Marketing automation brings substantial advantages for businesses, clients, and marketers alike. Here’s how to leverage its capabilities effectively.
Marketing automation has the capacity to lower marketing expenditures by minimising the time needed for administrative tasks and reporting, while simultaneously driving revenue by automating customer outreach in the marketing pipeline. Yet, numerous decision-makers remain unaware—or have yet to capitalise on—the extensive benefits marketing automation can provide across various scenarios.
To seize this emerging opportunity, marketing organisations need to adapt both their workflows and technological platforms so that marketers and automation solutions can operate synergistically. Pioneers in marketing automation frequently observe an increase in creative and strategic work time, elevated customer contentment, efficiency gains, and potential boosts in marketing performance.
Only a Fraction of Companies Have Embraced Marketing Automation
Studies reveal that a substantial portion of marketing activities, around one-third, can be efficiently automated using current technological advancements. This positions marketing as a function with significant automation prospects.
Nevertheless, the adoption rate remains surprisingly low. Only about 25% of businesses have mostly automated their customer journey. Discussions with industry leaders reveal that many marketing professionals are still unaware of the wide range of advanced automation tools available and the substantial opportunities they offer for enhancing efficiency and effectiveness across marketing operations.
Let’s consider this example for instance:
A leading e-commerce company applied automation to streamline its email marketing campaigns (the most reported areas for currently using marketing automation, along with social media). The first objective is to reduce the campaign setup time from several days to just a few hours. Previously, all campaigns were manually created by marketing teams. This involves tasks such as segmenting the audience, crafting individual emails, and scheduling sends. Now, predefined templates and audience segments are automatically populated with CRM data. A marketer reviews the final campaign and schedules it for delivery.
Taking this initiative can result in higher customer engagement rates and an uplift in conversion rates. Other examples of the benefits of automation include an overall cost reduction and a reduction in campaign execution time from days to mere hours.
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Maximising Value at Every Stage of the Marketing Chain
Maximising efficiency while also improving internal version tracking and storage of relevant marketing content. Here are the various aspects of the marketing process that can be automated.
- Automated targeting and segmentation. Scalable targeting and segmentation models, combined with automated execution tools, can create highly effective customer segments for micro-targeting. Ultimately, organisations can customise their marketing efforts for different groups of customers based on factors such as demographics, behaviour, and preferences.
- Content personalization. Through natural language processing and generation, marketing automation can personalise content at scale. It addresses individual customer needs and preferences. This process saves time and improves the relevance and quality of the content delivered. Leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
- Multichannel campaign management. Automated systems can schedule and deploy emails, social media posts, and ads, optimising timing and content relevance. It also tracks engagement across channels, providing data to further refine and segment messaging.
- Lead nurturing and scoring. Monitoring prospects’ behaviour throughout their journey helps identify customers who are most likely to convert. This is possible by tracking and responding to potential customer interactions across different touchpoints. Bots can send timely and relevant follow-up emails, score leads based on their behaviour, and pass on qualified leads to the sales team.
While some believe the marketing function of the future will be fully automated, there’s another perspective to consider. The loss of the personal touch that human marketers provide. Creativity, intuition, and relationship-building are difficult to replicate with machines.
Therefore, companies need to strike a balance. A balance between using automation for efficiency and ensuring human marketers continuously drive the emotional and strategic aspects of campaigns. This balanced approach could lead to more innovative and impactful marketing strategies.
Effective Strategies for Marketing Automation Deployment
To capture the benefits of marketing automation, marketing leaders must first recognize that, while anyone can deploy marketing automation and capture its benefits, those with well-defined marketing strategies and a centralised marketing team usually capture more significant benefits from automation and see impact faster than their peers. This is because their costs for data integration, technological deployment, and change management are lower.
An integrated marketing platform and a unified data management system usually help enhance the scalability of automation solutions. The more streamlined, simplified and digitised the internal marketing processes, the faster basic automation (such as email marketing automation) can be deployed and more advanced solutions, such as predictive analytics and AI-driven customer segmentation, can be implemented. With marketing automation, using the same data set, companies can segment their target audience and create relevant email campaigns that are more likely to convert into sales.
But how can organisations effectively achieve this scale?
The process unfolds in five distinct phases:
Phase 1: Identify automation opportunities and rank them. A team of specialists evaluates the marketing tasks to determine where automation will be most beneficial and then ranks the opportunities. Advanced tools can assist in completing this evaluation rapidly.
Phase 2: Execute high-priority automation initiatives. This phase requires an in-depth review and mapping of the processes in the key areas identified. It generally involves three steps:
Step 1: Exclude activities that do not contribute value.
Step 2: Streamline processes by integrating centralised marketing support and unified data systems.
Step 3: Automate repetitive and time-intensive tasks.
Phase 3: Scale the automation efforts. It’s important not to attempt to automate the entire marketing function simultaneously. Adopt an iterative approach. Start by piloting and refining new processes beginning with the most viable and less critical functions.
Tech + Talent = Marketing Mastery
- Marketers need to be trained to use these tools effectively. They need to understand how to interpret data insights and adjust campaigns in real time.
- KPIs relevant to marketing automation include metrics such as conversion rates, customer lifetime value, and lead nurturing times.
- Enhanced performance tracking and reporting help marketers measure the impact of their campaigns accurately and justify investment in these technologies.
For even better adoption, companies must address barriers to change by promoting a collaborative culture among marketing, IT, and sales teams.
- Regular feedback loops and iterative improvements ensure that the technology consistently meets evolving business needs.
- In addition, appropriate incentives should be in place to motivate marketers. Incentives such as bonuses tied to ROI or performance metrics can drive adoption and ensure accountability.
“Hub and Spoke” model: Centralize, Automate, Dominate.
This model consolidates central activities and expertise within a hub. Then, it offers guidance and tools to various spokes including individual marketing teams or departments within the organisation.
- The Hub serves as the central repository of best practices, technical expertise, and strategic oversight.
- The Spokes, on the other hand, are responsible for carrying out localised and department-specific marketing initiatives.
This model helps companies ensure consistency in branding and messaging across all channels. It gives them more flexibility and customization to meet specific regional or departmental needs.
Marketing teams in the spokes can benefit from the centralised resources and shared insights provided by the hub, such as analytics tools, campaign templates, and customer segmentation data. Additionally, this approach nurtures innovation as learnings from diverse campaigns are fed back into the hub.
Overcoming Resistance to Change
Implementing new technologies or adopting a “Hub and Spoke” model may be met with resistance from team members who are accustomed to traditional ways of doing things. As a company, here’s why you should prioritise education and communication:
- Helps build buy-in from all team members.
- Ease the transition and improve adoption rates.
- Help them feel more invested in the changes by soliciting their feedback.