Marketing Automation: What it is, Why you need it, and Where to Start!

Every person has something they dream about, whether it’s a destination, or a house, or a job. If you’re a marketer, however, then among your top most coveted dreams is *drum roll* Marketing Automation.

Unless you’ve been living on a cloud, you’ve probably heard of marketing automation. You’ve also probably spent a few coffee breaks eyeballing that shiny software which could turn your dreams into a reality, and practiced convincing your boss to spare the budget for it. Now if you haven’t, you’re really missing out and we can help point you to the best one in the market! But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today…

We’re here to discuss Marketing Automation, but we’re going to bet that 90% of you don’t really know what it even means.

“Oh, but I do! It’s automating my email messages.”

Wrong. While it is common for marketers to use “marketing automation” and “email marketing” interchangeably, email is simply one channel among many that make up marketing automation.

What does this magical term even mean?!

Marketing automation will take care of your customer communications, lead nurturing, content scheduling, social media management, and analytics. It will basically tackle any task that doesn’t demand ongoing human intervention.

It also presents you with the perfect opportunity of increasing efficiency, reducing costs, and improving customer experience. In a nutshell, marketing automation brings in more leads, higher conversions, better sales, all with less work. Companies that utilize marketing automation have witnessed a 14% increase in sales productivity and a 12% decrease in marketing overheads.

1. Marketing Automation Helps You Focus on Strategy

The ultimate goal of any kind of automation is to boost efficiency. With all your regular, repetitive, and redundant tasks automated and taken care of, you’ll be free to put your expertise to good use, namely on designing a better strategy for interacting with clients.

2. Marketing Automation Frees Up Budget

With less clutter from repetitive tasks in your daily schedule, you’ll find yourself more productive with more time to be focused on the important tasks. This in turn helps you deliver projects faster with less need for investment in extra staff and resources. With this saving, your business can reallocate budget directly into a campaign to get more returns.

3. Marketing Automation Connects Multiple Channels

Automating your marketing practices allows you to connect multiple touch points and channels from email, to social media, to content marketing, even to search engine ads. Marketing automation aims on nurturing your leads for the long term, which means providing an omni-channel experience.

4. Marketing Automation Centralizes Data

By centralizing your marketing initiatives, you also centralize your data collection. This means, you’ll gain a 360-degree view of your prospects’ and customers’ interests and goals across all marketing channels and lifecycle touch points.

5. Marketing Automation Facilitates a Marketer’s Life

When you automate your marketing communications, you can focus more heavily on the quality of your messages and campaigns instead of investing your whole time on juggling the many tasks across several channels.

6. Marketing Automation Streamlines User Personalization

Less time spent on repetitive tasks and a well-rounded view of your target audience gives you the ability to think through your campaigns, add more personalization to every touch point, and custom-tailor future offers so that they are more relevant to your audience’s needs.

Hopefully, this clears out some – or most! – of your confusion regarding marketing automation. And while there are countless of automation platforms out there, going through them all to find the best one for your needs can be tedious at best!

But that’s what we’re here for.

Contact us and we’ll get the ball rolling in order to find the perfect marketing automation software for your business, whether it’s the B2B champ, Pardot, or the one-SaaS-to-rule-them-all, Salesforce Marketing Cloud.