Are you still sending sales emails "by hand" and feeling like you're wasting your time? Are you looking for ways to eliminate repetitive tasks while personalizing your messages? Marketing automation is exactly the solution you need. Given the rapid digitalization of the marketing function, and the increasing amount of data to be processed, automating your processes is becoming essential. We explain the benefits!

A simple definition of marketing automation

As its name suggests, marketing automation is the automation of marketing processes. To achieve this, you can use a number of online tools and platforms. These software programs enable you to manage your strategy and automate repetitive but essential tasks, such as sending e-mails or SMS messages, or creating content on social networks.

Marketing automation thus serves to improve the quality of the customer experience and increase conversions (by targeting the right person, with the right message at the right time). The goal for the company? To be more efficient and profitable in its growth marketing!

The benefits of marketing automation: application examples

1: To increase sales

This is the major advantage of marketing automation! Thanks to this strategy, the company can segment its prospects in detail, and move them through the sales tunnel at the right pace - a sine qua non for better conversion.

Upstream, the marketing team will distribute content (lead nurturing strategy) to move the prospect forward in the sales cycle. Thanks to lead scoring, it's possible to qualify the prospect's level of progress in the sales cycle.

Then, when the lead is sufficiently "hot", it can be passed on to the sales teams.

Sales can then prioritize their sales efforts, focusing on the most qualified prospects likely to become customers.

These different sales phases can be automated using marketing automation platforms.

2: To save time on a daily basis

Sending e-mails, managing social networks, filling out CRMs... these marketing actions are essential, but they are also time-consuming for sales teams.

Marketing automation helps to automate these repetitive tasks, freeing up time to focus on strategy (the real added value), rather than operations. As a result, prospects are guided through the conversion tunnel from A to Z, and sales teams save a major amount of time!

GOOD TO KNOW
Using marketing automation solutions is a good way to reduce your marketing costs. As the sales process is often a lengthy one, use tools to do the operational tasks, instead of your marketing teams concentrating on strategy!

3: Better communicate with prospects & customers

Marketing automation solutions will give you all the information you need about your prospects: the number of clicks on a sales page, the content that worked well, the type of resource downloaded... It's a real centralized gold mine!

Thanks to this collected data, the company can personalize its communication according to the lead's progress in the buying process. This is what we call lead nurturing.

To complement this, you'll need to establish an excellent content strategy, track your statistics and use a CRM. Some marketing automation tools can be used to automate sequences of sales emails (e.g., during an offer launch), to create genuine communication campaigns on social networks, or to respond to your prospects in real time (e.g., via a chatbot).

Focus: marketing automation tools

Numerous tools are available for implementing your marketing automation strategy. You can use them to improve the effectiveness of your emailing sequences and the distribution of content on social networks.

  • Zapier and Make: a platform for connecting different applications to automate tasks and workflows.
  • ActiveCampaign and Brevo (formerly Sendinblue): software for e-mailing, landing page creation and marketing campaign automation.
  • Leadpages and Ounbounce: creation of conversion-optimized landing pages (sales, registration or thank-you pages).
  • Hootsuite: social network management, publication planning and social media performance analysis.
  • Phantombuster: automation of social network campaigns (especially Linkedin), data extraction and outreach. 

Hubspot, Marketo and Pardot are marketing automation platforms: with their advanced functionalities, they enable you to link different tools together and facilitate the management of marketing campaigns (e.g. emails, content on social networks, automated SMS sending, etc.).

As you can see, managing leads, qualifying prospects and creating compelling content (sales page, follow-up emails, posts or stories on social networks) takes time. Marketing automation helps you create cost-effective acquisition and retention scenarios, while enhancing the quality of your customer relationships! Properly integrated and used (remember to measure the results of your marketing strategy), it benefits all departments in your company.

Interested in growth marketing? Discover our training course to learn the basics of this customer-focused approach.

Learnabout Growth marketing