What Is Marketing Automation And Why Should You Use It?

What is Marketing Automation? 

Marketing automation is the practice of using marketing tools to automate manual tasks, maximising the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and your time. You can use a single platform, or multiple tools integrated together, to take your leads on a tailored journey until they have been nurtured enough to become a sales prospect.  

The marketing automation industry has been growing steadily for over a decade, and is now forecast to grow from $ 5.2 billion USD in 2022 to $9.5 billion by 2027, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.8% during the forecast period.  

When set up correctly, marketing automation is the most effective way to scale up your marketing efforts without spending exponentially more time tied up with repetitive tasks. Alternatively, you can put in the work early to reap the rewards for years to come. If you invest now in getting the tools and processes in place, you’ll be poised well to evolve your marketing as the automation capabilities continue to evolve. 

So which are the highest-impact areas for utilising marketing automation? 

List Building and Segmentation 

Marketing automation tools help you track your prospect’s activity and sources of engagement. Working in tandem with a CRM, this allows richer segmentation and refining of your database than ever before. 

Whether you’re segmenting your database with information you already hold on your leads, like their industry or their turnover, or you’re looking at what they are actively engaging with and interested in, marketing automation tools provide excellent opportunities for data segmentation and targeting. 

Ensuring you get your automated list building will save you checking over it later, and will also let you trigger additional automations to nurture your leads with targeted content such as email marketing. 

Email Marketing 

Email marketing has long been the go-to method for reaching out to your database of leads, but marketing automation platforms empower you to create tailored and highly specific journeys for your leads. Gone are the days of relying solely on wide-net emails to your full database. 

Marketing automation platforms, like SharpSpring or HubSpot, let you build streams of tailored emails to send to your contacts based on their engagement. With the tracking capabilities, you can detect and flag a prospect’s interest in a topic or service and serve them relevant content to continually nurture their engagement. 

If you can set yourself up with several focused, targeted, relevant email streams for different segments of your target market, you’ll be able to leave it running and let the automation tools trigger the right message, to the right person, at the right time. 

Lead Scoring 

Another powerful marketing automation feature is lead scoring. By scoring tracked engagement, you can decide which means of engagement are most valuable to you and how much of that engagement warrants following up. 

You’ve also got the option to use scoring categories to further nurture your leads, triggering automations as they hit certain thresholds and prompting continued engagement.  

Continuously nurturing your leads with targeted content means that when you do pick up the phone to talk, you can see the topics that resonated with them, and you know they have a solid understanding of how you can help before you’ve said a word. 

Automation Workflows 

We’ve already discussed automation being used for list building / segmentation , emails sends, and other content delivery, but it’s also invaluable after you’ve opened the conversation with a prospect.  

Automated workflows can be built to notify your sales team of a prospect’s interest in specific products or services, or a lack of engagement during the sales process. Emails can be triggered to prompt booking a meeting, or further the sales process with hyper-focused content about specific things being discussed during calls with your team. 

Putting the work in to automate more of your sales team’s processes can pay dividends when they’re spending less time with email follow-ups and chasing uninterested leads, and more time talking to the prospects who are ready to buy. 

New business isn’t the only potential target for automation; renewals, additional services, and upselling products to your clients and customers are all great opportunities. Approaching renewal dates, or viewing specific product / service pages are all possible triggers for targeted content to be sent to receptive customers. 

If you’d like to discuss how automation tools can enhance your sales and marketing processes, don’t hesitate to get in touch.