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What is Marketing Automation? Guide to the automation process

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Sabah Noor

date icon Jun 26, 2024

date icon 10 min read

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A recent study revealed that the average marketing automation ROI is $5.44 for every dollar spent. Despite this, 28% of surveyed companies plan to use marketing automation in the next two years, and 13% do not.

This indicates a significant gap between potential benefits and current usage, attributed to challenges such as a lack of training, complex process setup, and budget constraints.

This guide will help you understand the marketing automation process and how to overcome challenges to maximize your business’s revenue and conversions.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to using software to automate marketing tasks and processes. The marketing automation definition includes saving contact data, organizing contact databases, sending notifications and reminders, tracking campaign performance, and managing social media posts designed to streamline complex marketing activities for efficiency and effectiveness.

How does marketing automation impact the customer journey and its workings? It allows consistent and efficient product marketing using valuable data to engage customers and drive conversions.

With marketing automation tools, businesses can target customers with automated messages based on predefined workflows. These workflows can be pre-built templates, customized, or modified mid-campaign for faster results.

Why Use Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation platforms can do so much, but only a handful of marketers feel they are fully utilizing these tools. The primary reasons for this underutilization include lack of training, the complexity of process setup, and budget issues.

A well-defined marketing automation strategy is crucial to utilize these tools and enhance efficiency.

However, when implemented correctly, marketing automation can significantly enhance the efficiency of sales and marketing teams, allowing them to focus on strategic tasks and improve customer engagement.

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How to Simplify the Marketing Automation Process?

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Marketing automation involves a series of steps that enable software to streamline tasks. Choosing the right marketing automation solution is crucial to streamline lead management and handle lead filtering. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the marketing automation process:

1. Define Your Goals

Identify what you want to achieve with marketing automation. Integrating marketing automation across the customer lifecycle is crucial for creating long-term relationships and tracking the customer journey. Common goals include lead generation, customer retention, upselling, and increasing conversions. Clear goals will help you select the right tools and measure success effectively.

2. Select the Right Marketing Automation Tools

Choose a marketing automation platform that suits your business needs. Popular options include HubSpot, Marketo, Mailchimp, and EngageBay. These tools offer various features like email marketing, CRM integration, social media management, and analytics.

3. Create and Segment Your Database

Collect and organize your customer data. Segment your audience based on demographics, behavior, purchase history, and engagement levels. This segmentation allows for more personalized and targeted marketing efforts.

4. Design the Customer Journey

Map out the customer journey from awareness to purchase and beyond. Understanding marketing automation work is crucial as it involves utilizing the components, technology, and benefits of marketing automation to streamline and enhance your marketing efforts. Develop workflows for different customer segments and stages in the journey. For instance, using EngageBay, you can automate social media posts, email follow-ups, and personalized messages based on user interactions.

5. Develop Content and Campaigns

Create personalized content that resonates with each segment. The marketing team can leverage automation tools to create personalized content and campaigns. Plan your campaigns, including email marketing, social media, and SMS. Automation tools can help you schedule and execute these campaigns efficiently.

6. Set Up Automated Workflows

Configure your marketing automation platform to trigger actions based on customer behavior. For example, you can set up workflows to send welcome emails when a user signs up, follow-up messages after a purchase, or reminders for abandoned shopping carts.

7. Implement Lead Scoring

Assign scores to leads based on their behavior and engagement. Prioritize leads for your sales team based on their readiness to purchase. This ensures that your sales team focuses on the most promising prospects.

8. Monitor and Analyze Performance

Track key metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and ROI. Use analytics to understand what’s working and what needs improvement. Tools like EngageBay provide comprehensive reporting features to help you analyze campaign performance.

9. Optimize and refine

Continuously test and optimize your campaigns for better performance. Use A/B testing to refine your messaging, timing, and offers. Regularly update your workflows based on insights and feedback.

10. Ensure Compliance

Stay compliant with data protection regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Ensure your marketing automation processes respect user privacy and consent. This builds trust with your audience and avoids legal issues.

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Types of Marketing Automation Processes

Marketing automation streamlines complex processes, allowing for more focused and efficient marketing strategies. Here are six core types:

  1. Email Marketing Automation: Enhances customer engagement by handling recurring email campaigns like welcome messages, programmed drip sequences, and timely follow-ups automatically.
  2. Social Media Marketing Automation: Streamlines digital presence by prescheduling content, automating post publication, and managing online interactions on multiple social platforms efficiently.
  3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Automation: Improves customer insights, seamlessly automating the data collection, storage, and detailed analysis of customer interactions and preferences.
  4. Customer Segmentation Automation: Boosts campaign relevance by dividing the customer base into specific groups based on distinct characteristics for finely-tailored marketing approaches.
  5. Analytics Automation: Simplifies data analysis by generating detailed automated reports evaluating the performance and effectiveness of various marketing campaigns.
  6. Advertising Automation: Optimizes ad management, enabling the scheduling, automatic posting, and diligent monitoring of advertisements across diverse digital platforms.

