Marketing Automation: What You Need to Know
"Marketing
automation" is more than just a buzzword - it is a very real practice
that is empowering marketers around the world to accomplish more than ever
in a shorter amount of time. At its core, marketing automation is a term
used to describe a set of software, technologies, and other platforms that
automate marketing on certain channels. These can include e-mail, social
media, websites, and more. The idea is that by automating certain
repetitive tasks that, while hugely important are also time-consuming, you
unlock a host of additional benefits that can't be ignored.
Reaching Customers on a Deeper Level
Targeted marketing has always been the bread and butter of many businesses
in terms of increasing customer engagement. People don't want to feel like
they're just one of a million different people being marketed to
simultaneously - they want to feel like your business is taking time out of
its busy day to speak to them directly. This helps increase the
effectiveness of your marketing materials and is also a great way to take
an average customer and turn them into a loyal brand advocate at the same
time.
The issue here is that this historically takes a lot of time - or at least,
it used to. Marketing automation is one of the best tools that you
currently have to reach your unique customers in a meaningful way.
Previously, you would have to manually segment customers based on things like
your buyer personas. You would have to spend time creating these niche
groups of customers based on their personalities, their needs, their likes
and dislikes and more. While effective, this takes a great deal of time.
With marketing automation, however, you can simply create restrictions that
will allow your software resources to segment these customers automatically
based on whatever criteria you want. You get the exact same beneficial end
result, but you only had to spend a fraction of the time in order to get
there.
What Marketing Automation Is NOT
When people hear the term "automation," they often call to mind
images of technological solutions or other IT developments that are
designed to completely replace the jobs of human employees. While that may
be true in an environment like a factory floor, this couldn't be farther
from reality in terms of marketing.
Marketing automation is not designed to be a replacement for your marketing
team or the hard work they're doing - it's designed to be supplemental to
the existing experience. Automation isn't an excuse to hire one less
employee, but to free up that employee's valuable time to put to better use
elsewhere within your organization. Maybe Thomas shouldn't be spending so
much of his day writing and sending out new tweets or Facebook updates
every time you publish a new piece of content - maybe that should happen
instantly so that Thomas can work on something a bit more important to your
larger business objectives.
These are just a few of the major advantages that marketing automation is
bringing to the table in terms of what the industry looks like today. By
automating certain basic marketing functions, it's enabling your employees
to do better work in a more fundamental way. It gives them the ability to
work "smarter, not harder," so to speak.
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