlining processes

Automating your marketing lets you streamline marketing processes and place your customers in the center. Marketing automation helps you create procedures that function across different working teams. 

It allows you to decrease customer effort at every stage of the journey. You can now work together to deliver a unified and seamless customer experience from the first touch to beyond the consumer purchase.

There is no need for complicated hand-off processes with practical marketing automation since you store everything automatically in the central data storage. Internal workflows can enable you to prioritize assignments as they're needed.

Data and analytics

All your prospect's actions are essential pieces of data, and they might help you curate the perfect marketing strategy for your business. 

However, it is impossible to track these data without marketing automation. But worry no more. Marketing automation can help you derive this data from multiple channels online and, based on this information, allow you to deliver the right content at the right time. Financial institutions like banks are also looking at it to streamline operations.

With an understanding of your client's requirements, you will be able to convert your leads into loyal customers who are likely to refer to their family and friends.

Advantages of marketing automation

Let us focus now on how marketing automation can benefit your business. Marketing automation streamlines your marketing efforts and makes the entire process of marketing more efficient. 

Here are some of the key benefits of marketing automation for your company:

Increased Efficiency

One of the significant benefits of a marketing automation system is increased efficiency. These include all the processes to generate a lead and nurture it to a point beyond customer relations. 

So, you see, marketing automation increases the efficiency of the entire marketing team. It will help you reduce the employment expenditure on your staff. Your team will also get more time to focus on the more strategic and creative tasks.

Marketing automation software can automate the process of posting on social media. And in turn, this will allow your team to focus on creativity and brainstorm for upcoming campaigns. You can also use the same software to post on social media, create stimulating email campaigns, create a landing page, and post a blog. Your team will be able to collaborate better and work efficiently.

Aligning sales and marketing

One of the advantages that add to the value of marketing automation is the freedom to combine your sales and marketing automation efforts. It allows you to align the actions and objectives of the business. You can convert marketing-certified leads into sales-certified leads much more effortless.

Invespcro states that marketing automation allows you to increase the sales team's productivity by 14.5%. It can also decrease your marketing overhead by 12.2%. It can help in generating leads and consequently increase sales. In this way, your marketing will devise more flawless techniques for lead conversion while the productivity of your sales team increases.

Increased conversion rate

77% of businesses witnessed a rise in their conversion rates after implementing marketing automation. Marketing automation is an effective way to increase the productivity of your marketing team and increase conversion rates. It helps you nurture leads more effectively and convert them into paying customers. How does this happen?

Your marketing automation software keeps track of all your leads. You can even use this software for retargeting visitors to your website to increase CRO. You can do all of this while your team gets more time to strategize on how to convert the leads and drive sales.

Accuracy of reporting 

In the age of data-driven businesses, reporting analytics can seem a difficult task. Marketing automation comes to the rescue. The marketing automation system can produce automated reports with utmost precision. 

Moreover, marketing automation platforms can give you a nuanced view of the overall process and new vantage points to look at the data. It simplifies a problematic yet inevitable task and gives you a detailed picture of your marketing process and its results.

Personalizing marketing strategies

Automating monotonous marketing tasks lets your marketing team have more time to create personalized content for lead conversion. With marketing automation, you can target your sales persona on multiple channels. You can even reach out to your prospects and customers through social media, search ads, or email campaigns.

Marketing automation converts your website visitors into leads. It helps you send personalized content to your target while ensuring that the management automation system tracks their engagement. You can segregate your leads into different categories based on their characteristics and behavior when you know who your leads are. 

Scoring Leads

Marketing automation helps your marketing team create a lead scoring mechanism. You will be notified by the system when a marketing-certified lead gets converted into a sales-certified lead. 

It requires effective collaboration between the sales and marketing teams, which is made possible by the marketing automation system. It can reduce the wastage of time so that your sales team can reach out to the prospects in no time. 80% of companies using marketing automation systems for the last three years have witnessed an increase in the number of leads.

Managing Data

You need not worry about data management anymore when you have a marketing automation system. The automation software stores all your data in a central database and effectively manages it to produce more insights. And this helps you track your leads and their engagement with your website. Moreover, your database is automatically updated regularly. Managing your data has never been this easy.

Scalability

How do you measure the effectiveness of your marketing processes and strategies? If your efforts are not scalable, you wouldn't be able to derive insights from your performances. 

A marketing automation system helps explicitly you accomplish that task helping keep all your marketing efforts scalable.

Nurturing Leads

Finally, marketing automation helps nurture your leads and convert them into loyal customers. 

Converting leads into sales prospects can get complicated without the lead nurturing process. You can do this by curating personalized and relevant email campaigns with the help of marketing automation software. It also lets you track the success of these campaigns.

However, several other advantages of marketing automation are highly beneficial to the marketing team. Now that we have discussed all of them in detail, we believe you know why you should leverage marketing automation and reap its benefits.

Define Your Goals for Marketing Automation

There are many options and ways to reach your target audience when marketing your business. There's not just one right way to market your business, but how you market your business depends on your goals. 

For example, if you want to drive leads to your company website, you would target your ideal prospects in their customer journey. A good example is using buyer personas to determine your ideal customers and their pain points in the customer journey. Here are the steps to define your goals for marketing automation.

Define your business goals

The first thing to do when you want to define your goals for your marketing automation strategy. It would be best to use SMART goals to define your marketing goals that align with your business needs. One example, you might have a plan to expand your customer base by a specific date. You would continue to add different SMART goals to your marketing automation strategy.

Identify your audience

Your next step in defining your marketing automation goals is to think about your audience. Who are you marketing to in the first place? The use of buyer personas is an excellent document that you can use to define your buyers. The buyer personas use demographic and psychographic data. You might want to target a certain age, gender, industry, or other market segments. One example, if you sell health and beauty products, you would want to target women in their 30s. If you sell office supplies, you may like to target business owners. Depending on your goals and audience, you might want to target different segments of your customers. 

Decide how you'll measure success.

The next step in defining your goals is to decide how you'll measure success. There are marketing automation tools. For example, you might want to track email opens and clicks, or you might want to track overall email volume. Or, you might want to track sales. Depending on your goals and what you're trying to measure, you might want to track different things. The best thing is to track your business goals that we recommended earlier and see how you meet them by automating your marketing with marketing automation tools.

Set up your marketing automation

The next step in defining your goals is to use a marketing automation tool to implement your work. For example, you might want to sign up for a marketing automation service, or you might want to create your own. For instance, if your goals are to grow your business, you might want to set up your marketing automation with a marketing automation tool like Hubspot, Marketo, or other marketing automation software.

What is Email Marketing Automation?

Email marketing automation is automating certain functions of email marketing activities. Some of the most common automated email marketing activities include sending newsletters, publishing lead generation emails, and sending campaign-specific emails like order confirmations and verifications. 

The use of email marketing automation can be a single daily routine where emails are sent simultaneously every day. It can also be as complex as having a workflow where specific actions in the email marketing process are triggered depending on particular criteria. You can trigger automated emails to a specific group of people each week every time a particular event happens.