Adopting these automation processes can transform how you connect with customers, making every interaction more impactful and data-driven.

4 Examples of Marketing Automation in Action

Marketing automation makes things easier and smarter. Here’s how it works in the real world:

1. Loyalty and Reward Programs

Brands can automate rewards based on customer actions, such as signing up, referring friends, or reviewing products. Points are automatically credited, enhancing customer engagement and retention.

2. Free Resources

Companies generate leads by offering free resources in exchange for contact information. Automation platforms send thank you emails with download links and store the information for future marketing efforts.

3. Welcome Emails

Automatically send welcome emails to new subscribers. These emails typically include a thank you note, a brief company introduction, and special offers to encourage purchases.

4. Newsletters

Schedule and send regular newsletters to keep customers informed about new products, services, and industry trends. Newsletters can be customized based on customer segments for better engagement.

Using these automation tricks can really change the game for your marketing, saving time and making customers happy.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

Research shows that marketing automation can increase lead generation by 80%, reduce marketing overhead costs by 12.2%, and boost sales productivity by 14.5%. Here are some key benefits:

Streamline Marketing Operations

Marketing automation platforms streamline operations by taking over repetitive B2B marketing automation tasks. This frees up your team for complex strategies and optimizes time and resources.

Understand Your Clients

B2B marketing automation platforms collect and analyze customer data, offering insights that sharpen your digital marketing strategies with personalized, effective content.

Save Time and Resources

Marketing automation saves time and resources, automating routine digital marketing tasks. This efficiency allows your team to focus more on lead conversion and nurturing.

Enhance Lead Management

With marketing automation, managing and nurturing leads becomes more efficient, ensuring timely, relevant engagement - a cornerstone of successful B2B marketing strategies.

Improve Sales and Marketing Collaboration

Marketing automation fosters alignment between sales and marketing teams, sharing insights that inform better strategies and aid in achieving shared B2B marketing goals.

Boost Customer Retention

Automated campaigns via marketing automation platforms keep your brand in constant contact with customers, which is crucial for customer retention and encouraging repeat business in the B2B realm.

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Marketing Automation vs. Account-Based Marketing

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While both aim to provide personalized experiences, marketing automation targets a broad audience through multiple channels, whereas account-based marketing focuses on a small group of highly profiled companies with personalized messages.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation focuses on efficiently communicating with a large audience through various channels such bloss as email, social media, and websites. It's designed to automate repetitive tasks, nurture leads through the sales funnel, and personalize content at scale, based on user behavior and preferences. Its strength lies in its ability to handle high volumes of contacts and its capability in segmenting and targeting these contacts based on automated workflows.

Key Features

  • Broad targeting and communication
  • High volume capability
  • Lead nurturing on a large scale
  • Automates repetitive tasks
  • Segmentation and personalized communication

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

ABM, on the other hand, is a focused approach where marketing efforts are tailored to specific accounts or customer segments. It involves identifying high-value accounts and creating customized marketing campaigns geared specifically towards those accounts. ABM’s targeted approach fosters deeper engagement with prospects, ideally turning them into high-value customers.

Key Features

  • Highly targeted to specific accounts
  • Customized campaigns
  • Deep engagement and personalization
  • Aligns marketing and sales teams
  • Focuses on converting high-value prospects

Comparison

While marketing automation is about reaching as many people as possible to generate leads and automating communications to nurture these leads, ABM is about focusing intensely on a smaller group of high-value accounts with the goal of converting them into customers. Marketing automation is useful for broad-based marketing strategies, whereas ABM suits companies looking for a targeted approach.

Choosing the Right Strategy

Deciding between marketing automation and ABH depends on your company's size, goals, and resources. Automation is ideal for broad reach and engagement. ABM might be more effective for tailored relationships and high conversions with key accounts. Many companies find that using a combination of both strategies optimizes their marketing efforts.

Understanding these two strategies' unique capabilities can empower a business to target and engage with its audience more effectively, potentially leading to increased sales and customer loyalty.

