Marketing automation has been a popular topic for a while now, yet not everyone seems to be taking full advantage of it. As advanced tools become more and more available, it’s only a matter of time before automation completely changes the way marketers work. It may be worth to start thinking about using proper marketing automation tools in your strategy – and here’s how to make that happen.
What is marketing automation?
Automation means improving and to some extent, even replacing manual or intellectual labor by machines. In the case of marketing, this becomes possible thanks to relevant marketing automation tools. Such software allows you to automate repetitive tasks, optimize your efforts, reduce human error, and as a result, make your job as a marketer much easier while optimizing your digital marketing strategy.
The main idea behind marketing automation goes way beyond that, though. It’s all about reacting to people’s behavior once you caught their attention, and make sure you keep them engaged – preferably through the whole marketing funnel. The more you (and thus, the marketing automation software) know about your web visitors or users, the better you can serve them. That’s precisely why proper marketing automation tools take advantage of machine learning and predictive analytics to be able to draw conclusions from the data available and suggest or even execute the best possible action. With such software, you can easily manage all your communication channels, personalize messages, and eventually turn your visitors into your clients.
What can you automate and optimize, exactly?
Email marketing
With email marketing, you can easily target and reach the right audience with relevant content. Apart from sending out mass emails, you can even define specific triggers to respond to your recipients’ actions right away correctly. Luckily, many tools can let you automate your email marketing campaigns. Take OutreachPlus as an example. You can easily send personalized e-mails on a scale, track the results of your campaigns, and even influence the acquisition of new potential customers. Once you’re at it, it can also be beneficial to monitor your competitors’ email marketing strategies.
Social media management
If you own a lot of profiles across social networks, having a social media marketing automation tool will help you manage them properly. Yet again, there are many tools created for that purpose, even though the majority has pretty much the same features. When searching for the best option to suit your needs, though, it’s worth to select the one that stands out and offers something more. Something that you could use not only for drafting, scheduling, and keeping track of all posts but also for automating the whole process even further, such as Kontentino.
Speaking of social media, though, there’s also another activity worth automating – social listening, especially if you want to keep an eye on what your competitors are up to. Luckily, Competitors App monitors both Facebook and Twitter to give you valuable insights. You can read more about monitoring and analyzing the moves of your competition on social media.
Landing pages
With proper tools, you can easily create well-designed, interactive landing pages that will allow you to capture more leads (or serve any other purpose of your choosing). Unbounce, for example, is a compelling landing page builder that has some great features in store. It can even automatically replace some keywords on your landing page to match specific phrases that your prospects search for.
Lead generation
Speaking of capturing leads, you can also engage with your visitors via push notifications to encourage them to leave their contact details or perform a specific action. It’s also a great way to keep your web visitors informed about any exclusive deals, offers or updates, as well as deliver your content to those who could genuinely be interested in it. PushPushGo is an excellent example of such a tool, as it allows you to track and analyze user behaviors on your site, and target the right audience at the right time.
Plus, if you need to retarget specific groups of customers, try doing so with RocketLink. You can not only set up push notifications with this app but also target people who have shown interest in your content by clicking on the link (which is shortened, by the way). What’s game-changing about that? Most likely, the fact that you can link to other websites while still using a relevant Call-to-Action that will drive traffic to your site, landing page, or a specific form.
Pretty much everything
Certain all-in-one marketing automation tools can serve most of your inbound marketing needs: building landing pages, capturing leads and creating databases, sending out email marketing campaigns, scheduling social media content, hosting and publishing your blog, analyzing data, and integrating it with your sales team. They come with a price, though. Advanced marketing automation software has tiered pricing, which means that its price grows along with your business. Still, Hubspot is definitely worth taking a closer look at if you’re interested in such a solution and able to afford it.
What to take into account when choosing a marketing automation tool?
If you’re considering to invest in marketing automation, it’s always a good practice to establish your needs first. Then, compare pricing, usability, and integrations with your existing software. Naturally, you may want to go for a powerful all-in-one marketing automation tool at first – but it may turn out to be too expensive. At the same time, you might not need to take advantage of that many features daily. That’s why it’s important to know what to look for when doing your research.
Choose your marketing automation tool wisely
Rapid technological development changes the way marketers work. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing, though. By taking advantage of marketing automation, you can save a lot of time and often money as well. Especially since collecting and segmenting your databases, effective planning, and even analyzing your actions are now easier than ever. It’s all possible thanks to advanced marketing automation tools that become more and more available.
It’s important to remember that seasoned marketers should remain in charge, though, carefully observing the results of each campaign and drawing conclusions themselves. That’s precisely why digital solutions can’t entirely replace human labor. And rightfully so.
