What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation technology streamlines automates and measures marketing activities while
increasing operational efficiency, driving engagement, and providing better customer experiences.

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Marketing automation software is, at its core, designed to simplify marketing processes for your organization by providing a platform that automates repetitive tasks; but it can also do much more than that.

Marketing automation addresses common challenges facing most marketing departments including:

Siloed, inconsistent, and unusable corporate data
Lack of analytics, reports, and dashboards to show marketing performance
A high number of operational duties that detract from executing important strategic initiatives

Marketing automation platforms help companies streamline, automate, and measure marketing activities while increasing operational efficiency, driving engagement, and providing better customer experiences.

Benefits Of Marketing Automation

Marketing today requires utilizing digital channels and has completely changed how marketers must practice their craft. There are more channels, increased data, and greater expectations from the customers on their experience. The ability to execute and deliver in all these areas presents challenges that require marketing automation.

Today’s marketing automation solutions provide an answer to this with their ability to engage across multiple channels, scale efficiently, and develop personalized campaigns with precise targeting.

There are additional benefits to utilizing a marketing automation platform including:

Ability to respond in real-time and appropriately to prospect and customer actions
Produce higher quality sales leads from precisely aligned sales campaigns and scoring
Deliver higher quality customer experiences throughout their lifecycle
Provide quality data for increased analytics and a better understanding of your customers
The capability to easily and methodically test campaigns
Become more agile with ready-to-use templates, assets, and data

Our Marketing Automation Expertise

Our team of certified professionals has successfully partnered with our clients to implement and advance their use of the major marketing automation solutions, including Salesforce Marketing Cloud (ExactTarget), Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement), Adobe Marketo Engage, and Hubspot Marketing Hub.

We have dedicated service offerings focused on selecting and implementing marketing automation platforms as well as consulting on all aspects of campaign implementation from design to implementation to operation:

Three core areas of functionality at the core of most marketing automation solutions include:

Marketing Contact Database

A repository for your contacts (prospects and customers), their marketing contact information, and their interactions and behaviors with experiences provided by the marketing automation platform.

This may also be where additional data is stored to support customer segmentation and in-platform analytics. Data management within the contact database varies across the various solutions.

Marketing Automation Engine

The marketing automation engine is the heart of the platform and the environment for the creation, management, and automation of marketing processes.

This includes performing and orchestrating your internal and external facing activities; including execution of customer communications (campaigns, journeys, programs, etc.), data management, and other administrative aspects including reply mail management and A/B testing.

Analytics

The Analytics engine is where all of the audience and engagement activities are brought together and analyzed to provide insights.

This is where you will discover the performance of your campaigns and the results of any testing. Here you will understand what worked, what didn’t, for whom, and ideally why.

Analytics capabilities vary by marketing automation platform, and some organizations choose to perform their analytics in external BI platforms.

Primary marketing automation platform features include:

Email automation: Create automated emails and multi-communication campaigns based on various types of triggers (time, engagement, etc.)
Landing pages: Build custom landing pages and forms that can function as campaign landing destinations with content or forms to capture lead data
Lead management, segmentation and scoring: Track, segment and engage with leads based on interest, behavior, demographics, and other criteria; develop & implement lead scoring models aligning with your lead lifecycle
Lead nurturing & scoring: Send targeted communications to leads based on their score corresponding to their engagement activities and other attributes
Social media: Schedule, publish, and report across multiple channels, monitor social media activity for company and brand mentions, as well as directly engage
Reporting & analytics: Create reports, visualizations and perform data analysis including email & campaign performance, content engagement, and audience behavior
Personalization: Develop communications & content to individual recipients based on their specific characteristics (demographics, segments, behavior, etc.)

Learn how the combination of marketing automation and Salesforce CRM can empower your organization.

The Marketing Automation Campaign Path

The graphic below depicts a marketing campaign path including nurturing and scoring with the following steps:

Define Campaign – Define success & KPIs, create a scoring model, and segment your audience.
Campaign Design – Develop content & creative.
Build the Campaign – In your automation tool build out emails, landing pages and implement a scoring model.
Execute Campaign – Create lead nurturing workflow, score leads, execute campaign logic, respond to inquiries and route leads accordingly.
Campaign Monitoring – Scoring model applied to determine customer insight and react to insights if necessary.
Campaign Reporting – Evaluate performance vs. forecasted goals, A/B testing and determine next steps.

Want to learn more about our Marketing Automation services?