Marketing automation technology is critical to digital marketing success. With automation comes optimization, along with many other advantages to using a marketing automation system.
To take a step back, I like this definition of automation by eMarketer: “Marketing automation is a solution that makes use of technology to perform some of the heavy lifting associated with communicating to prospects and existing customers across multiple channels such as email, social media and a company’s website. Automation can also be used to score leads, segment audiences and nurture those audiences throughout their customer life cycle.”
Here are four key benefits to using automation for digital marketing.
1. Increased efficiency
Most marketers will probably tell you that the greatest benefit of marketing automation is that it is a timesaver. Automation provides marketers and their teams the ability to eliminate the mundane and manual marketing tasks, freeing up their time to focus on other aspects of their role, such as creating great content, analyzing reporting and communicating with other departments to better generate business for the company.
2. Audience persona and list segmentation insights
Establishing your audience personas is the most important first step in creating a great marketing campaign, especially one utilizing automation. With properly implemented marketing automation tools, your team can deliver highly personalized messages and digital experiences to your customers and prospects.
Through tactics such as lead nurturing and drip campaigns, marketers can continue the conversation with clients and prospects while offering the right content at the right time. Ascend2 reported that “51% of email marketers say email list segmentation is the most effective way to personalize lead nurturing.”
Your list segmentation stems from the audience personas built out by your organization. Those audience personas are typically determined by a combination of digital behaviors and demographic information. This information is then sorted and organized by your automation system and then used to create metrics to better understand where a prospect is on their sales journey.
3. Concrete reporting and analysis
Automation platforms offer an abundance of readily available data, and in real time, right at the marketer’s fingertips. With this data, marketers can make informed decisions about where to focus their energy for the next campaign.
Automation takes out the guesswork, providing more concrete insights for creating reports, justifying marketing influence and ROI, and revealing what was successful vs. unsuccessful. In addition, automation allows for robust A/B testing, contributing even more details to your reporting.
Aside from just automated emails, multichannel marketing automation platforms give even more insight into prospects across different mediums. The insights on data benefit everyone involved: the marketer, the sales team and the prospect.
The marketer delivers better reporting and analysis, allowing them to understand their next move. The sales team has concrete transparency into the marketing world and their customers’ behavior. Lastly, the prospect has a more personalized experience delivered to them with even more relevant information.
4. Building Sales-Marketing relationships
Automation can promote a stronger relationship between marketing and sales. Both teams must understand each other’s roles through the buyer cycle to increase conversions and revenue.
Building trust between the teams is much easier with an automation platform, as it provides transparency into the customer journey. As Marketo puts it, marketing automation “will help sales teams to use their time wisely: spending less time on cold calling dead leads and more time getting in contact with those leads who are ready to sign on the dotted line.”
Automation should empower the marketer by saving more time on tasks to understand audience personas, analyze reporting and connect with their sales team. However, automation systems are not a one-size-fits-all.
To select the right automation system, and get the most out of it, you’ll need to weigh the different options based on your business’ needs and goals. With the right automation platform, marketers work more efficiently and generate greater ROI.
— Gabriella Clark – Marketing Manager, Demand Generation
