The Role of Automation in Digital Marketing

You’ve likely heard of automation in digital marketing as a way to streamline your marketing efforts, and you have almost certainly experienced digital marketing automation examples in your everyday life.

Have you ever left ecommerce website with abandoned items in your shopping cart, then received an email reminder? Or received a welcome or re-engagement email with a discount code or a prompt to leave a review? Those are the effects of marketing automation efforts.

You might be wondering how marketing automation could help your business. Its main goal is to automate repetitive tasks to reduce tedious work. Automation helps the flow of the customer journey you’ve developed so that the start-to-finish experience and how your company engages with customers is thorough.

What Is Automated Marketing? 

Automated marketing usually relies on marketing automation platforms to simplify processes and help sales and marketing teams do more. It leverages software and digital tools to speed up, simplify, and standardize repetitive activities.

You create workflows that ensure this work gets done both how you want it when you want it done. These workflows are critical to ensuring the automations perform as intended and are successful. A marketing automation workflow needs to include a trigger, or customer action that initiates the workflow. The action part is where you define what you want your automation to do for you. For example, if a customer makes a purchase, that could trigger a pop-up or email requesting a review.

The marketing automation process leverages technology to facilitate your efforts across different channels, as well as helping with efficiency and better targeting. You can manage customer communications and transactions faster and automatically, whenever a customer is engaging with your brand. This helps to boost customer retention while saving on administration time.

Importance of Marketing Automation Strategy

Marketing processes that work well for automation are simpler ones, with a basic trigger and action. If a customer does one thing, then an automated action happens.

It’s critical to maximize how useful these automations are with an effective marketing automation strategy that fits with your overall marketing goals. Whether you need to boost your online reputation with reviews, encourage immediate sales by offering discounts to customers who seem to be on the fence about buying, trigger reminders about your brand to previous customers, or have other immediate and long term goals, you need to define them and create a strategy that supports that.

Marketing Automation Software

Marketing automation software helps marketing and sales teams reach more customers in more locations, and develop more effective campaigns.

Software tools can help with qualifying and managing leads, and tailoring customer experience. Automation tools allow for effective tracking of customer data and ROI metrics as well as letting marketers schedule campaigns and automate standard yet personalized responses.

Marketing Automation Platform Tools and Features

An automation tool can provide information on a consumer’s interests to nurture leads, filter them, score them, and manage them. Leads that don’t have enough information or aren’t ready to be pushed to sales can be held.

A marketing automation solution will also help with personalized email campaigns and social media management, as well as schedule marketing campaigns.

There are tools for forms and landing pages to capture and analyze information from potential customers to store or act on.

They will even help with assessing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns through results measuring and visitor actions tracking.

Uses

A marketing team can use automated marketing software and tools to manage several social media accounts to maintain a consistent, active social media presence, automate email marketing, drive e-mail and SMS campaigns, encourage internet engagement and interactions, and more.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Combining ABM and marketing automation can maximize efficiencies. Accounts drive sales, so analyze account behavior, activity and engagement to determine marketing efforts. Even though ABM tools help, managing the vast quantity of information is difficult, so leveraging marketing automation can be a great benefit.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Marketing automation works well with CRM too, as marketing automation drives qualified potential buyers through the sales funnel, while CRM stores this data and information.

Benefits of Marketing Automation Tools and Drawbacks

Maintain Consistent Branding

Marketing automation tools help you stay consistent in style across all channels for better brand awareness and reputation.

Drawback

Your content can get in a rut, and if potential customers keep seeing the same things over and over again, it can put them off your brand, and your marketing can look tired.

Understand Customers Better

Customers want to have a more personal, tailored experience, from brands that understand and meet their needs, without spamming them with communications that aren’t relevant to them. Marketing automation can help provide the positive, relevant, and customized experience for better satisfaction.

Drawback

With customers wanting to be seen as people, and only have meaningful connections (e.g., authentic influencers), you still need to maintain a personal touch. Customers don’t want to feel like they are in an impersonal cycle of being manipulated by bots, so careful strategy is required.

Gain Qualified Leads

Well-qualified leads drive sales, and marketing automation can help generate qualified leads by creating useful landing pages, offering the potential for personalized, dynamic content, and tracking demographics and behavior information.

Drawback

There are times when insight is needed to identify new target customers and groups, and finding new ways to reach these people. Relying on the algorithms to identify leads and push communications, hoping to set the automation and be able to forget about it, can result in targeting the same people without being able to identify why they may not be converting.

Assess ROI

Being able to track the effectiveness of campaigns and your return on investment makes informed decisions easier. You have access to more data and information, allowing for insights that can lead to innovations.

Keep it Personal

While automation can help with repetitive and simple aspects of marketing, your overall strategy needs to be personal and lead to meaningful connections. Although the communications are being sent out by bots, the communications do need a personal, human touch.

Automation improves lead management and nurturing leads when your lead generation strategy improves, so careful strategy is needed. There are times when innovative insights are needed to identify new audiences and tactics.

Marketing automation software is a tool that helps as a complement to, not a substitute for, your marketing strategy. Automation is only as effective as this strategy, and its benefits improve with better planning and creativity.

Remember with any digital marketing automation tool, to focus on the customer, and make sure your automations will provide a benefit to the customer or fill a need. If not, you could just be spamming them and giving your brand name a bad reputation. You need to make sure customers don’t feel pushed around like a cog in a machine of transactions. If they can tell everything is all automated, they can feel cut off from your brand.

Done poorly, or when failing to nurture a customer relationship long-term, even after a successful purchase, automation can negatively impact the customer experience and stunt your marketing efforts.

Barker Social strategically leverages automation tools and adds the personal, human touch you need to make meaningful connections with your potential customers.