Automation has made life so much easier and fun, even in marketing. It streamlines all marketing and sales repetitive tasks with automated solutions, which reduces costs and human errors. These days, software and technologies are used to enhance promotional strategies across the globe. These things are individually referred to as marketing automation. Online marketers use this in their online and offline marketing campaigns’ planning, coordination, management, and monitoring.
Software categories used for Marketing Automation
In the past, it usually refers to auto-respond email solutions but is now more used for inbound marketing. Basically, automated marketing is highly applicable to different online channels including websites, social media, emails, and any online platform. In most cases, marketing automation is either web-based or hosted solution and requires no installation at all.
Marketing intelligence
This kind of automation software uses a tracking code across all online platforms to interpret social behaviour. It records the buying and browsing signals on diverse thread groups to accurately analyse buyer and prospective clients’ responses. Hence, it provides a more concrete audience target solution to marketers. Thus dubbed as Marketing Automation 2.0 for their interactive nature.
Marketing automation
Software under this category are more focused on B2B (business-to-business), B2C (business-to-consumer), and B2G (business-to-government) promotional email campaigns. Marketing automation encompasses various marketing actions from automating repetitive tasks such as sending emails, lead tagging and scoring and segmentation, to monitoring phone campaigns and online engagement. It streamlines the process, send relevant content and messages and provide in-depth insights that help marketers determine what works and what doesn’t.
Advanced workflow automation
As the name implies, advanced workflow automation is a more thorough kind of automation software. Those that fall under this category offer structured processes on internal marketing. And by internal marketing, it means budgeting, planning, workflow, approvals, internal collaboration, digital asset creation, marketing calendar, and management. Obviously, the software encompasses everything that ensures operational efficiency in any internal marketing campaign. Due to its structure, the automation process requires CRM or an administrator. The CRM or administrator sets up the series of complex rules and uses in triggering sales action.
Functionality of Marketing Automation
The use of marketing automation benefits professionals in marketing and companies as it takes the bulk of the task in campaigns and advertisement projects. Clearly, all it takes is setting up the campaign and criteria for the intended outcome. Then, the software will take care of the tasks’ execution. Still, you continually feed leads through the funnel while the software monitors and interprets results. Bottom line, this not only increases efficiency but also reduce human error and effort.
To sum things up, the marketing automation functions as:
- Marketing campaigns and prospect customers analysis, development, and improvement
- Marketing projects and campaigns management
- Customer data and storage organisation
- Moving contacts based on leads and turn into customers
