Digital marketing
Marketing automation
Leveraging the power of marketing automation
Marketing automation explained: Marketing automation uses a software platform to carry out a carefully planned email and SMS campaign in which subsequent brand messages are personalized and customized to each target based on their previous behaviors in response to communications as each target is moved toward a desired goal (such as a sale or endorsement). If you’re looking to generate more leads for your business, convert those leads into revenue, provide prospects with impactful content at the right time through the right medium, and demonstrate marketing ROI, then marketing automation is what you may be looking for. Marketing automation is growing aggressively and is currently used by 42 percent of companies. Though still the domain of large companies, the fastest growth in marketing automation is occurring in midsize and smaller companies.Advantages of marketing automation:
Personalized and customized
At its heart, marketing automation is behavior-based marketing. So, depending on how (or if) a prospect responds to your first communication, your follow-up is an appropriately tailored and personalized message (content, format, vehicle) – increasing your chances of moving them along the path you wish to move them while gaining an ever-richer understanding (progressive profiling) of that prospect through tracking visits, forms and website analytics.
Integration with social media and websites
One of the biggest advantages of marketing automation is the ability to seamlessly integrate email and SMS outbound campaign messages with social media platforms and websites to determine who is engaging with which channels, as well as when they are engaging. This allows you to optimize your campaigns almost in real time.
A managed database
A marketing automation platform allows you to build, analyze and track emails, as well as segment lists of leads, generate Web traffic and much more while automating the process through one simple, easy-to-use Web-based database.
A/B testing
Marketing automation is also a great tool for experimentation. Rather than committing to a single message in the hope that it will be effective, marketing automation allows you to test which of two alternative messages is more effective at each stage of the marketing process. This creates a living, breathing, real-time marketing strategy.
Doing more with fewer resources
Having a completely managed database in one place that allows you to build, analyze and send appropriate and customized content based on your audience’s behavior allows you to maximize the efficiency of your marketing team. This is one major reason why 63 percent of companies using marketing automation plan to increase their budgets for this form of digital marketing.