Salesforce defines marketing automation as “technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically.” Marketing automation is a way to automate some of the repetitive marketing tasks like social media posting, email marketing, and even ad campaigns. It’s a combination of strategy and software. It permits you to engage prospects with personalized and useful content so that you can convert them from prospects to customers.

Basically, marketing automation gives you a way to implement your digital marketing strategy without having to press “send” on every single email, message, or social media update you post. With good automation tools, you’ll be able to identify your audience, create the right content, and trigger actions automatically based on a prospect’s behavior. 

Marketing automation software is often discussed along with customer relationship management (CRM) software. This is because they have some overlapping features. The main difference is that CRM software is typically more sales focused and marketing automation software is more marketing focused. Marketing automation is also about personalizing and customizing your content based on who your audience is. 

So how does marketing automation work? Essentially, you will collect customer data based on emails, website visits, social media interactions, app usage, etc. The marketing automation software then uses that data to send personalized content to customers and potential customers.

There are a lot of different options for marketing automation. Some of the options out there include Eloqua, Sharpspring, Marketo, Hubspot, Salesfusion, and Act-On. They all have slightly different features, and they all integrate behavior-based workflows by watching for certain triggers and reacting to them with an automated action. With behavior-based workflows, your marketing team can specify the content all of your leads receive automatically. 

The workflow will automatically send relevant content to each lead that interacts with your brand in some way. Another helpful feature is that the marketing automation software will then collect feedback on how the workflow is working. So it will analyze where the customers are interacting or falling out of the funnel so that you can constantly adjust your content accordingly. 

There are many reasons to look into marketing automation. Marketing automation increases sales productivity by 14.5% and it reduces marketing overhead by 12.2% according to Nucleus Research. Marketing automation is also easy to use. It allows you to create entire campaigns with a single click, and it gives you a place to manage all of your marketing efforts in one place.

Marketing automation gives you a lot of power and ability to customize your marketing efforts. WT Digital Agency is a certified partner of Sharpspring. If you’d like more information on creating a marketing automation strategy to grow your business, please contact us today.

WT Digital Agency is an Atlanta marketing agency specializing in brand development, content marketing, website design, SEO, and more. To learn more about what we do, click here.