What Is Marketing Automation? A Brief Overview

SUMMARY:
  • Some of the common issues faced by marketing teams today usually happens in the middle of the marketing funnel, primarily insufficient resources to engage leads and inability to gauge whether the lead is "hot" or "cold".
  • Marketing automation resolves these issues by automating repetitive tasks such as engaging leads and also provide insights into customer's responses to these engagements, such as clicking on emails.
  • Marketing automation's role is primarily to send the right content at the right time, and track the user's responses to these content, prioritizing those who are highly engaged

In Marketing Automation by Benjamin

What problems does Marketing Automation solve?

The key activity of marketing is about engaging the prospective customer with the right content at the right time, which aims to convince the prospect that the specific product/service fully addresses their needs, eventually leading to a sale.

Many marketing teams focus on acquisition strategy, as Econsultancy reported in 2016, “For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them, (Econsultancy, 2016)“. There are various reasons behind this trend, but chief among them is attributed to limitations in resources, budget and time, depriving these marketing teams from engaging the prospective customer with the right content at the right time throughout the buyer journey.

For every $92 spent acquiring customers, only $1 is spent converting them. (Econsultancy, 2016)

Customer acquisition is less resource intensive as we’re able to “set & forget”, allowing SEO, SEM, PPC Campaigns on various medium to run its course, however, converting a lead requires various engagement points, delivering the right content along the way to nurture the lead into a sale. Many marketing teams struggle with this, with the most cited reason being:

  • insufficient marketing personnel to engage every lead.
  • inability to gauge whether the lead is a hot or cold prospect to focus their efforts on.
  • inability to continuously engage with the prospect, as most prefer not to divulge phone numbers, due to perceived “pushy” nature of a sales call.
  • Inability to engage the lead with a promotion if they have lost interest

All of the above issues, and much more, can be resolved by automating marketing tasks intelligently with software tools.

Addressing Missed Engagement Opportunities with Marketing Automation

Addressing Missed Engagement Opportunities with Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a software tool that automates marketing and sales task to reduce the strain on resources, time and budget by delivering the right content, at the right time. To be specific, it focuses on optimizing the lead generation process, tracking and deployment of marketing campaigns, lead scoring and routing, customer intelligence and segmentation. With these processes in place, marketing automation helps businesses to:

  • Generate more and better leads
  • Improve marketing productivity
  • Improve conversion and engagement rates

How does Marketing Automation work?

The two key elements of marketing automation are content and logic, which could be executed with software, providing marketing teams the ability to:

  • craft great content and,
  • determine the logic of who gets what, by when.

To accomplish this, the content (email in this case) and a sequence of tasks are designed in the marketing automation software. For example, when the prospect submits a contact form on the website, send a welcome message immediately. The software would then execute the sequence that has been laid out.

Taking it one step further, you can even score the lead for opening the email, let’s say provide 10 points for opening the email and 20 points for replying to the email or you would like to send the prospect another email, showing case studies of successful users.

A Simple Marketing Automation Sequence

All logical sequences would be built and delivered via the marketing automation software.

The Key To Make Marketing Automation Succesful.

Software vendors would tout the marketing automation features, capabilities and much more. We’ll leave software tools and its features aside, and delve into the one key that could make a marketing automation programme successful for your business.

It’s an in-depth knowledge of your buyer, together with the ability to map highly relevant content to the buyer journey, marketing automation can then be used to deliver the right content at the right stage of the buyer’s journey.

Nebworx’s Approach To Marketing Automation

For a successful marketing automation programme, there is much digital marketing planning that is required prior to implementing it via software. Marketing strategy tools such as Buyer Persona, Buyer Journey and Value Proposition tools would help to shape the content and logic that is required which are all part of Nebworx’s digital marketing planning.

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ABOUT

Benjamin Tan switched from a career in engineering to the artsy field of marketing, whilst retaining his love for structures and data. He's available to provide training & consultancy. Book a FREE 15 minute session now!   →