Wondering how to automate your marketing?
Are you tired of sticking to the same plans?
This is the right time to automate your marketing skills because marketing automation is growing, and new and better tools are emerging to simplify processes. Whether you have just stepped into the marketing world or are a pro, automating your marketing processes and integrating tools to save time is an excellent way of cutting down the clutter.
Because of the complexity and pace of the current marketing campaigns, teams involved in digital marketing can fall behind on essential tasks, including optimizing leads and ongoing email campaigns. As a result, the teams cannot achieve the allocated targets.
If you are reading this, chances are that you have gone through a similar scenario. Simply executing the campaigns is not enough- you need marketing needs automation to take advantage of all the activities happening in the marketing funnel.
Before we further move ahead, it’s essential to discuss what automation is and why it has become so crucial for marketing processes and teams.
What is Marketing Automation?
What comes to your mind when you hear the word automation? Something related to the marketing efforts or your business strategy? Yes, you have guessed it right. Marketing automation streamlines customer life cycle marketing, cross-selling marketing, up-selling, and lead generation.
The idea brings together various platforms to manage all aspects of digital marketing. It perfectly shapes out the targeted email campaigns and social media strategies. Marketing automation assists you by taking over the monotonous tasks so that you can dedicate more time to planning and evaluating results.
The primary purpose of marketing automation is efficiency, but it also helps you personalize marketing strategies. While all areas of the marketing operations could benefit from automation, email marketing and social media content calendar management benefit from the process the most.
The good thing about marketing automation is the rapid entry of new tools that improve existing processes and introduce an innovation that opens up new areas of marketing to automation.
Once you decide to opt for marketing automation, the first thing to do is to have a clear vision of the bottom line’s expectations. Next, you need to select the tools that help you in achieving the targets. It is important that the tools you pick should complement each other so that you have a smooth-operating marketing machine at your disposal. Finally, set up proper guidelines to make sure the tools contribute to the marketing processes.
Let’s look at what studies reveal about marketing automation.
According to research, businesses that use marketing automation to bring in marketing prospects see an increase of 451% in qualified leads. Another research from Forrester reveals that companies that automate lead generation using marketing automation produce 50% more sales-ready leads at only 33% of the cost.
A good way to understand the impact of automation is to see how the tools integrate at the four major milestones of the customer journey. Here’s a quick rundown of the four milestones and how automation could help simplify and speed up the process.
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- Attract: At this point, tools help in discovering and reaching the right audience.
- Convert: Here, the audience is nurtured to become customers.
- Close: The leads convert into customers, who are then segmented into various actionable cohorts.
- Delight: Customers become the advocates who bring in more customers
Tools for Automating Marketing
Choosing the right tools for your marketing automation processes is a serious challenge because of the massive variety of tools available today. Any marketer serious about marketing automation would have to experiment with many tools to find the right fit for their processes. To help all such marketers, we have listed the following tools to have a good starting point for the tools.
Social Champ
Social Champ is a social media management and automation tool that helps you to create, manage and schedule posts for all your social accounts. This is an excellent way of experiencing the power and simplicity of handling all your social media campaigns from one platform.
With SocialChamp, you can schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, Google My Business, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. The content composer is crisp and has a clean design.
- Pocket friendly
- Track your all social posts
- Repurpose your content and much more!
Omnisend
For automating your marketing, Omnisend is a great example of the tools that take care of many hassles. It has been around for a while, and the platform is very mature with lots of features. Omnisend helps with:
- Addition of various channels to automation workflows
- Push notifications
- Emails
With tons of features, advanced targeting, and an easy drag and drop builder experience, it is an immersive omnichannel tool for your marketing campaigns.
Marketo
Marketo is currently owned by Adobe and brings a host of features, all aimed at integrating various marketing channels. This is a great tool for lead management that covers all aspects of the process. In particular, Marketo helps with:
- Lead management
- Lead scoring
- Search engine optimization
- Discovering lead revenue opportunities
Marketo is something every marketer could benefit from, thanks to its emphasis on the quality of the leads.
Eloqua
Next on the list is Eloqua from Oracle. This great marketing automation tool takes care of all major aspects of a marketing campaign with proper reports for all major milestones, thanks to over 700 integrations. In particular, Eloqua is a great option for:
- Dynamic content
- Email marketing campaign
- Drip sequence
- List segmentation
Eloqua is a robust platform that is better suited for B2B marketers and other agencies.
Wiser
Next, we have Wiser on our list. The tool is considered one of the best automation tools on the market. From A/B testing to assisting you in finding the right spot to increase your bottom line, Wiser is a great all-in-one automation tool for businesses of all sizes.
Why Do You Need to Automate Your Marketing?
Still, wondering why you need to automate your marketing?
We will now list out three arguments that could convince you to audit your processes and come up with exciting ideas for automating your marketing campaigns.
It Saves your Time
Whether you are a social media manager or a digital marketer, time management is the biggest issue that marketers face. The most significant benefit of automation is that it saves time. You can schedule your content and post it on multiple social accounts all at once. However, now social media networks allow you to schedule your content through tools such as a Pinterest scheduler. When you integrate tools into your processes, you will soon find time for more crucial activities as the tools take over the monotonous tasks.
Connect and Sell More
Why not give your customers a reason to stick to your product? With marketing automation, you can easily do this. Your purpose is to sell your product, and that’s fine. Automation can help you build trust with your customers. For instance, when they add favorite things to their cart, remind them to add more trendy stuff to their final purchase.
Increase Productivity
Here comes the most significant benefit of automation: running digital marketing campaigns with minimum input. Once you are all set to run your automated digital campaigns, your team can get on to more essential tasks. Automation helps the marketing team do more tasks as their attention shifts from mundane to actual business challenges.
In the End…
Good marketing is essential for distinguishing your products from competitors. However, as things get complicated, you need to find time to manage all the moving parts of the campaigns.
A big thanks goes to all the automation tools that have made the work easier for the marketing teams. You need to have the right tools that fit your budget and requirements. However, make sure you understand the benefits and the use cases for each tool. You will definitely see an improvement in productivity and performance.
