Marketing Automation: What Is It, And How To Apply It?
Marketing automation is a process that automates marketing actions, optimizing results. It can be applied at various sales funnel stages, from attraction to customer loyalty.
In addition, several types of tools are available in the market to automate your campaigns. This article explains what marketing automation is, its benefits, and how to start applying it to your strategy.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation refers to the techniques and tools used to automate marketing campaigns. This allows the marketing department to operate more efficiently, reducing time spent on manual tasks and increasing focus on marketing strategies.
These new actions accompany the evolution of companies, increasingly developing their digital transformation.
How Does Marketing Automation Work?
Marketing automation can be broken down into three main steps: lead capture, lead nurturing, and lead conversion. Lead capture is the process by which potential customers are identified and added to the marketing database.
This can be done by creating forms on landing pages or manually entering leads into the database. Lead nurturing is the process by which potential customers are fed relevant and valuable information about your company and products.
This can be done by automating the sending of emails or personalized messages to leads. Lead conversion is the process by which potential customers are converted into customers.
What Are The Benefits Of Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation can provide several benefits to your company, such as:
- Improve customer segmentation
- Increase the efficiency of campaigns
- Decrease operating costs
- Generate more qualified leads
Within this context, it is essential to note that it is necessary to invest in a good strategy and goal setting to extract all the potential benefits of marketing automation. In addition to passing security on to your potential customers.
One way to address this security point is to use a digital signature to ensure the authenticity of the sender’s identity for automated messages. Not only for that but for all activities and transactions made by your company on the internet.
Types Of Marketing Automation Tools
Marketing automation can be done through the use of several tools, such as:
- Email marketing
- Landing pages
- Forms
- Chatbots
- Social networks
To choose the best tool for your company, it is essential to consider the purpose of automation and the characteristics of your customers.
Several solutions integrate all these types of automation on a single platform, making your life much easier. In addition to automation, it is also essential to invest in good content to feed automated campaigns.
How To Implement Marketing Automation?
The first step of marketing automation that generates results is planning. It is important to outline goals and strategies to automate your campaigns.
Once you have a clear idea of what you’re looking for with automation, it’s time to start qualifying your previously captured lead base. Whether through landing pages, forms, or other channels. After that, you must start working on the content for your base, segmenting and personalizing the messages you will send to each group based on each purchasing journey.
Never create random content, as this will compromise your strategy, as marketing automation is based on content relevant to the lead. The next step is to automate the actions through a specific platform. Several on the market, such as RD Station Marketing, can help you with this task.
You will create automated flows for triggering emails and advancing the journey according to lead actions. Finally, monitoring the results to know if what was planned is bringing the expected results is essential. Track metrics and campaign performance so you can make adjustments as needed.
When To Invest In Marketing Automation?
There are several times when marketing automation can be an excellent strategy for your business. Whether to generate more leads, nurture customer relationships, or even sales.
Marketing automation can be used to:
- Increase the sales
- Improve the conversion rate
- Reduce the cost per acquisition
- Optimize the time of marketers.
That’s why it’s ideal for companies with a clear plan of their goals and already well-defined processes. For retail companies, for example, automation can be an exciting strategy to capture and retain customers.
Mainly, a system is used for the store that allows the registration of these buyers. This strategy can be a good alternative for generating new leads for companies that provide services. By creating landing pages and forms.
Best Practices For Automation
As marketing automation is a strategy involving technology use and well-defined and planned processes, paying attention to some good practices is essential.
To succeed with marketing automation, be aware of the following points:
- Create a persona
- Use in conjunction with inbound marketing
- Qualify your lead base
- Trace the flow of the customer journey
- Set clear objectives and metrics for each automated campaign
- Choose a good automation platform
- Create relevant and targeted content for your leads
- Test, test, and test your automated campaigns
This can be a very efficient strategy for companies, as long as it is well planned and executed. With the necessary care, marketing automation can generate good results for your company, directly impacting the generation of leads and sales.
