Marketing Automation:
What You Need to Know

Marketing automation refers to any marketing software that automates marketing efforts and processes (specifically repetitive and tedious tasks and complex workflows) to help increase your marketing team’s operational efficiency. Marketing automation tools can be used to enhance your content promotion, social media engagement and email campaigns or carry out strategic sales methodologies like lead management and lead scoring.

However, marketing automation is not…

• A replacement for your marketing team
• A “set it and forget it” solution
• A way to spam your customers

The most effective marketing teams automate only the most monotonous and highly technical aspects of their job so they can focus on building creative campaigns that address buyer personas’ key pain points and help them overcome their challenges human-to-human.

If you choose to adopt tools like those available through HubSpot marketing automation, you can expect the following benefits:

• Improved productivity: Entering lead information manually and building contact lists one-by-one isn’t just boring, it’s also inefficient. Automating these tasks allows you to dedicate more time and energy to other, more pressing tasks.
  

• Marketing and sales alignment: The most significant threat to alignment of your sales and marketing teams is poor communication, but automating documentation ensures both teams have all the data they need. For example, using a platform that can automatically track leads’ digital behavior across every touchpoint and marketing channel allows sales to have more meaningful and productive conversations when the lead is ready. Additionally, sales reps can be automatically notified a lead is ready for a conversation based on this behavioral data and reach out when the lead is hot.

• Simpler multi-channel integration: Most buyers engage with a brand across multiple channels before they make a decision. But without automation, it can be challenging to make sure your message remains relevant to their current stage in the buyer’s journey. Plus, automation allows for better visibility into which efforts are most likely to drive action.
  

• Easier campaign tracking and measurement: Marketing automation tools help track, monitor and measure each tactic within a campaign so you can determine what’s working, what you should change and how to replicate success on-the-fly. It can also help translate massive quantities of data into easy-to-understand reports.
  

You may have heard marketing automation and inbound marketing are conflicting ideas because marketing automation perpetuates cold, robotic communication while inbound marketing focuses on human interaction and authentic engagement. However, they are not mutually exclusive. Inbound marketing is a method and marketing automation is a tool, and you can easily leverage marketing automation to help improve your inbound efforts through a process called marketing funnel automation.

Let’s take a look at an example:

Imagine a potential customer is scrolling through their social media feed when they see an ad for a free eBook that discusses a pain point they are experiencing from your company. Interested, they click through to the gated landing page and fill out the form to download the content. Because this new prospect did not immediately complete a purchase, they’re added to a nurture list and a workflow. Each email in the workflow has been carefully composed by the marketing team, and uses tokens to automatically personalize the messages as much as possible based on the information you have.

A few weeks later, the same contact engages with your brand on another social media platform, searches for reviews of your product on Google and navigates to a product page. Each of these interactions is taken into account so you can move the contact into a more appropriate bucket and ensure the messages you’re delivering are reflective of the contact’s stage in the buyer’s journey. It may make sense here to automatically provide (through email or ads) a buyer’s guide your team created to compare industry options.

In this case, the sophisticated contact lists, workflow and personalization are all possible because of tools like HubSpot marketing automation. You’re able to marry together the technology with inbound concepts to create a streamlined user experience.