Marketing Automation

Marketing automation means technology designed to more effectively market on multiple channels online by automating repetitive tasks. They have become more popular for marketing departments and organizations as platforms have become more sophisticated enabling users to more easily plan, coordinate, manage and measure campaigns.

Both B2B and B2C organizations use marketing automation for lead generation, lead nurturing, segmentation, customer retention and more.

The reason that the concept has become more popular has to do with scaling a business combined with the increasing number of marketing channels available. By combining a central database of marketing data with both a marketing engine and analytics engine you are leveraging a one-stop-shop approach to dealing with online marketing.

The common features with Marketing Automation are:

• Email marketing
• Social marketing
• Campaign management
• Lead management
• Marketing analytics
• Landing pages
• Predication and scoring
• CRM management

You can target customers with various automated messages across platforms such as email, social, web, and even text. Messages and delivery functions can be customized to fit most needs and campaigns. By using automation in this manner, employees aren't using valuable time on repetitive tasks leaving them free for more critical issues. Additionally, the use of automation reduces the chance of human error.

This type of automation is also very useful for building databases of information on individual customers which can then be used in numerous ways. Customer interactions can be tailored so each instance funnels a user along their journey.