Choosing The Most Effective Marketing Automation For Your Business

Marketing automation is a powerful tool that helps businesses move leads through the marketing funnel and convert them into sales-ready customers.

By scoring prospects based on their activities and providing targeted content and messaging, marketing automation nurtures potential customers from initial interest to final sale. This approach is particularly effective in B2B and longer sales cycle B2C environments and involves various marketing techniques, including email marketing and structured sales processes.

Ultimately, marketing automation is about streamlining and optimizing the customer journey, from first contact to final purchase. So where is automation most effective in marketing campaigns? To get the answer, we look at types of marketing campaigns.

Marketing Campaign Types

Various types of marketing campaigns work effectively with automation, including:

Email marketing

Organizations using email service providers like Mailchimp or the email marketing tool a marketing platform like HubSpot can use automation to capture customer data and craft and deliver relevant emails.

SMM

Social media marketing (SMM) tasks like scheduling posts, curating content, and analyzing engagement can be managed with automation tools.

Advertising

Then there are marketing campaigns using targeted content in adverts and website content.

You may consider using Google’s Local Service Ads (LSAs) alongside your existing marketing automation platform for higher conversion rates with your advertising campaigns. To learn more about how LSAs can work with your marketing automation software, check out this informative blog post from Adplorer.

To identify which marketing automation tools are right for your business, you must consider usability, scalability, and support.

Usability

Most systems offer a free trial period, and you can select a group of users to try out all the systems on offer and document their experience. Together you can make an informed decision on which platform or app offers the best value.

However, ensure all user testers answer the same questions relevant to their expertise and intended system use.  Marketers will need to know how intuitive the system is to use. Whereas your technical staff will want to know how easy it is to implement, whether you can set up backups, and does it offer MFA for secure logins.  There will be many questions that need answers, including

• How easy was it for your team to learn and master the platform?
• Does the program have an intuitive, user-friendly interface?
• How long will it take to implement the solution?
• Is the platform accessible using mobile devices?
• Can it integrate seamlessly with your already existing programs?
• Are there features that restrict users and information based on job function?

Scalability

It is important that the platform you choose is scalable to accommodate your business as it grows. If your business is a startup, it is likely to grow very fast – so you don’t want to be stuck with a tool that inhibits your growth or one that needs ongoing customization.

Tech Support

Remember to find out how responsive the vendor’s support team is. You don’t want to be held up for hours before someone attends to your support inquiries.

Summing Up

Marketing captures and churns a lot of data, and marketing automation makes lighter work of it. Organizations can now use automation to manage lead capture and nurturing, create customer segments for personalizing content, and the usual types of marketing campaigns like email marketing and social media marketing.

The marketing automation tools are designed to save time and improve outcomes by automating repetitive tasks and delivering personalized experiences to their customers.

Your business may be using automation in marketing without knowing it. Social media sites like Facebook use it, so if you’re using the tools in Facebook, you are using automation and probably AI too.