In today's ever-evolving marketing landscape, employing a one-size-fits-all approach is no longer effective. Marketers face the challenge of tailoring their strategies to reach specific target segments with the right message at the right time.
As manual efforts become impractical, marketing automation emerges as a crucial solution to excel in this dynamic environment.
96% of marketers consider marketing automation platforms indispensable, and they expect this reliance to continue growing. Wondering what makes these tools so powerful? In this blog post, we'll delve into marketing automation and its tools, offering insights on how they can enhance your marketing efforts.
Additionally, we'll provide a practical roadmap to help you seamlessly integrate automation workflows into your business. To top it off, we'll share some noteworthy examples of automation tools that you should be aware of.
Marketing automation is the process of using marketing automation software to automate and optimise various marketing tasks and strategies. It can help businesses save time, money, and resources, as well as improve their performance and results.
This automation process is mostly done based on some core principles, such as:
So, the benefits of marketing automation can be explained as follows:
To leverage marketing automation and its tool's full potential successfully, understanding its functionality and benefits is crucial. In the following sections, we will offer guidance and tips on effectively utilising automation to boost your business growth.
Once marketing automation tools are set up, they will execute or trigger the actions required to streamline your marketing strategies. However, before utilising these tools, you must implement automation workflows into your operational processes.
To achieve this, follow this step-by-step guide:
1. Define your goals and objectives: Determine the desired outcomes of your workflows. For instance, are you aiming to increase conversion rates, generate more leads, nurture prospects, or achieve other specific goals?
2. Identify your target audience and segments: Understand the characteristics, preferences, needs, and pain points of your target audience. Use data and behaviour to segment them effectively.
3. Design your workflow logic and structure: Plan the actions or triggers that will initiate your workflow, along with the conditions or criteria that will guide the subsequent steps or branches. Clearly define the expected outcomes or results from your workflow.
4. Build your workflow using a suitable tool: Choose a tool that aligns with your needs and budget, providing an easy and effective way to create and manage workflows. You can utilise drag-and-drop editors, templates, or custom code for building your workflow.
5. Test and optimise your workflow: Before launching the workflow, conduct comprehensive testing to identify and rectify any errors or issues. Utilise test mode, preview mode, or dummy data to validate your workflow. After launching it, closely monitor its performance and results, making necessary adjustments or improvements as needed.
By following these steps, you can seamlessly integrate marketing automation into your strategies, resulting in more efficient and effective campaigns.
One of the key advantages of marketing automation tools is their ability to be customised according to your specific marketing campaigns, goals, and needs. To inspire you, here are some best practices for different marketing goals or scenarios:
A personalised marketing approach entails creating and delivering customer-centric messages and offers to customers through a variety of channels. Achieving the delivery of personalised marketing experiences fosters increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, conversion rates, and retention.
According to a study by Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to purchase a brand that provides personalised experiences, and 90% find personalisation appealing.
But how can you achieve personalised marketing experiences at scale using marketing automation tools? Let’s dive into some of the effective strategies that’ll help you achieve this level of personalisation.
Harness automation tools to collect and analyse customer data from diverse sources, such as web analytics, social media, email, and CRM systems. By doing so, you can segment your audience based on their unique characteristics, interests, needs, and pain points.
Engage your audience with relevant and customised messages and offers using automation tools. Deliver personalised content based on audience segments, their stage in the buyer’s journey, and their previous interactions with your brand across multiple channels like email, SMS, push notifications, social media, etc.
Leverage automation tools to track and monitor visitor behaviour on your website or landing pages, including location, device, referral source, and browsing history. Use this information to dynamically customise content, images, videos, forms, and CTAs on your site.
Respond to customer feedback by using automation tools to collect and analyse data from surveys, reviews, ratings, and testimonials. This valuable input can guide you in personalising your product or service with features, functions, and benefits that meet or exceed customer expectations.
By employing these strategies, you can effectively deliver hyper-personalised customer experiences on a larger scale.
There are many marketing automation tools available in the market, each with its features, functions, benefits, and drawbacks. Here is a closer look at some popular and emerging options.
Hubspot stands as one of the most widely used and comprehensive tools. It provides solutions for various marketing needs, including CRM, email marketing, content marketing, social media marketing, SEO, landing pages, and analytics.
For affordability, Hubspot offers a free plan suitable for small businesses and startups, along with several paid plans catering to different levels of functionality and support.
Another leading and powerful marketing automation tool is Oracle, which offers a suite of products tailored to different marketing requirements. For B2B marketing automation, there's Eloqua, while Responsys caters to B2C marketing automation.
Additionally, Oracle includes Maxymiser for web personalisation and Infinity for web analytics. Its platform is known for its robustness and scalability, capable of handling large volumes of data and complex workflows.
If you're focused on social media management and optimisation, Sprout Social is an ideal marketing automation tool.
It allows you to create and schedule social media posts, engage with your social media audience, and analyse and report on your social media performance. The platform also offers features like social listening, influencer marketing, and advocacy marketing.
For those invested in influencer marketing and collaboration, Influencer Marketing Hub offers specialised automation tools.
You can discover and connect with relevant influencers, manage and track influencer campaigns and relationships, and measure and report on influencer ROI. The platform comes equipped with features like influencer discovery, outreach, and analytics.
