Marketing Automation is Transforming How We Reach People

Automation. Makes you think of robots, doesn't it? Well, brush off those fears of being replaced. Marketing automation software works for you — freeing up your time so you can connect with customers in more meaningful ways.

Read on to learn how marketing automation can help you reach your customers and grow your business.

How marketing automation impacts business

Marketing automation technology refers to the range of solutions that automate marketing tasks. These tools allow marketers to more effectively reach their target audiences. The tasks can be as simple as sending out a single Facebook post, or as complex as nurturing leads from identification to close. 

As for its overall impact on business processes, marketing automation can help improve efficiency, reduce costs, and provide an enhanced customer experience. Additionally, automating essential (but repetitive) tasks means marketers have more time to focus on what they do best: strategizing smart new ways of enhancing the customer experience. Using Research and development efforts can be powered by data-driven insights without taking time away from necessary but time-consuming tasks.

One benefit of automation tools — which could have a significant impact on your business — is that they help you achieve a clearer sense of you and your teams' campaigns. Consider the following to achieve success: 

• Create processes: Develop a step-by-step workflow for any activity you want to simplify. Identify which technology will best help you capture efficiencies at a specific point in the process. (More on those marketing automation platform options in a bit!)

• Understand and segment your audience. Sending Sam-from-Sales the same message you’ll push to Cindy-the-CEO is unlikely to make either consider your product or service. Instead, segment your target audience to create campaigns specific to their interests. Technology can then help you to further personalize content for leads and initiate the customer engagement rates you seek.

• Measure the success of your email campaigns: To understand the effectiveness of your campaign, measure every relevant metric. Blindly automating tasks and not adjusting to consumers’ behavior is a surefire way to ensure your technology is an expense rather than an added value.

Types of marketing automation software

So, what are your options? Basically, if a step exists within the customer journey, there's a software to optimize it. But there's no need to purchase every marketing automation tool out there — just what suits your needs.

Most automation platforms offer an array of tools to fit your organization’s unique goals — very few only support a single function. Some of the most popular software options on the market help to:

• Optimize keyword research 

• Schedule content calendars for social media 

• Improve customer support and chatbot services

• Achieve higher-quality lead identification, segmentation and outreach

To decide which to utilize, consider your team’s long-term objectives and which essential tasks are taking the most time to complete. From there, you can select an automation service that specializes in a specific activity or helps to simplify several. 

For example, if content marketing is essential to your strategy, the HubSpot platform provides tools for social media marketing, performance monitoring, lead ranking and real-time customer data. Connect with inbound leads through content fueled by user-generated insights. 

Is your team’s email specialist preoccupied with tracking down undeliverable addresses instead of honing outreach efforts? Marketo offers marketing campaign management, automatic emails, lead generation, budgeting tools, visitor tracking and personalized messaging.

These are just two examples of the many options available. Take a look at your long-term goals, evaluate what you wish to streamline and then identify which platforms will work best for you.
 

Providing the best customer experience

For today's marketers, success is measured by the ability to effectively cater to a large audience across multiple channels. From customers' first interaction with your brand to their eventual purchase, scalable personalization, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics improve their overall experience. 

Here are a few ways you can use marketing automation tools to create a quality customer experience across touchpoints: 

• Use AI to push highly customized messaging. Dynamic content tools will change the subject matter of ads, emails and web pages in real-time to align with user intent based on search queries and other historic interactions with your brand.

• Create a consistent customer experience. Data dashboards and visualization software will give your team powerful insights into how you can optimize support services as you grow.

• Leverage your satisfaction drivers. It's important to address pain points. Predictive analytics identify what makes customers happiest and how you can further succeed in these areas.

Throughout each stage of the customer journey, outreach should be fine-tuned to nurture a lead based on their specific interests and needs. Forget manually identifying patterns in each individual interaction across social media and other channels — utilize data-driven insights generated by AI to create a strategy that improves your customers' overall experience with your brand.

Again, it's how your people use the marketing automation technology that leads to a better customer experience.

Make automation work for you 

In the digital age, marketers no longer have the ability to manually reach their entire target audience. And simply investing in the latest martech won’t instantly solve the problem of trying to do more in less time. 

By strategically automating the right tasks, you can reduce bottlenecks and empower your team to pursue more rewarding and transformative marketing without removing that human touch.

Get in touch with GeekHive today — our team's ready to help you identify which tech will propel and empower you to reach new prospects and drive more qualified leads.