You’ve been constantly hearing about it, your fellow marketers increasingly debating about it, but…
What is marketing automation?
Marketing Automation is a software, a marketing technology that lifts the burden off marketers’ shoulder by equipping organizations and marketing departments to effectively market on multiple channels like email, sms, website, social media and other, in real-time through a single platform. Marketing automation automates all the marketing actions and the repetitive tasks.
What Marketing Automation does?
Marketing automation makes sure the right people get the right message in the right place at the right time. Marketing automation allows companies to nurture prospects with hyper-personalized, meaningful content that helps convert prospects to customers and turn customers into delighted, loyal customers.
For instance, if Raj hasn’t visited your website for more than a week, then send her an email saying “We Miss You”. If Raj visits your website, then check if he looks at more than 5 pages. If he does, then email him contact information to a sales representative.
Marketing automation allows a business to set such action-based rules which could be specific to a single contact or broad enough to apply to all contacts with certain characteristics. For example, people who have visited your website in two days.
To perform all these actions manually would almost take ages. But marketing automation enables the if/then rules that drive the ongoing marketing actions of a business for every individual contact. Ideally, marketing automation equips marketers to talk to an individual instead of everyone, digitally. Different content can be created for different people to be consumed at different points in time on different channels. For example: Did someone just submit a form requesting your product demo? Send her a welcome email introducing your product.
This type of marketing automation generates significant new revenue for companies, and provides an excellent return on the investment.
What Marketing Automation doesn’t do?
Marketing Automation has become more like a buzzword for most marketers. But one must understand that it isn’t a software that generates a customer’s initial interest or closes the final deal.
If your marketing assets – materials that you offer to your prospects and customers, are not useful or if your data was purchased and is filled with people who are nowhere like your rest of the target audience, then marketing automation won’t work.
Marketing automation drives marketing and customer engagement actions, but it doesn’t make campaigns succeed automatically, nor does it make content more interesting. Creative and compelling content plus a good, actionable data is essential for driving results out of your marketing automation campaigns.
Similarly, marketing automation does not typically get conversions. Instead, it prepares a contact to get converted. A visitor may fill out a form for knowing more about a product and automatically get an email with more details about that product. Now, that excites him and he is more interested in purchasing because he received thorough details about the product. If the potential customer is well-informed and interested in the product, the salesperson’s job becomes easier- it helps better qualify leads and use their time more efficiently! But the misconception must be out of your head – clear and ideal!
