In the last 20 years, marketing departments have been forced to automate their sales processes and digital marketing strategies using technological software. Since the appearance of the first search engines on the Internet, such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, web positioning and virtual relationships began to be of great importance for companies. Communication and information technologies (ICTs) have evolved to the point of being important sales tools for companies.
Social networks, blogs and emails have become favorite channels to generate appropriate interaction in which companies relate to their buyers. Not in vain, they constitute today the media that they mostly use to monetize their content and boost their sales.
The scenario that best suggests how necessary it was to devise marketing automation in companies is: What happens when an account or blog receives many visits and increases its followers quickly? At first, it can be very easy for organizations to maintain 1:1 conversations with their readers, but when this growth occurs exponentially, It is necessary to look for faster and more effective ways to stay in touch with customers, without losing quality or response time.
Within this context, it is not surprising that companies turn to marketing campaign planning tools, as well as the optimal technology to be able to correctly manage their marketing objectives. Here is where Marketing automation plays a very important role to quickly and agilely execute the customer service of these organizations, to build loyalty and to continue providing positive experiences to your potential customers.
This automated marketing is leveraged on web tools that allow you to carry out all the actions of a digital marketing campaign, such as: sending emails, managing web pages, creating segmented lists, managing all social profiles, CMR, etc.
What is marketing automation?
In this sense, marketing automation is a methodology that bases its operation on the use of software to automate all the processes derived from a digital marketing strategy, such as segmentation, workflow generation, lead nurturing, campaign management, newsletters, autoresponders, triggers, etc.
Hubspot, a pioneer in inbound marketing, states that marketing automation fulfills the purpose of taking your potential customers on a guided journey through the sales funnel until they become spokespersons and loyal ambassadors for your brand. In this way, marketing automation is an excellent ally for those companies with powerful potential on the Internet, which wish to manage an inbound marketing methodology, without losing sight of their philosophy of educating over selling and providing service.
Some specialists in the area define marketing automation as an essential part of inbound marketing, which consists of the use of computer software to carry out marketing actions in an automated manner. Among the companies that offer and provide these services are of course Hubspot and other relevant brands such as Oracle Eloqua, Salesforce Pardot and Marketo.
Benefits of marketing automation
Segmentation of your buyer personas
Instead of manually separating the characteristics of your customers according to their needs and motivations, automated marketing allows you to build a database where all your leads can be classified according to these characteristics. The automation of these processes will allow you to segment your buyer personas and know, on average, what the tastes of your potential buyers are.
The importance of this? With this information, you can create relevant and useful content for them, because you know roughly what they like to see and read. In this sense, marketing automation will allow you to more effectively reach the mind and heart of your buyer persona, that is, Your clients will receive messages with content that will really be of value for their daily activities.
Efficient time management
Without a doubt, automating your marketing processes would free up the agenda of your marketing and sales team, so that they can carry out other activities within your company, such as: creation of creative campaigns, new content ideas, loyalty strategies, etc On the other hand, thanks to this automation process, your community manager will be able to schedule your posts both on social networks and on the blog, since it can be perfectly adapted to your marketing and content plan.
Greater effectiveness in building leads
Connecting with each of your visitors, readers or potential clients manually can take a long time, especially if your content is having success on your social networks and blog posts and you are achieving strong growth in a short time.
Therefore, implementing marketing automation to your conversion processes ( call to action, landing page, emails ) can help you connect with people interested in your content, from the beginning of their interaction with your company’s assets.
For example,If a visitor subscribes to your newsletter, you can connect with them immediately through a personalized welcome message and confirmation of their subscription,that will arrive in your email inbox automatically. Additionally, you can automatically send all your new publications by including it in your subscriber lists.
Management of your actions
Marketing automation software gives you the opportunity to follow and monitor each of the actions that your buyer personas are carrying out. For example, in these technological tools, you will be able to specify what stage of the buyer’s journey certain customers are in and what type of contact they have had with you. Let’s remember a system that gives you a broad overview of all the steps followed by both your inbound marketing team and your sales opportunities (leads).
A lead is a person who, by providing their data through a form (found within a landing page) and becomes part of a company’s database. By being part of this database, marketing automation software will be able to provide you with detailed graphs, statistics and data that you can later analyze in order to optimize your campaigns in the future, about the behavior of these leads.
Optimization of your resources
Marketing automation allows you to effectively manage your human and financial capital. By reducing the need for personnel to collect information, create and distribute messages among your contacts, you can make the most of your financial resources.
For example, a single member of your marketing team can run complex campaigns and connect with a large number of customers using this automated software.
Marketing automation has achieved a powerful prominence in recent years and is not in vain, it is an essential tool within the inbound marketing methodology. It has been that solution that companies have implemented to quickly, efficiently and, above all, automatically fulfill all their digital marketing strategies.
