What is Marketing Automation Software?

Introduction

Marketing automation software is a sophisticated solution that helps marketers collect leads, nurture them down the funnel, and evaluate campaign performance and lead behavior. This tool has become an important resource for B2B and B2C sales and marketing departments seeking to expand their business.

Marketing automation software is typically compared to customer relationship management (CRM) solutions as both have overlapping features. But CRMs are currently utilized mainly by sales teams, while marketing automation applications are designed to scale and speed up marketing efforts and make each touch more focused and personalized.

Marketing automation tools include functionality such as analytics, multi-channel marketing, web marketing, social media, and email. The program helps to harness consumer data from several sources and develop strategies that function across multiple mediums.

Marketing automation automates some processes, but this system doesn’t convert your brand into a robot. The software allows you to you scale your initiatives to develop relationships with numerous prospects across multiple channels and to provide them a uniform experience regardless of their differing needs or interests. Plus, after you segment your audience, this platform enables you to create meaningful relationships with your leads by providing them with relevant content for their interests.

Features of Marketing Automation Software

Lead Nurturing

Marketing automation services offer lead nurturing capability that helps marketers to segment, track, and communicate with leads to convert them into paying customers.

Email Marketing

Email marketing may be an old medium, but it is still very effective. Basic marketing automation solutions allow you to send bulk emails to segmented audiences. Advanced systems can deliver triggered emails after prospects perform specific actions, like downloading a content piece or filling up a form. Plus, they allow you to create, edit, and embed forms in your emails.

Digital Advertising, Paid Media, and SEO

Enterprise marketing automation platforms offer digital advertising, paid media, and SEO functionalities to help marketers manage their paid campaigns from the centralized system where other marketing initiatives are stored. SMBs can handle these campaigns with a basic free tool, but still need to consolidate all their data in one interface for easy analytics.

Analytics and Reporting

One of the main benefits of marketing automation – after scaling individualized marketing campaigns to large audiences – is utilizing detailed analytics. Top marketing automation programs look similar to business intelligence applications with dashboards that show your firm’s vital marketing KPIs in simple visualizations.

Social Media

Leading marketing automation software solutions offer social analytics features that permit you to monitor what your prospects are talking about on social platforms, and who shares your company’s content and with whom. Additionally, you can create referral programs, sweepstakes, and polls. Event triggered functions enable you to prompt leads to share content while they engage with it.

Benefits of Marketing Automation Software

Customer Retention

Marketing automation software can run analytics on your marketing activities and campaigns, giving you actionable insights into how your prospects react to your pitches. You can create limitation rules to automatically segment prospects based on their past actions. While the sales/CRM team pitches to a lead based on their interest, marketing automation tools provide you insights into the propositions that you can use to understand buyers’ interests, pain points, and concerns.

Sales Funnel Feed

You need to constantly feed the sales funnel with new leads to keep revenues flowing. With marketing automation software, you can fill your top-of-funnel to the brim with constant repurposed campaigns even as you produce new initiatives. In short, you can develop a bunch of campaigns without needing to worry about tasks like qualifying prospects and delegating the proper response as these processes are automated.

Workflow Accuracy

Automation of routine tasks helps to reduce human error. For instance, you can use a rule-based workflow to ensuring the correct sequence of work is followed and maintained consistently. To cite examples, you can funnel all leads that downloaded an asset into a segmented mailing list for nurturing, or you can send a targeted group to the relevant landing page.

Small Team Efficiency

By automating manual workflows, you can empower even a small team to handle complex campaigns. This allows you to deploy more initiatives and gain more leads without needing to hire more employees. Further, you can also automate tasks such as categorizing leads, delivering emails, and social media posting.

Strategic Planning

Marketing automation software can be used to automate repetitive yet vital tasks such as qualifying prospects, grouping email feedback and creating the right responses, and updating consumer data. A marketing automation platform can perform these tasks, allowing marketers to concentrate on important work like thinking up initiatives, strategic planning, and analyzing feedback so they can launch more relevant and effective campaigns.