Once used by only the most prosperous businesses, marketing automation has the ability to mechanize marketing activities – such as SMS, emails, social media and other functions. The aim of marketing automation is to free up the time of marketers to focus on other, less laborious and time-consuming tasks.
The concept of marketing automation began back in the early 90s. But with the rise of social media from 2006 onwards, marketing automation platforms have been cropping up more frequently and incorporating a wide variety of marketing tools. Marketing automation primarily came to fruition due to marketers finding themselves needing technology such as web analytics, email and resource management.
Tech giant Salesforce revolutionized the marketing automation industry and gave rise to the Software as a Service (SaaS) model, offering the same service at a lower cost to companies who did not have the immediate budget to buy a fully-functioning marketing automation system.
What types of marketing automation are there?
There is a wide range of marketing activities that have been used by marketers for years to find customers and promote their brand. However over recent years more and more of these activities are becoming increasingly automated, including:
Social media – As an incredibly powerful marketing tool, social media is used by most businesses to connect with their audience to promote engagement and brand message. Social media automation tools are useful when it comes to scheduling posts, network management and measuring the performance of your posts.
Customer relationship management software – If you don’t have a system that is capable of collecting, storing and retrieving customer data, this can be an exhausting and confusing task. Marketing automation software resolves this issue however.
Email marketing – Despite being a relatively old form of digital marketing, email marketing still provides a significant ROI, which is why it is still a much-loved channel! Email marketing automation tools enable you to automate the messages you send to your customer base – whether this is trigger-based or an email blast.
Marketing analytics – Many marketers tend to neglect measuring how their content is performing, which is essential if you are to gain an insight on what your most effective strategies are and how to maximise your ROI. Automating your analytics ensures you gain accurate and insightful data on how customers are interacting with your content.
Campaign management – More companies are focusing on campaign automation to engage customers more effectively than ever before. Automating your campaign management enables you to systematize marketing and email campaigns, freeing up time to refine and improve your strategy and other less manual tasks.
Why you should be using marketing automation
Marketing automation software such as BlueVenn gives you the ability to analyze every byte of your customer data and reach them in increasingly effective ways. This means you can centralize your planning, coordination, management and execution of campaigns – all in a cohesive and consistent manner. This results in a high rate of efficiency, the enhancement of the customer experience and, ultimately, an increase in sales.
The benefits of marketing automation include:
- A reduction of time spent on repetitive, manual tasks
- Increased efficiency of marketing campaigns and operation
- A consistent and unified message
- Tailored content for each customer
- CRM integration
- Data collection
- Multi-channel management
Marketing automation – It’s here to stay
Not only does marketing automation software enable you to mechanize and unify your marketing efforts, the BlueVenn marketing automation platform empowers marketers to create automated, tailored content for your customers.
Could your business benefit from the advantages a marketing automation platform would bring? If so, get in touch with our team today to arrange a BlueVenn demo to ensure you are getting the most out of your marketing campaigns.
