What Is Marketing Automation and How Does It Work?

Marketing automation is software that automates all of your repetitive marketing tasks. Be it emails, social media and even tracking prospects in your marketing funnel.

If done well, it can save you heaps of time, and essentially, it makes your life a lot easier.

“B2B marketers say the #1 benefit of marketing automation is the ability to generate more and better leads.”

By refining your lead generation and sales funnel with marketing automation, you’re more likely to generate not only more leads, but better-quality leads. This is because the prospect has been engaging throughout the process, and you can see exactly what with.

Social Media

It’s no secret how successful social media has been for marketing strategies. It allows companies to have an online face and post relevant content to their target audience.

Added to this, there’s the bonus factor that the more time you invest in social media marketing, the more likely your SEO rankings will increase. It’s a no brainer really!

Use marketing automation to ensure that you have a constantly updated social media presence. You can plan your posts and overall strategy and then get your software to post them for you. That way, if you’re rushed off your feet with other tasks, your social media channels are still getting updated regularly.

Of course, you can’t automate engagement and keep it personal, so be sure to keep an eye on anyone interacting and respond accordingly.

Emails

Email marketing has been a marketer’s favourite choice of communication for some time now. Being able to send mass communications at the click of a button is an easy way to generate leads.

But now, with marketing automation, you can really segment your email communications and send more personal emails depending on where your prospect is at in your sales and marketing funnel.

It does this through triggers. Say a person opens a piece of content you send them, you can then send them another piece of content. If they click through again, then you know you have someone who is engaged and can move them through.

“The ability to segment email lists and individualize email campaign messaging are the most effective personalization tactics for 51% and 50% of marketing influencers respectively.”

Marketing automation allows your email strategy to truly perform. But, you must remember that in order for it to work well, the content of your messaging and your overall strategy do need to be in place first.

Content

45% of marketers say that blogging is their most important content strategy. That’s no surprise really, and it wouldn’t be a shock if that figure was actually even higher. The benefits include improved SEO rankings, increased lead generation, more touchpoints and overall a higher level of engagement (and also, content for your social media platforms!).

Use marketing automation to schedule your content so that you’re always ahead of the game.

Nurturing, not selling

Marketing automation is brilliant for nurturing your leads. It complements your sales funnel effectively by monitoring how your leads are engaging and responding to your touchpoints.

This means that rather than having to manually follow your leads in the funnel (this could be thousands or a few), you’ll be able to set up automatic triggers when they reach a certain stage, meaning their journey becomes just that little bit more personal and hey presto! they’re more likely to buy.

By automating this process, you can also see what different prospects respond well to and what they don’t, meaning you can refine your buyer journeys.

How to implement it

Take a look at your current processes: your overall sales funnel, your buyer journeys, buyer personas, lead generation and lead nurturing. Look at the ways in which you can refine the whole process and how automating aspects can work.

You need to remember that marketing automation won’t drive traffic to your website or generate leads (the content that you’re automating, will, however), but it will enable you to convert and segment your audiences so that you are more successful and refined.

There are so many marketing automation services now. Some focus on specific marketing techniques such as email, whereas some do it all. Click here for an extensive list that could be useful for you.

Hubspot is our favourite and if you’d like any more information then drop us an email at grow@bbdboom.com.

Also, if you’d like more tips and advice on marketing automation and how to really refine your lead generation, then please get in touch at grow@bbdboom.com – we’ll be more than happy to help!