What I Learned So Far About Marketing Automation

People think marketing automation can be the future of marketing. But with current trends and with the new direction of digital marketing, it's not in the future. It's the present era of digital marketing.

Why Marketing Automation

Digital marketing runs through numerous platforms. It can be content management platforms, email marketing platforms, social media platforms, or analytics platforms from different organizations. Digital marketing specialists need to have comprehensive knowledge of most of the platforms in their day-to-day work. So they have to follow one to many online applications per day. This is the exact moment that marketing automation is coming to the story. Marketing automation can be helpful to handle your segment your audience, personalize your web content or emails, create daily, weekly, or monthly reports, publish content in social media according to your content calendar, and many more tasks. The main task of automation is to stop spending your time on repetitive tasks, which you spent in your work hours.

Foundation of Automation

The basic idea of automation is processing a sequence when we activate the triggers. The definition of the sequence is a set of steps that we need to complete when we work on a specific task. So triggers are the main checkpoints we complete steps. As an example, let's assume you try to fill out a contact form on the website, and when you press the submit button, it can trigger another step like sending a thank-you email to the email address that was added to the form you filled out. Otherwise, when someone fills out your lead form on Facebook, you can follow up with them about your product or service, which you promoted the advertisement about. Trigger is the moment that you have to start the next step of the process.

So the next question is, can we automate every process we have? So for this, my answer is yes, but sometimes it is a no. The reason for that kind of answer is that some of the processes are really easy to segment according to the checkpoints, but for some of them, there can be a number of choices to select when we try to separate the processes. So some of the processes we can easily automate. As an example, after our welcome email, we have to send out a follow-up email after one week at the same time, so there are no options for that one. It's a straight-forward process, so we can easily automate it. Although a process like brand storytelling is not an easy one. Storytelling always needs to come up with authentic exposure from people; we cannot provide a formula or a format for a brand creation, and also the next steps will be based on customer engagement and customer feedback about the story you created for the brand.

Choose the correct tool

If we look for tools for your process automation, you will see there are a number of online applications there, but you have to know those applications are executing according to your work. The first thing is to note down all the steps and make a decision tree for that. And defining all the steps and identifying the deadlocks and priorities is also the most important process in this workflow. With this decision tree, you can decide what will be the most effective tool or tools for your automation journey. You can easily recognize these tools if you go through their product reviews and tool-comparing articles from subject matter experts. The next most important point is to compare the prices of these tools. We know that some of the platforms, like Hubspot and Mailchimp, already provide a free quota for their customers with limited facilities. But these resources will not be enough with your business growth. The main reason we mentioned in the first paragraph is to save your time. So the next point is to check if the cost you spend is worth the time you save from the tools we use.

As the author of the article, I understand that executing the process is not as simple as reading the documentation. Let me know your thoughts on this. Share your experience about your marketing automation processes. Let's learn more.