Marketing departments are being pressed to do more with less money, and they’re being held to higher standards than ever before (ROI). One of the best ways to meet these growing demands is to use marketing automation to eliminate and streamline repetitive tasks, freeing marketers to perform more human work.
However, what and how does marketing automation work? To learn more about digital marketing automation, keep reading.
- What is the purpose of digital marketing automation?
- What role does marketing automation play in your overall marketing plan?
The purpose of digital marketing automation?
Marketing automation software and tools are used to manage, streamline, and automate various marketing tasks and processes. While human creativity, such as writing, designing, and strategizing, cannot be completely replaced by automation in digital marketing, it does allow marketers to create multichannel campaigns and eliminate repetitive tasks such as list building and social media posting. Teams benefit from data-driven insights and increased productivity as a result.
What role does marketing automation play in your overall marketing plan?
Each marketing platform has its own unique set of features and functions. Most digital marketing automation tools, on the other hand, follow the same six basic steps.
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Gather data
Data is the foundation of a marketing strategy. The first step in any business’s data collection process is to gather all of the relevant information about their clients, prospects, and leads.
It’s easier to create personalized and targeted marketing content when you have a lot of data points. Using marketing automation software, you can get this data directly from your customer relationship management (CRM) system.
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Creating content
Using the data and insights gathered in the previous step, create content for each step of the customer journey. This could include content on your website, blogs, social media, email campaigns, and even eBooks. When creating content, keep your audience in mind at all times. They are likely to look for educational materials before making a purchase. Further down the sales funnel, detailed information presented in an ebook format may be more relevant to your customers. A platform that includes built-in asset creation and management will help your content team work more efficiently. Brand-compliant content blocks that are reusable, dynamic content functionality, and subject line optimization can be used by users to create content.
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Identify distinct groups within your target market
Marketing automation starts to shine at this point. Automated marketing tools use the data gathered in the first step to create customer profiles so that teams can segment their prospects and current customers and deliver relevant content to each one. It’s more likely that teams that create content with a specific audience in mind will be successful in this step.
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Create advertising campaigns that are fully automated
Multi-channel campaigns that target specific audiences can be created following audience segmentation. A/B testing can be used to compare two variations of the same email to see which one performs better. Team members set up predetermined actions and triggers that cause their automation software to carry out particular functions (such as sending an email) in response to specific customer or prospect behavior (e.g., attending a webinar). From a single location, the best digital automation platforms make it easy for everyone to access the information they need.
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Let the software do its thing
Once the campaign goes live, the marketing automation software takes over. Prior to initiating workflows, it monitors customer behavior for predefined actions and triggers. In the end, these functions are responsible for guiding leads through the sales funnel and handing them over to the sales team. In order for a marketing automation platform to be truly effective, it must be able to adapt to the ever-changing customer journey. Customers’ actions are “heard” by the platform, which changes the experience or redirects them to a different campaign based on their preferences.
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Observe the outcomes
Throughout the process, teams can monitor and analyze results to better understand which materials are performing well. Marketing teams can use real-time monitoring to fine-tune their content, triggers, and campaigns to achieve the best results. Reports and dashboards allow you to analyze the performance of campaigns, assets, and lead scoring models.