So what is marketing automation, exactly?
If you’ve been marketing your business for any period of time and want to up your game, you’ve certainly researched how other successful companies are getting it done. Inevitably, you’ll have come across a host of articles singing the praises of marketing automation and the impact it can make on your bottom line.
Marketing Automation, at its core, is powerful software that helps to automate marketing processes, activities and communications with a goal of increasing marketing efficiency and accuracy. If you’ve ever signed up to receive email from a company and start receiving emails in a regular cadence that match your interests very directly, or even in response to actions you’ve taken on their website, that company is using marketing automation on some level.
It is generally associated with email marketing, as it is one of the easier operations to automate. However, the power and reach of marketing automation can extend to lead generation, landing pages, management activities behind the scenes, social media and more. Importantly, the greatest result of implementing marketing automation is higher relevancy to your target audience, which can improve your downstream metrics: email interaction rates, customer experience, lead quality and quantity, conversion rates and shortened sales cycles.
While 80% of companies use email marketing, only 40-50% of companies have implemented a marketing automation platform (Ascend2 Marketing Automation Trends Survey). Of those, 63% outsource some or all of their marketing automation strategy/planning/implementation – 12% outsource it completely.
Whether you need a little or a lot of help when it comes to marketing automation really depends on your team and your capacity. Keep in mind, once you start a marketing automation program, you need to continually feed the beast and you can eat up a good portion of your day.
Look for our next blog post on how to choose a cost-effective platform to get you started on leveraging technology to reach your audience, general leads and improve marketing ROI.