Common Marketing Automation Integrations

In today's fast-paced digital world, using the right marketing tools can really help your business run smoother and improve your marketing. Let's see how different technologies work well with marketing automation to make things better.

  1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software: This integration streamlines sales and marketing by connecting interactions and tracking leads, ensuring cohesive strategies across teams.
  2. Social Media Management: Marketing automation tools include features for managing social media, enabling scheduled posts and analysing engagement to optimize campaigns.
  3. Account-Based Marketing Software: Tailors marketing efforts to high-value accounts, ensuring personalized engagement and fostering deeper business relationships.
  4. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): Integrates with marketing automation to manage operations and centralize data, facilitating informed decision-making and efficiency.
  5. Email Marketing: Automation expands outreach by enabling the scheduled sending of personalized emails, enhancing engagement and conversion rates.

By using these tools together, businesses can really step up their marketing game, ensuring they manage things better and get great results in attracting and keeping customers.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is a powerful tool that helps businesses target customers more effectively, streamline processes, and enhance customer engagement. By implementing marketing automation, companies can focus on essential tasks, create personalized client experiences, and boost revenue and conversions.

At Saffron Edge, we've experienced the transformative power of marketing automation. By leveraging automation tools like HubSpot and Salesforce for our clients, we've witnessed a substantial uptick in lead generation compared to our previous methods.

The result has been a more focused approach to our essential tasks in SaaS marketing and the creation of highly personalized client experiences that drive revenue and conversions.

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According to Wikipedia, “Quora is an American question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, and edited by Internet users, either factually, or in the form of opinions.” To put it in layman terms, Quora is basically a social networking website, where any and all can answer, and get answers to theirs and others doubts. Through this site, you can answer anyone's queries and also at the same time put up questions, to get the answer off. Anyone can ask any question and can also provide answers to questions that they might know the correct answers to. How does it work? Quora works on a few principles. For instance, once you're signed up with Quora, you need to pick out a set of topics that interest you carefully, and then follow them. Based on what you are following, you will then see questions and answers related to those topics, while browsing the site. For example, if you are interested in sports, then you will mostly get questions and answers regarding sports. 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With one wrong move, your business could turn up-side-down. This is the reason why some businesses hire content writers for the task of writing their Quora answers. But is that seriously required? We think it’s not. Does a content writer know more about your business than you? The answer to this question will always be, NO! We consider Quora to be a very personal platform for businesses to portray themselves. Then why hire an outsider to do the job, you yourself is best capable of doing. So here are the Do’s and Don’ts of answering a question, which could positively or negatively affect your brand: Do’s: Understanding each and every question that you intend to answer is very important. Create a rough sketch of how you are to go about with the answer. Proofread it and think, is that the best you can do? You need to keep it sweet and short and comprehensive. You need to always stay relevant, and your content should be informative. The viewer should see value in your text. You need to see this from the point of view of the viewer, and question yourself, does this answer my query? You need to prove your credibility. This can only be done by adding in foot-notes and instances of pieces of content you wrote that might be considered to be relevant while answering the current question. By doing so, your audience gets an idea of who you are, and that the information that you are providing them with, is trustworthy and correct. Providing backlinks to support your content can really be helpful. You must use high-authority backlinks. This provides weightage to your text, and proves that you know what your talking about. Images are a good source of getting the message across. Even better are videos and infographics. If you can incorporate those in your answers, it will help capture the eyes of the viewer and will make your content more engaging and interactive, and effective at the same time. Try including brand names. 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Lawyer Internet Marketing: 7 Trends Every Law Firm Should Follow! (Updated)

