Marketing automation is no longer a passing trend. And although some still might be skeptical of what automation is truly capable of, businesses en masse are already leveraging it to 10x their growth. In this guide, we’ll break down everything you need to know about marketing automation and accelerating your business’s growth.
What is Marketing Automation?
Let’s kick things off with a definition.
Marketing automation is the use of software and tools to automate marketing tasks. This includes the execution of workflows and processes that learn the behavior of customers over time.
The end-goal of marketing automation is simple — streamline your time-consuming marketing tasks and eliminate some of your most tedious ones outright. Some tasks that can be tackled by automation include:
- Lead generation and nurturing
- Customer messaging and follow-ups
- Scheduling and publishing content
- Data entry
- Prospecting research
- Responding to customer queries
Although automation is sometimes treated as pie-in-the-sky, the fact remains that 75% of B2B companies already invest in some form of automation.
Chatbots. Email drip campaigns. Social scheduling.
These are all basic forms of marketing automation that have become commonplace for businesses both big and small. As modern tools are becoming more user-friendly with less of a learning curve, getting started is easier than ever.
How Does Marketing Automation Work?
Much of what makes most marketing automation tools “tick” happens behind-the-scenes via machine learning.
Translation? Automation software is capable of “learning” customer behaviors and preferences, making decisions based on how a lead or customer acts.
For example, presenting a specific ad to a prospect who looked at a similar product on-site or sending an email at a particular time because that’s when your list is most engaged,
Marketing automation tools do the heavy lifting of both carrying out tasks and making decisions based on logic. That said, humans obviously play a huge role in what tasks are automated and how they leverage their automation tools.
And so while there’s a ton that automation can do, putting any sort of process on autopilot requires setup and monitoring from a flesh-and-blood marketer.
