Marketing Automation in Digital Marketing

What is Marketing Automation in Digital Marketing?

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a technique that uses software to automate a range of marketing processes within one platform. The core purpose of marketing automation is to enhance efficiency and convenience throughout the marketing process, from lead generation to customer retention.

This process enables businesses to streamline and optimise their marketing efforts by automating email marketing campaigns, social media campaigns or content creation. By doing so, marketers can free up valuable time and resources that can be better spent on other areas of the business.

How Marketing Automation Can Solve Problems Within Your Business

To consistently meet key performance indicators (KPIs), an evolving strategy is required to grow and expand a business. There are a collection of tasks that businesses continue to complete manually to their own detriment. Marketing automation can help businesses automate these time-consuming tasks and improve the efficiency and quality of their marketing processes.

By implementing marketing automation in their day-to-day operations, businesses can address the following issues:

  • A lack of time and resources to create more targeted and personalised content

In this constantly changing industry, digital marketers continuously want and need to adapt to new ways of thinking in line with algorithm updates. This puts a lot on one plate, often meaning there isn’t enough time to complete the foundational tasks of a marketing strategy. 

With marketing automation, marketers can experience relief from the monotonous tasks associated with customer retention and personalisation by automating the process. There are tools on the market that assist marketers in creating high-quality, targeted content that attracts new customers without putting the time into duplicating and personalising each piece of content. 

  • Inability to track the customer journey and understand what marketing channels are most effective

Creating unique content can quickly become tedious and complicated with so many platforms to engage with your customers. As a result, businesses will experience leads stuck within the sales funnel, reducing engagement with your brand, and completed purchases. 

Marketing automation performed with an omnichannel approach will guarantee that leads are engaged across all platforms, no matter what stage of the customer journey they have reached. Businesses can enhance their marketing efforts with minimal hassle by offering personalised content on the right platform at the right time. 

  • Inefficient lead generation processes that don’t correctly nurture or qualify leads

As a marketer, your goal is to grab the attention of potential leads and introduce them to the sales funnel. This process requires specific content and interaction at each stage of the journey to ensure the lead is engaged and informed about your product or service. 

Companies that fail to nurture their leads will continually experience poor performance and low return on investment (ROI). Marketing automation can assist businesses in generating relevant content at the time when it is needed. This frees up your time whilst establishing consistent lead prioritisation. 

  • Lack of data-driven insights to make informed decisions about marketing strategies

A marketing strategy without analysis and reflection is like taking a shot in the dark. With expectations to constantly generate creative and effective methods of gaining customer attention, marketers will struggle to understand their audience unless they start paying attention to their needs and behaviours. 

By tracking engagement across various channels and gauging how users have responded to content, marketers can adapt their marketing tactics to create the most efficient way of providing a positive customer journey. 

When is the Right Time to Implement Marketing Automation?

If this is your first time learning about marketing automation, you may not be aware that marketing automation is a solution that applies to all businesses due to its ability to facilitate the work process. We have already covered the many benefits of marketing automation, but this doesn’t necessarily tell you what your current marketing strategy is missing. 

Each business will have the core priority of acquiring new customers and generating increased revenue. To do this, the business must expand over time. As the company starts to grow, simple yet monotonous tasks will no longer have a place in your busy schedule. Because of this, marketing automation is relevant to most, if not all businesses, regardless of size.

Those concerned by a lack of the human element will be pleasantly surprised to learn that marketing automation enables marketers to streamline the customer journey whilst nurturing customers who relate to your business personally. Marketing automation takes a weight off your shoulders whilst providing the connection consumers crave during their purchase decision.

Marketing Automation

How to Choose the Right Automation Solution for Your Business

If marketing automation is the right choice for your business, you’ll need to implement a plan to integrate it within your current strategy. This will involve consideration of your most time-consuming tasks and current priorities. 

Fortunately, a collection of tools and software packages enables businesses to implement marketing automation into their efforts with minimal experience. 

A range of choices can make selecting the right tool for your business difficult. There are plenty of differences between each of the tools. Certain providers focus solely on one aspect of marketing, such as social media or email marketing, whereas others create an inclusive platform to manage all of your automation activity.

Hubspot

The all-in-one tool for streamlined automation, sales, operations and customer service

Hubspot is one such platform that combines almost every tool you could need to enhance your productivity and customer engagement. We have previously mentioned their marketing hub software across other articles and continue to love the versatility of this CRM resource. Marketers can access one of the market’s most comprehensive marketing automation suites at $45 per month within the starter plan. 