The internet is one of the essential tools for online businesses to reap a more significant ROI than conventional marketing methods. Today, attorneys look for the best lawyer internet marketing tactics that can help their practice grow more. The truth is that most individuals looking for legal assistance are using search engines to find a lawyer. Today, online legal services have garnered massive growth in terms of audiences. The market size of online legal services had reached $8.5 billion in 2020. In 2021, it is expected to grow further at a rate of 2.7%. According to a survey conducted in 2020 in the USA, 17% of the participants claimed that they use online search engines to find an attorney. Hence, legal professionals in the USA are investing their time and effort in online marketing. On average, lawyers spend 1.4 hours each day strategizing their networking tactics and referral techniques to attract new clients. 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Apart from case studies, you can also post informative blogs to educate your visitors about legal procedures or laws. Once you have a decent pool of case studies and blogs on your website, your visitors will look at your brand as a thought leader in the legal industry. In this way, you can win new clients and establish trust among them. Publishing good website content with relevant keywords will also help your law firm rank well on Google SERPs; therefore, it’ll also increase your brand presence. Source: Unsplash 2. Why Branding Is An Important Element Of law Firm Marketing Strategies? Many online legal firms overlook the significance of branding. In the era of digital marketing, branding has become one of the key ingredients behind a brand’s success over the internet. You must remember that over a billion searches every day on Google, 15% of these searches are fresh! Hence, to garner the top spot and attract relevant audiences, you have to brand yourself properly. When you invest in tools or services that uplift your brand presence over the internet, you tend to portray your strength and expertise. You must showcase the stellar results you have brought to your previous clients. It will allow you to build trust among new clients. Branding in the legal industry conveys the right message before your potential clients. It would be best to portray how the results would look when a client invests in your services. Make sure your branding is consistent across all social media platforms and search engines. If you haven’t set up your Google My Business Page, you must create one; it’ll help your local searchers find your business quickly! 3. The Significance Of Email Newsletters In Lawyer Internet Marketing Newsletters are pretty simple to produce; however, they effectively market your legal services to your audiences. You can use your weekly or monthly newsletters as a tool to stay in touch with your existing clients while offering them some unique or special information. You can also introduce new packages or services via your newsletter. E.g., one of our clients who has a professional law firm in California offers information about the recent changes in federal law in their state. You can produce newsletters that highlight how your clients can handle legal scenarios to avoid any further complications. Newsletters have a flexible format in which one can use engaging visuals or illustrations. However, your focus should be on providing relevant, helpful information that adds value. Source: Unsplash 4. Social Media Can Help Your Boost Your Growth. Social media is a great tool to empower your marketing efforts. According to a forecast, experts predict that there will be 3.43 billion active social media users by 2023. Therefore, you can understand how powerful social media can be. It gives marketers an enormous pool of audiences to which they can market their products and services. Online businesses can directly stay in touch with their customer base. They can post valuable and engaging content which can attract new audiences. One of the vital attributes of social media is providing a platform through which a brand can build a community. Your law firm can create a community of clients and lawyers with whom you can interact daily. For example, your law firm can create a Facebook group through which you can answer the most frequently asked questions. In this way, your law firm can cultivate the audience's trust and boost its credibility. 5. Does Your Website Offer Live Chat Feature? Live chat is a feature that law firms often overlook. However, this feature is future-relevant; it isn't going away anytime soon! It provides a vast amount of utility on your website. How? When you have a live chat tool on your website, your customers can quickly get in touch with one of your representatives. These representatives can soon clear their doubts, and they can encourage them to take action. Even when new users ask basic questions, you must ensure that they get relevant answers. In this way, they'll get what they were looking for, which reduces the chances of visiting a competitor's website. Live chatbots are great features that can help you streamline your leads. Chatbots also provide 24x7 support, even when your visitors visit your website at odd hours. 6. Enhance Your Website’s User Experience. If your website doesn’t offer easy navigation and potential clients find your website interface problematic, then they won’t wait a single second to shift their preferences to your competitors’ websites. Don’t drive them away! If they drive away from your website then it will lead to a high bounce rate which is a key element in the Google Algorithm that decides the quality of your website’s content. If users leave your website quickly, your overall website rankings will fall. Hence, you should take care of things like website loading speed, images, CTA buttons, videos, etc. Bonus tip: you should always format your web pages in a way that offers the best search experiences on mobile devices. Source: Unsplash 7. Develop A Marketing Budget How to market a law firm effectively? Well, to answer this question, we have to consider your marketing game plan. Your marketing game plan must contain a well-structured marketing budget. A pre-determined marketing budget can prove to be a crucial component; it gives you the scope of figuring out law firm marketing initiatives in which you can invest. You must identify your business goals and determine what type of ROI you want to generate. There is no specific marketing budget because it may vary depending upon a law firm's expertise or business goals. To figure out your marketing spend, you need to do the groundwork. Are you a well-established law firm, or have you just begun your career in the market? Do you offer niche services, or do you provide a broad range of services? Ask such questions to yourself; once you do that, you will be able to create a marketing budget for yourself. Once you have created one, you need to stay within its limits! Takeaways When it comes to "lawyer internet marketing," we know it is a very competitive space. Each attorney or law firm over the internet in the legal industry wants to achieve maximum growth. However, to garner online success, a law firm needs to work hard on its marketing skills. They need to work actively on their strategies and devote a decent amount of time. To maximize success, every law firm needs to keep an eye on the current industry trends. According to Clio, 65% of law firms invest a large portion of their marketing budget on online marketing. Why? Because most of their clients are over the internet! Hence, law firms can develop a robust marketing plan to attract more clients to their websites. Our marketers at Saffron Edge can help you develop and implement premium, industry-proven legal marketing strategies that can grow your legal business. Contact us today to know more! ...

