Marketing Automation - Basics and Benefits

  •  31.07.2020
  •  Judith Wester
  •   Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is considered an absolute necessity in online marketing. By automating your marketing activities, you will work more economically and efficiently. Learn more about the basics and advantages of automation.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation means automating your online marketing processes. Software platforms provide the necessary basis for this. This saves you time and thereby costs. Do you manage your email campaigns yourself? So you know how much effort it requires. In addition to email marketing, the handling of leads can also be automated. Furthermore, the automation of SMS, Web-Push or App-Push is a common procedure. The corresponding marketing automation tools make implementation effortless.

Marketing Automation - Best Practices for Quick Content Marketing

Although automation may sound like a rigid mechanism, each campaign is as individual as the company that generates it. Marketing Automation helps you find the right content for your target group, especially during the content creation process. Next, you coordinate different steps according to your needs. It is customary to address clients personally.

Many advantages with one software solution

Marketing Automation offers you many features as a complete and compact package. Let's start with the most important bonus: saving time.

1. Time saving takes priority

In the business world, recurring processes are automated at all points. So why not also in marketing? This frees marketers from having to perform recurring tasks themselves. As a result, they restructure themselves and work much more efficiently. What remains is more freedom for creative tasks.

2. Better communication between sales and marketing

Marketing Automation helps sales and marketing to work better collaboratively. During the initial phase of automation, both departments will have to sit together to analyze and redefine existing processes. This alone creates synergies that are implemented and structured in the marketing automation solution. Potential impacts are the improvement of follow-up processes and an increase in sales efficiency as well as the simplification of sales procedures.

3. Personalized addressing and increase in sales

Approach your customers with personalized emails. Even if the recipient is aware that you do not address each client individually, you still stand out from mass mailings. Furthermore the marketing automation solution offers optimization potential even with only little information about existing customers. For example, a user account can be created based on the click behavior of an individual recipient. This becomes more and more accurate over time. A profile is shaped from the collected information. As a result, the content is tailored specifically to the potential customer and broadcast accordingly.

4. Lead Management and Lead Nurturing

Lead Nurturing is all about providing interested parties with suitable content or information at the right moment. Lead Nurturing can be tracked at every stage of the customer journey, for example when searching for information, in social networks and, of course, during the purchase decision. In the latter situation, however, there are very few Internet users. Which is why it is so important to be active in the phases before the purchase decision and to design your marketing campaigns accordingly.

It is no secret that lead generation is one of the most complex and important aspects of marketing. The more important is a proper use of the leads by the sales department. Marketing Automation not only automates lead scoring, i.e. the evaluation and qualification of leads. The tool can also be set to fully automate the target-oriented approach at the right moment.

5. Making Social-Media-Marketing more efficient

Communication within your community is important. Frequent posts increase the traffic on your website and other potential customers become aware of your company. Automation allows you to plan social media content weeks in advance. The realization is carried out at the desired time. This means that social contact does not come to a halt when an employee is absent due to illness or vacation. However, questions from social media should only be answered personally. No software can replace you for this. Here too, it is crucial that marketing and sales cooperate.

6. Binding the target group with artificial intelligence

Not only your own measures can be used to address customers. Sending an email can as well be activated by an external trigger, such as a shopping cart cancellation. The customer then receives a personal email with fitting content such as a product recommendation or a discount coupon. You can influence the purchase decisions in a positive way.

Requirements for integration

A well-established CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the basis for automation. This is synchronized with the Marketing Automation software. Consequently, all information of existing customers is always maintained and immediately available to the company's employees. Marketing Automation aims at a fast conversion and at the same time a sustainable customer relationship.

What are the advantages of automation?

We have summarized all the advantages of marketing automation for you:

  • great time saving
  • installation and maintenance is done by the provider
  • easy coordination of marketing
  • quick and easy setup of campaigns, which are adjusted to each other
  • more capacity for creative marketing tasks
  • time profit for your main business
  • individual automation possibilities
  • simplification of follow-up processes
  • advance over competitors

Marketing automation should be an inseparable part of your digital marketing strategy. Free yourself from time-consuming to-do's and improve your workflow. Not only does this make your work easier, it also leaves you more room for non-automated tasks. Do you have any questions? Please contact us, we are happy to consult you personally!