Marketing is an extensive field. Often used synonymously with advertising, it involves much more than simply blasting out advertising messages. Sales support, corporate communications, event organization – the tasks in marketing are extensive. Fortunately, marketing automation can help remove some tasks from employees’ to-do lists and shorten their workdays. There are many possibilities for this.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation involves the use of software and digital tools to automate repetitive marketing activities. Its primary goal is to save time, increase efficiency, and enable personalized customer communication. The most important marketing automation trends involve the use of AI, machine learning, and data analysis to improve campaign performance, internal workflows, and productivity.
What Does Marketing Automation Do?
Automation is now a term that goes hand in hand with simplification. Marketing automation is no exception. Automation is particularly helpful in online marketing.
- Build Relationships: New customers rarely buy from a company when they first encounter it. That's why marketing automation, such as personalized emails, is important to build and maintain this relationship. By helping your audience learn more about your products and mission through regular, thoughtful mailings, you can encourage and increase conversion rates.
- Track the Customer Journey: The more you know about your customer, the better. With marketing automation, you can track the customer journey and see how long it takes a customer on average to make a transaction and what information they need to complete the purchase.
- Lead Nurturing: Marketing automation allows you to guide your potential customers through the buying process. Using automated workflows, companies can provide leads with relevant information and offers to develop them into qualified customers in your CRM. In the next step, leads can be evaluated and prioritized based on specific criteria. This allows you to focus on the most promising leads.
- Automated Social Media: Dealing with social media can also be simplified. Automatic publishing saves time, helps your brand maintain consistency, and also helps you choose a more analytical and thoughtful approach instead of being guided by spontaneous ideas.
- Analyses and Reports at the Touch of a Button: Data is the gold of the digital age. But filtering and processing it is time-consuming. Marketing automation also helps here. The software collects the data centrally, for example in a Customer Relationship Management system, and creates reports at the touch of a button. Lead generation, for example, can be tracked in real time.
How Can Marketing Automation Be Used?
The possibilities for automating marketing tasks are diverse. However, this also means that companies can lose track or not know what makes the most sense for their own processes. Simple ways to make marketing automation directly usable for your own company are:
- Chatbots: The range of uses for chatbots in the company is huge. There are numerous points of contact with the customer that can be optimized by chatbots. On the website, they answer questions; in customer service, they solve problems. This increases satisfaction and increases customer loyalty.
- Automated Newsletters: There is a wide range of options for reducing the time spent creating email newsletters. You can start by automating simple things like creating email templates or easy-to-duplicate designs to speed up your production process.
- Personalized Mailings: Each (potential) customer is at a different point in the sales process, the sales funnel. Some customers may not have bought anything for a long time. Marketing automation software not only helps you keep track of this, it also sends personalized mailings, such as for birthdays. Where the team simply doesn't have the time, software increases customer loyalty.
- Content Planning and Publication: With marketing automation, posts for various social media platforms can be planned in advance and automatically published at specific times. This enables consistent publication of content, even if you cannot constantly publish posts manually. Built-in analyses often offer opportunities to measure the performance of the posts, engagement rates, follower growth and other metrics.
In times when efficiency is becoming increasingly important, marketing automation is an important factor. There are many options for running campaigns automatically and using the software in your own channels. Before you decide to do this, however, it is important to create a solid foundation: an appealing, high-performance website. We at BornDesign can help you with this. Contact us today. Together we will create the basis so that you can make your life easier with marketing automation.
