Marketing automation is often described as a magic way to save time and do more with less. This is only partially true as those explanations often forget about the context or consistency.
What is marketing automation?
To answer this question, we must first look into another concept – marketing operations. They are the foundation behind any automation. Marketing operations are like the rules on the road – everyone is still moving without them, but it’s only a matter of time before something crash.
The concept is quite self-explanatory, but some elements are easily overlooked. Marketing operations is not only triggering emails to customers or reaching out to people in social media. They cover the processes, systems (tech stack), data & reporting, as well as strategy planning and execution. Strong marketing operations help you connect the dots and bring strategy to live during daily execution. They also define how tools are used, how data is exchanged between different platforms, or how you track performance over time. Without this foundation, it’s almost impossible to automate while still maintaining high quality.
Now, marketing automation is there to help you level up those often manual marketing operations, so you can shift focus on more strategic aspects. Some of the biggest benefits of investing into a proper automation system are consistency and reliability. One-time implementation effort can help you deliver a high quality newsletter with recent articles related to each individuals’ interests, or send a reliable transactional email when they buy from an online store.
Marketing automation ≠ email marketing
Despite marketing automation help you automate emails and trigger those at the right time, it’s not the same as email marketing. While email is often main channel people consider for marketing automation, there are many more like web, social media, CRM systems, paid media, and more.
Why so many people often mistaken these two concepts? The answer could differ based on different factors, but usually it’s because email is one of the most visible channels, and very popular, which makes it easy to use. If you search the web for email marketing best practice or examples, you find many of those, mostly because it’s hard to imagine a world without emails. Either you create a new account, buy something or sign up to an interesting newsletter, emails are easy and cheap way for companies to keep in touch with its customers and potential prospects.
What is not visible at the first sight is that marketing automation is a much deeper concept, and a true cross-channel layer, which connects systems into a single ecosystem. It often starts with data, which could come from many different sources, but is usually stored and interpreted in one central place. No marketing automation exists without a proper data structure. You can’t send customer a confirmation email if you don’t even know that they placed an order.
Once the foundation is in place, you are ready to use your tools to take informed actions, which go far beyond email. Website behavior can influence the customer experience, and often tailor content based on browsing history or customer profile. Email can still pay important role, but different people prefer different channels, which emphasizes the use of paid media and social media channels. Lastly, in the ideal world, any actions taken should trigger updates to customer profile, so the whole cycle can repeat itself based on updated details.
Key concepts behind effective automation
Understanding the current process and data comes first.
It’s crucial to first understand what kind of marketing operations are painful, time consuming, or maybe lack consistency, and try addressing those with a proper automation. Before any configuration starts, it’s essential to map the process to see how the operations will change while automated and whether that will not create any potential issues.
Data quality is critical
Any automation depends on accurate and meaningful data. Poor data leads to poor automation. While not collecting required data to power up automation could be a problem, trying to use bad quality data could be even more harmful. From misfiring workflows to irrelevant messaging, things could quickly escalate when whole system proves unreliable.
Working in iteration
Marketing automation is not a one-time setup. It often costs you a good amount of time to set up a single workflow, but you should constantly benefit from having it in place. Performance should be reviewed in a regular cycle, and relevant updates should be made to improve the setup, and ensure it evolves as the business needs change.
Relevance Over Volume
Lastly, investing in marketing automation doesn’t mean you need to increase the volume and try reaching your customers at any cost. One effective interaction is worth much more than many irrelevant, or incorrectly timed attempts.
How to approach marketing automation
Before getting started with the actual automation you should consider your current situation and set realistic goals. Once you defined clear objectives, and have a solid understanding of your marketing operations, then focus on automating some processes. It’s important to “take it easy” and work in iteration as you can’t automate everything with a single process or tool, and if you remember all those platforms are interconnected in one ecosystem. Even a small change to a critical process could have a huge impact on other tools in that ecosystem.
When you keep complexity in mind, and realize that marketing automation is a process rather than one-time setup, you can look at the bigger landscape and build automation roadmap. This would truly help you identify items, which would maybe consume more effort, but give you greater benefits if automated. Thanks to such a roadmap, your actions can be properly orchestrated, and interconnected systems can be updated accordingly after each change. Tools play a supporting role, while planning and execution become crucial for overall success. The whole process could be outlined with the following 4 steps, which would be repeated over the next iterations:
1. Understand
Understand your data and where you currently stand. Consider issues and challenges, but also risks and opportunities that you have based on the current marketing setup.
2. Plan
Considering data you have available and your current situation, plan which next steps would give you the best value and focus on those. Either driven by reducing manual effort, simplifying a solution, mitigating a risk or anything else, the bigger value the better. Keep in mind to identify any other platforms or processes, which might get impacted by a planned automation.
3. Automate
Use the marketing automation tools to work on the identified tasks. Start with simple tasks and always try to break down big projects into smaller chunks of work, which can be delivered in a single work iteration.
4. Learn
Take your time to reflect on where you started and how the automation changed your situation. Was it a good change or a missed idea? Review if the implementation went to plan, and identify any things that should be done differently in future.
Final thoughts and next steps
Marketing automation is not about doing more, but doing things differently, approaching daily tasks with purposeful tools. The best outcomes are not guaranteed by the tools, but consistent and iterative use of those tools, aligned with the current needs and challenges. When used properly, marketing automation is a great way to reduce repetitive operational tasks, which allows to shift focus on more strategic tasks. Lastly, implementing any marketing automation processes should not sacrifice the current quality, but build on top of it, and ensure consistent experience for hundreds of customers and allow easy scalability over time.
Marketing automation is closely connected with other concepts, which we recommend as a follow up read for those seeking for more information. Here are some of our recommendations:
- Lead scoring
- Personalization
- Data segmentation
- CDP