Hubspot enlightens marketers to publish content at the most opportune times across key social media platforms. This feature is compiled into one manageable platform with analysis of consumer engagement and keyword monitoring integrated within the social media management toolbox.

To simplify your email marketing efforts, the tool enables you to create compelling email templates without coding knowledge. Then incorporate trigger conditions that send the right emails to leads at the right time. 

Specific Tools for Individual Tasks

SEO automation provides detailed insights at your fingertips without requiring time spent gathering the data. SEMrush facilitates this action and performs automation tasks that marketers should no longer have to manually complete in 2022. In a previous article, we mentioned that SEMrush is one of the critical tools that SEOs should always include in their rotation. The automation features described below continue to demonstrate their utility.

SEMrush offers many standout features, including the keyword position tracking tool. This process is vital for recognising progress and tracking areas of improvement. The SEMrush position tracking tool automates this process preventing marketers from wasting time by manually tracking how their rankings have changed over the past days, months, and weeks.

The tool also offers a range of audits and reports to identify issues across the website. The backlink auditor automatically tracks new and lost links and highlights toxic ones. With a tool that highlights this information automatically, you can address the toxic links early and maintain the health of your backlink profile. The audit tool offers a similar resource. By starting a crawl of your website, the tool will create a report highlighting issues to be fixed, tracked against over 130 ranking factors. 

In terms of email marketing, Mailchimp is the first name that often comes to mind when talking about automation. This software quickly grew in popularity after demonstrating how effective its arsenal of automation features can be for generating and nurturing leads from acquisition to purchase.

With the auto-responses tool, businesses can automatically reach out to new leads. Additionally, the cart recovery tool sends email reminders to customers who have abandoned their online shopping cart. Finally, their feedback tool provides excellent insight into customers’ opinions who have just completed purchases. 

These tools, and more, enhance customer contact by sending reminders and gathering valuable data. However, users of Mailchimp have discovered shortcomings where other tools on the market have started to thrive. Whilst Mailchimp offers simplicity and convenience in its selection of tools, other software like ActiveCampaign provides a more sophisticated strategy with its list segmentation features and drag-and-drop email builders. 

As a social media automation tool with analytics features, Social Pilot offers almost every tool you might need for an effective social media strategy. To alleviate some of the time manually spent posting social media content, Social Pilot enables users to schedule reels, stories, tweets, text, and video posts within a single dashboard.

Beyond this, you can schedule comments on your social media posts to highlight the relevant hashtags that will draw additional traffic to your posts and generate helpful analytics of your posts for future adjustments. 

With so many tools on the market offering a similar automated social media service, it is important to note that Social Pilot is compatible with each of the core social media platforms. Including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, LinkedIn, Youtube, Google My Business, Pinterest, and Tumblr. To combine your social media efforts within one platform that offers complete visibility, Social Pilot is the ideal choice. 

Competing with tools such as Social Pilot, Linkedhelper is automation software that focuses its services directly on the LinkedIn platform. Despite the convenience of all-in-one platforms such as Social Pilot, there are benefits to be enjoyed from specialised tools such as Linkedhelper.

LinkedIn offers a unique opportunity to generate valuable B2B and B2C connections. By mastering the skill of acquiring connections and engaging with them through solid content, you can create an audience of potential leads. However, manually sending out hundreds of connection requests and personalised messages consumes valuable time.

Here’s where Linkedhelper stands out. The tool completes each of the tasks you usually perform to maintain your LinkedIn account. This enables marketers to focus more on broader business goals and innovative marketing strategies. Benefit from personalised automated messages delivered straight to your most valuable leads. 

The software mimics human behaviour to provide a genuine experience for your customers and create highly efficient results. An additional benefit of this feature is that LinkedIn doesn’t identify the tool as a bot. Due to its ability to mimic human behaviour. As a result, Linkedhelper has gained a reputation as the safest and most reliable LinkedIn automation tool

Summary

Plenty of professional marketers incorporate automation into their plans due to the convenience that it offers. Deploying the right tools for your needs could take your business to the next level. Spend less time on the monotonous tasks that take up too much of your attention. Instead focus on meaningful actions within your business. 

With the right tool, marketing automation reduces your workload whilst enhancing your marketing efforts. Plenty of tools enable businesses to provide personalised content that is distributed at the most effective time, without having to lift a finger. 

If you are interested in further information on how you could integrate marketing automation into your current strategy, contact Pinnacle Internet Marketing. Our team of digital marketing experts can provide guidance and expertise on a range of automation tools and techniques. For email, social media, SEO, and content marketing. 

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