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5 Proactive Content Marketing And Planning Trends To Follow

Digital marketing is the form of content marketing, marketing automation, paid advertising and mobile optimization will all continue to grow in the coming years. Some of the new marketing trends that’ll see the light of the day in 2016 are: 1. Digital Marketing is not a niche channel anymore Digital has become so mainstream and central to marketing, that it does not require niche treatment. Findings released by Gartner about their study concerning digital marketing clearly prove the above point. Marketers have stopped making a distinction between offline and online marketing disciplines. Today marketing is a mixed effort of both the platforms as people opt for digitally-led experiences and traditional advertising. B2B firms, like their B2C counterparts, have begun to realize that they have numerous tools, tactics, and channels to reach and engage their target audience. 2. Advocate Marketing Until now B2B marketers were focusing a lot of time and effort on the pre-purchase part of the customer journey. But increasingly, firms are realizing success by also concentrating their efforts and energy on providing value beyond the sale, with the aim that the client will turn into a promoter- an advocate who wilfully refers your business to others and provides references. Referrals have long been considered a valuable form of marketing, and are popular for delivering qualified leads that tend to become clients and are loyal to the business for a long period of time. While loyalty programs have become a staple in retail marketing, we are seeing a new version of them being adopted by B2B businesses. Advocate marketing software platforms such as Influitive and CustomerAdvocacy help marketers in building advocacy relationships with clients by increasing social media engagement, generating reviews for their products, and capturing referrals. These platforms make the use of customized portals and allow firms to invite their best customers to participate in challenges and provide feedback to earn gifts like badges, special event invitations, and award ceremonies. 3. Search Budgets Shift to Content A report released by PulsePoint and Digiday found that budget allocations for content marketing are bound to increase by 59 percent, far outpacing search and social budgets. Search engines are rewarding websites with high quality and relevant content much more than companies who have merely invested in the technical aspects of SEO. Today rankings are more independent of technical SEO and more about creating content that people are searching for in order to earn rankings. Rankings are also affected by providing content for long-tail keywords that now contribute to 70% of the search traffic. So while SEO and SEM will still have a role in a B2B marketer’s budget, the trend will be more about providing content that entices the target audience. 4. Online Advertising Disruption Even though Google is moving towards promoting display video ads in search engine result pages, the year ahead should make for some major disruption in the online advertising space. A recent report published by Pagefair and Adobe found that ad blocking in the US grew by 48% from last year and there are now almost 198 million active ad-block users around the world. Another major trouble to the B2B marketers was that click-through rates were massively declining across all ad formats and placements is only 0.06%. So this clearly reinforces that users are annoyed with content that is not relevant to them or that they don’t seek in the online space. Another trouble to the advertisers is caused by the Bot-frauds that have been estimated to cause a loss of $6.3 billion dollars to the industry globally. The research conducted by WhiteOps and the Association of National Advertisers recently analyzed over 3 million websites and found that bots accounted for 23 percent of video ad impressions, 11 percent of all display impressions, and 19 percent of all retargeted ads. Even after all this, online advertising is not going to disappear anytime soon, but ad-blockers, bot-frauds, and excessively low click-through rates are still going to haunt many B2B marketers. 5. Email Marketing is Alive! Many people predicted the death of email marketing, but the research data shows quite the contrary. According to the research conducted by Gigaom Research, marketers still rank email as the most effective tactic for conversions, awareness, acquisition, and retention. While many B2B firms have stepped up their email marketing campaigns, others have not leveraged email marketing to its full potential. In 2016, we’re going to see a trend towards more effective use of email marketing by B2B companies. There are many reasons to support the above statement such as better ROI, effectiveness, and measurability, but one noteworthy reason for them all is mobile. As B2B businesses have been wondering all the way long how to leverage mobile, the answer has been under their noses all this while. A study conducted by Moveable Ink found that in the first quarter of 2015, 67% of all US email opens occurred on a mobile device- and 75% of those were smartphones. While the data is variable in many studies, the growth in mobile email opens is staggering and the shift towards mobile opens is undeniable. While there are certainly other trends likely to appear in the B2B space in 2016, these five ought to stand out and for sure to happen. If we missed out on any of the happening trends around, let us know in the comments section. ...

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