A beginner’s guide to marketing automation

For many marketers, sending automated emails might be a thing of the past.

Additional data-based messaging tactics, however, are emerging as important components of many marketing strategies.

Though technology has made data collection and targeted messaging less labor intensive than in years past, today’s marketers must focus their energy on relevant content creation and authenticity.

From emarketer.com:

The benefits of using marketing automation are numerous. Chief among them are improved lead management in the form of scoring, nurturing, segmentation and campaign management. Experts say mastering these functions through marketing automation will enhance efficiencies and help streamline the marketing and sales process. Once marketing automation systems are implemented and integrated into CRM platforms, measurable results and granular insights about how to engage with prospects and customers follow.

For organizations seeking to increase brand loyalty, digitized marketing automation—in certain circumstances—might be effective.

Here’s are a few approaches to consider:

Putting your customer first

Implementing automation begins with an organization’s desire to understand its costumer.

Digital marketer Dennis Williams sees tremendous value in automation technology, but he advises coming up with a game plan first:

The advances of automation have created a whole new way to learn about your customers. There are many tools to help you automate your marketing duties. The key is using them strategically.

For automation outfit Kahuna’s senior vice president of product, Mihir Nanavati, automation adds branding value:

To ensure a brand's message is relevant and interesting to the consumer, the marketer must be able to understand who the consumer is, what they prefer, when they prefer to be notified, how they engage and respond to messages, which devices they use and so on.

Deemphasize your email marketing efforts

Most marketers are familiar with reaching consumers via email—and many are equally as familiar with feeling as though they are perpetually flooding inboxes with spam.

Due to a variety of reasons, Nanavati says, reaching potential customers primarily using email has proven ineffective.

In addition to consumers’ diverting these emails to spam accounts, a brand’s image/reputation can suffer. Instead, try to develop a more personalized way of reaching consumers.

Nanavati adds:

In building such a rounded understanding of the consumer, it is imperative that a marketing automation platform capture as many of the digital breadcrumbs and information from the consumer as possible to provide a more meaningful and relevant engagement message to them. Not just via email but also through other digital channels frequented by the consumer.

A variety of tools can pick up customer data to determine when, where and how to reach consumers more successfully.

Letting data-mining software gather these “breadcrumbs” lets marketers focus on building authentic relationships, instead of collecting their own data—one message at a time.

Add numbers to your small team

Social media marketers often schedule posts in advance to keep up with consumer demand and engagement.

If you work in a small department, Williams says automation could be a speedy solution to an overwhelming social media workload:

If you generate leads through social media, automated services could help you increase your efficiency and ideally scale those communities with less work from you. Saving bandwidth is vital these days, especially for smaller teams.

If your automated approach generates more traffic for your brand online, Williams says, it’s imperative to remain consistent with your increased interaction:

As traffic increases, more automation will be needed to match demand. Then, your automated services will expand outside of social media, and you may need to automate lead generation when it comes to scheduling online demos or webinars.

Reaching customers across devices

Not sure whether consumers are interacting with your content or messaging on their smartphones, tablets or desktop computers?

You’re not alone.

Without the ability to collect data from device to device, marketers won’t know the behaviors of their customers—nor what drives their purchasing decisions.

As more and more consumers use a variety of devices each day, shifting certain marketing efforts toward automation can better track consumers’ actions individually and help you understand their preferences and habits.

From Nanavati:

In terms of relevance, [a marketing automation platform] helps you to know for example what are [customers’] preferences when it comes to shopping for shoes—what brands, shoe types and shoe sizes have [they] bought in the past, whether [they] bought them from an iPad or Android device, etc. Based on that knowledge, a marketer can create a more targeted message at the right time, on the right device the next time [a consumer] might be in the market for shoes.

Additionally, emarketer.com says marketers can benefit from marketing automation by quickening the sales process and sealing deals more efficiently.

“Shortening the sales cycle comes up, but the primary objective is ‘let’s close the deal’ and identify those prospects and customers who are a good fit for this product,” General Electric’s Lawrence DiCapua told emarketer. “Let’s nurture them to the point that they’re actually buying.”

Tips and tricks

Despite how much of your strategy is automated, Williams emphasizes the importance of staying true to your brand.

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“As marketers, we still must beware of allowing automation to look automated, the authenticity of your brand is more important than cutting corners,” he says.

An automated approach might not be for everyone—especially for brand managers who don’t need marketing insight on each and every branding decision their organization makes.

Marketers new to automation programming (and veterans, too) should consider these four tips:

1. Consider marketing software that is easy to use, not overwhelming in its complexity.

2. Ensure that the marketing automation software enables you to reach the consumer across a variety of channels (email, mobile, social media).

3. Make sure the software provides clear analytics and reports on your goals and key performance indicators.

4. Pick the software that minimizes guesswork and provides recommendations on what to automate based on user behavior.

Which automation approach do you use, PR Daily readers, and how has it helped or hurt your marketing efforts?

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