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What is Marketing Automation? What are its Different Types?

Marketing automation has been around and evolving for more than 20 years. In a nutshell, it is the use of technologies to automate repetitive marketing operations. It was first developed as a mass emailing tool but has since developed to a degree of sophistication that enables deliberate omnichannel digital engagement and experiences. The current driving forces behind marketing automation are IoT technology, AI, and machine learning.

Marketing on Steroids: marketing automation and how it makes you a better Marketer

Let us start with some hard, cold statistics first:

Personalized marketing enables brands to communicate with their audience in a more meaningful way. Keeping track of all the data required to enhance and customize a prospect’s marketing experience can be difficult. Think about how much longer the process would take if an email outreach professional had to manually curate and edit each email they sent.

And today, it is incredibly easy as a marketer to start with any marketing automation platform (MAP) or tool. Let us dive into the different types.

Types of Marketing Automation that will make your life easy

1) Email Marketing:

The lifeblood of marketing automation emails. Email is typically the marketing communication channel brands, and marketers refer to when discussing developing lead nurturing procedures (especially for B2B). This is not at all surprising, given that email continues to offer the highest ROI of almost any marketing channel.

Email automation software generally personalizes marketing emails depending on user data, workflows, and online behavioral triggers.

2) Socials Automation

The most common forms of social media automation are post-scheduling, social listening, data gathering, and reporting. In the beginning, post-scheduling solutions like Hootsuite may make things much more practical, save time, enhance message consistency, and optimize posting timings.

Then there are tools for social listening. These assist in tracking and monitoring particular competitors, post-types, keywords, or hashtags which may be very helpful for evaluating campaign performance, measuring your business against competitors, and keeping an eye on audience sentiment.

Analytics and reporting marketing automation software/platforms are your last type. These tools gather and analyze data to give insights into your audience and performance.

3) Lead Management

Marketing automation software is made to develop an effective lead management framework. The most significant error you may make is considering qualified lead creation as the last step in your marketing objectives. Both nurturing and managing leads during the lifecycle are crucial. You may gradually automate the lead nurturing process to eliminate irrelevant and subpar leads.

4) Marketing Analytics

The interesting element of using marketing automation technology is that you can perform a fairly in-depth analysis of the outcomes of your marketing activities. Sharper marketing data and analysis may help you make more informed business decisions.

By using automation tools, you may get rid of assumptions. Instead, you get real-time data to better understand your campaigns’ success and KPIs.

Implementing marketing automation to scale proficiently

Putting a marketing automation strategy into place remains an enormous challenge for many people. Marketer’s may expect everything to be simplified by the MAP and completely rely on it to produce the results. But this situation is easily avoided with the right vision and implementation.

1) Identify your company’s needs and set goals.

It is essential to understand and specify the goals of your business as well as the precise outcomes that must be obtained. Compared to only email marketing campaigns, marketing automation has a wider range of benefits.

2) Invest in the right automation platform

It’s time to select the best solution for enabling your marketing automation once you have a firm grasp of your company’s objectives and marketing expectations.

Consider

  • Features of marketing automation needed to achieve your objectives
  • Your team’s technical proficiency compared to the necessary set of abilities
  • The cost of purchase vs. the cost of recurring payments
  • CRM and other tech stacks you might require to activate automation at scale

3) Engage Professionals to Implement marketing automation system

Your current marketing staff could struggle to comprehend and use the marketing automation platform you’ve purchased despite being technically skilled. The best course of action is to collaborate with a qualified or outside group to put the MAS into practice. These experts can work with the other members of the marketing team and provide them with the appropriate training. It is crucial to have an experienced team on board in order to completely deploy the MAS and guarantee that the provided capabilities be utilized to their fullest potential.