Marketing automation

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks.

Marketing departments, consultants and part-time marketing employees benefit by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes which are then interpreted, stored and executed by software, which increases efficiency and reduces human error. Originally focused on email marketing automation, marketing automation refers to a broad range of automation and analytic tools for marketing especially inbound marketing. Marketing Automation platforms are used as a hosted or web-based solution, and no software installation is required by a customer.

The use of a marketing automation platform is to streamline sales and marketing organizations by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions.

Marketing automation is a platform that marketers use to plan, coordinate, manage and measure all of their marketing campaigns, both online and offline.

Overview

Marketing Automation is a subset of customer relationship management (CRM) that focuses on the definition, segmentation, scheduling and tracking of marketing campaigns. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient and makes new processes possible.

There are three categories of software:

Marketing intelligence

Uses tracking codes in social media, email and webpages to track the behavior of anyone interested in a product or service to gain a measure of intent. It can record which social media group or thread they followed, which link was clicked on in an email or which search term was used to access a website. Multiple link analysis can then track buyer behavior - following links and multiple threads related to product A but not B will show an interest only in A. This allows more accurately targeted response and the development of a nurturing program specifically targeted towards their interest and vertical market. Due to its interactive nature this has been described as Marketing Automation 2.0.

Marketing automation

Has a focus on moving leads from the top of the marketing funnel through to becoming sales-ready leads at the bottom of the funnel. Prospects are scored, based on their activities, and receive targeted content and messaging, thus nurturing them from first interest through to sale. Commonly used in business-to-business (B2B), business-to-government (B2G), or longer sales cycle business-to-consumer (B2C) sales cycles, Marketing Automation involves multiple areas of marketing and is really the marriage of email marketing technology coupled with a structured sales process.

Advanced workflow automation

Encompasses automation of internal marketing processes. These include budgeting and planning, workflow and approvals, the marketing calendar, internal collaboration, digital asset creation and management and essentially everything that supports the operational efficiency of the internal marketing function. Typically these systems require a CRM or COM administrator to set up a complex series of rules to trigger action items for internal sales and marketing professionals to manually process (designing files, sending letters, sending email campaigns). This type of system increases marketer's ability to deliver relevant content to relevant individuals at relevant times. Limitations may apply, based on the human resource capacity of an organization and their level of commitment to the tasks as they are assigned.

Functionality

In order to effectively aid marketers in fully understanding customers and subsequently developing a strategic marketing plan, marketing automation tools (MAT) are designed to perform four key tasks:

• Development and analysis of marketing campaigns and customers
• Management of marketing campaigns
• Appropriate customer data organization and storage
• Moving contacts from leads to customers

It is typical of marketing automation platforms to offer a content management system, hosted webforms, landing pages, analytics, and email platform.

Major developers

A number of companies are known for releasing software or software suites dedicated to the automation of marketing. According to Forrester, among them are Averetek, Balihoo, BrandMaker, Brandmuscle, Bridgeline Digital, Distribion, EarthIntegrate, Partnermarketing.com, Pegasystems, Revenew, SproutLoud, Standard Register, StructuredWeb, TIE Kinetix, and Zift Solutions.

Marketing using Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is becoming one of the most invested areas of recent times. With the availability of user data, marketing has become more personalized, targeted, and data-driven. There are numerous spaces where artificial intelligence is helping marketers. Ad optimization, sales, customer support, content curation, and analytics are all getting revolutionized by artificial intelligence.

Applications and Use cases

Learning User Behavior

Artificial Intelligence is helping brands understand user behavior and needs. Users leave online footprints all the time when they use the internet. User search data and social media conversations can be analyzed and leveraged by marketers to understand needs and set their messaging of the product. With the advent of Deep Learning algorithms, it is possible to predict user behavior. This lets brands to show you the ads you care for. According to this study, machine learning algorithms can predict your behavior better than your spouse by analyzing your mere 300 ‘Likes’ on Facebook. Imagine, with all the browsing data available to the marketers, the ads can be highly targeted. This leads to better optimization and ROI.

Leveraging Personalized Marketing

This is the era of personalized marketing. And personalized marketing is not limited to targeting ads based on your needs. Brands are trying to establish an emotional connect with users to drive more engagement. AI can help detect sentiment and emotions from user data. This data can further be used to target specific user and personalize product/service recommendation. Also, it can be used for competitive research and comparison.

Sales Automation

Brands hire a horde of sales professionals to identify, target and pitch customers. Identification of potential buyers and targeting them is a hectic task for a sales professional. This task can be automated by using artificial intelligence to predict user behavior. Filtering leads using intelligent algorithms can save plenty of time for the sales team and reduce human effort. Artificial Intelligence can help manual work to identify prospects and contacts, filtering leads, and finalizing the clients based on user behavior as well.

Customer Support Optimization

Artificial Intelligence is changing the way customer queries are handled and analyzed. The users choose social media, e-mails, and forums to voice their opinions and reviews about a product/service. Using artificial intelligence, marketers can classify the data into various categories and allow relevant sources to respond to such user queries, opinions, feedback etc.

Using intent analysis, marketers can automate the identification of underlying intent of the text. This helps marketers classify and manage numerous user queries surfacing online. This makes the overall process fast and efficient.

See also

• Demand generation
• Inbound marketing automation
• Lead scoring
• Outbound marketing
• Online marketing platform
• Enterprise marketing management
• Real-time marketing
• Predictive analytics
• Customer retention
• Data Integration
• Mobile marketing automation