Why is marketing automation so important?
Marketing automation is something I have been an advocate of for a long time and people often ask me why it is so important. Marketing automation is the future of marketing and it is already happening because everyone wants to create efficiencies within their marketing efforts. When you think about marketing automation, it allows you to do more with fewer resources. The trend in marketing and business, in general, is to create efficiency and you can improve your overall customer experience with automation. One statement I saw online that I liked was it streamlines your digital marketing efforts, which ultimately reduces human error and helps to achieve better results. Instead of performing these manual repetitive processes, you're able to focus more on strategic tasks, such as planning, design, goal development, conducting research, establishing your brand, and consistency.
What is marketing automation?
I like the definition that Salesforce gives: Marketing automation is a technology that manages marketing processes, and multifunctional campaigns across multiple channels automatically. Let's dive into that a little bit. I want to break up some of these words and get clear on what exactly is the depth of this definition for you. So technology nowadays, this is typically a web-based solution that used to be more of a canned packaged solution from a CRM automation standpoint, but it's web-based and it could come in many shapes, sizes, price ranges, and offerings from its doing a little bit, to do the whole gamut of things. Marketing processes consist of many things and have unique definitions based on the goals and the objectives of an organization, but at its core, marketing processes are a mix of managing your contacts and your leads, your content marketing, measuring, and analysis. The next statement in that definition was multifunctional campaigns and a variety of these activities can take place at once. So for example, at this very moment, the marketing automation system that we have going on, we have our guided profits campaign, our manufacturing white paper campaign, webinar attendees campaign, the campaigns for this specific podcast as well as another podcast that we have in house, we have our monthly newsletter, and many more. So we have eight different campaigns happening simultaneously that are being tracked independently, and automatic functions are happening. The last component is the multiple channels. So marketing automation allows you to manage emails, social media, video calls, and ultimately, you can keep track of any traditional direct mail activities as well.
The basics of marketing automation
I want to cover a few high-level basics of marketing automation that will help you master any sort of automation within your CRM tool.
Quality information is key
First and foremost, it all comes down to the quality of the information that you have going into the system, which will give you quality information out. You want to make sure that your leads and your contacts and all that information is really clean. So the basics of any system along these lines are collecting data and making sure that you're inputting quality data related to the name, the email, the company, phone number, mailing address, and whatnot. One of the things that the systems can do which is really powerful is going beyond just the type of activity that they're doing and providing you actionable insights so you can actually target your leads with more personalized information. For example, if you see a certain individual is engaging heavily with a certain type of content that you're sharing, then you can have targeted content that is going to continue to engage them as opposed to keeping them on a general list and sharing general information to them.
Creating lists and segmenting your contacts
Another component that's important, and I...
