Marketing Automation

Market automation refers to the process of using an automated system to handle several marketing processes and campaigns across various channels. Businesses use marketing automation to target marketing messages to their target customers via text, email, web, and social.

Automated marketing messages are defined by a body of instructions or templates called workflow. A marketing manager sets the workflow, which could be an existing marketing template, a custom-made one, or an adjusted and modified template during a campaign.

The primary reason sales and marketing departments employ marketing automation is to create an automatic process for transmitting their sales activities and marketing campaigns. With this process, employees can focus on other more crucial projects. Automated marketing maximizes efficiency, saves human stress, and increases revenue.

Some other benefits of marketing automation include saving time and cost, generating and nurturing leads, scoring, and measuring total ROI from marketing campaigns. As your business grows and expands, an excellent marketing automated system should scale to cater to your new reality.

Marketing automation is a body of tools that simplify and automate some of the modern sales roles and marketing-related responsibilities.

An excellent automation tool identifies your audience for every targeted message, designs the content that suits them, and sends these messages according to pre-set schedules or observed customer behavior.

Immediately your automated marketing campaign is up and running, you can conveniently handle other activities while saving time and resources. When you start recording results from your marketing plan, you can measure, analyze, and adjust your strategies to drive more ROI and revenue generation.

The process of marketing automation begins when you collect customer information from your interactions on social media, email lists, online forms, apps, or website visitor details.

You create a well-rounded view of your customer using these details, then your marketing automation takes up the segmentation and adequate target defining the process to measure the right audience for your campaign.

Once the system defines and segments customers based on their profile, marketing automation creates messages that are tailored to these customers and sent across via social platforms, emails, mobile messages, etc.

Regardless of your customer base, whether large or small, marketing automation delivers personalized messages to every customer in an efficient manner.

A customer journey comprises the totality of the personalized interactions they have with your brand from the first contact.

Marketing automation also creates an integrated mobile messaging system comprising your emails and social campaigns via group messaging and SMS/MMS push notifications.

Furthermore, marketing automation creates digital ads and transmits them to a customer at the right time, while automatically recommending the right products for each user from your website.

Following industry best practices when creating your automated marketing strategy will help you achieve success from the process. Here are a few of such best practices.

1. Define and describe your goals adequately. Employ figures to explain your reason for investing in marketing automation platforms to relevant stakeholders.
2. Work with other Teams. Ensure you get the contributions of other teams in your company as your automated marketing strategy will affect and concern them.
3. Visualize the Process. Create a detailed diagram of outflow that shows your objectives and goal of your automated marketing process.
4. Work on database segmentation. Segment customers based on their data, define why and how you would like to engage them.
5. Build a Content Strategy. Design messages that are engaging, relevant, and interesting. Ensure that they reach your customers at the right time and right stage during their journey.
6. Plan your strategy in stages. To achieve a successful automated marketing campaign, it is best to launch in stages, carry out tests as you go on, and optimize the next stage for better results.
7. Conduct Analysis. Monitor feedback information and analyze results as you get them. The analysis helps you make positive adjustments to boost your business and ROI.

Marketing automation comes with dynamic tools to help you boost your marketing efforts, and save money and time. Automated marketing solutions help small business owners expand their marketing strategies without stress.

Here are some ways to use marketing automation for your business.

Email marketing automation

Automated email marketing allows you to send emails to several groups of prospective or existing customers. With this system, you can get details from your receivers, identify those who open your emails, click on your links, and take other actions.

Email marketing automation also helps you discover the sites your subscribers’ visit and their favorite content.

When your automated marketing tool collects this information, it segments or groups your customers based on shared interests, similar age, occupation, web history, or other similar activities. The software then sends similar messages to people in the same group. Such targeted messages are called triggered emails.

Some triggered emails include:

• Welcome Emails: It is common practice to send welcome emails to new subscribers on your list. You can make it a single or multiple message introducing your brand and telling them what to look forward to.
• Referral Emails: Referral emails often contain discounts, coupons, and other forms of motivation for new and existing customers who refer friends and family to patronize your business.
• Milestone Emails: Such emails mark important days or celebrations for your customer such as birthdays, public holidays, anniversaries, or national observances. You can choose to simply celebrate them, or also offer discounts to mark the milestone.
• Abandoned Cart Emails: Companies send abandoned cart emails to customers who leave their e-commerce site in the middle of shopping without checking out their products. This email reminds and encourages them to finish their purchase.

Automated email marketing holds the secret to establishing a consistent and efficient connection between your brand and your customers. When people opt-in for your emails, you can use automated email marketing to build great relationships while taking them towards a final purchase decision.

Social media automation

Social media automation helps you engage your audience on several platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. You can also share relevant information about your company and products on these platforms.

With social media automation, you can handle the following tasks.

• Content Sharing: Social media automation helps you to schedule and publish posts across several networks. Specific automated tools allow you to republish some content from time to time, for more effective distribution.
• Monitoring Brand Mentions: Several social media automation tools help you monitor your brand mentions on different platforms and inform you when people are talking about your brand. This way, you always know what people are saying about you at any time.
• Progress Tracking: Some automated tools will offer reports based on your progress rate and social media performance over some time. This information helps you adjust your approach for better performance.
• Growing your Brand: Social media automation tools help you save time as it sends messages and engages with your customers automatically, based on the responses and messages you set.

The larger social media following and engagements you build, the higher your chances of gaining fans to support your business.

Automated social media marketing helps you build loyal customers across various social media platforms, and promote brand awareness.

Google Ads automation

Automated Google Ads help you execute successful search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns. Google Ads comprises display ads and pay-per-click ads (PPC) that reach as much as 90% of internet users with your advert message.

Here are some options for your Automated Google Ad strategies.

• Automated Bidding: It is normal to get confused as to how much your bid for a page view, click, or conversion should cost. If you have a hard time doing the math, opt for automated bidding, and Google Ads will help you find the lowest amount available.

• Responsive Search Ads: Setting up a responsive search campaign entails writing out a few headlines, adding some images, and writing an ad copy. Google Ad will try several combinations and pick the most appealing to your target customers.
• Dynamic Ads: Google Ads will help you create dynamic ads for your target audience using material available on your website. Simply input the URL you want to advertise, and the tool will handle it.
•   Smart campaigns: To set up a smart campaign, you need to select a goal and input all relevant information about this goal. The smart campaign will begin running immediately. Google Ads take charge of the optimization process for best results, while you monitor the process when you can.

When you automate your Google Ads, you can promote brand awareness, boost sales, and convert customers without much first-hand technical knowledge.

While your automated Ad platform handles most of the work, you can focus on other marketing and business goals.