What Is Marketing Automation?

 

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is all about using software to automate marketing activities. Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns -- not just for the sake of efficiency, but so they can provide a more personalized experience for their customers. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier.

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The Ideal

At its best, marketing automation is a combination of software and strategy. It should allow you to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to delighted customers. 

Think of effective marketing automation like growing a garden. You need fertile soil, ripe for growth. You need seeds to sow. And you need water and light to nurture those seeds into a lush, blooming plant. With good marketing automation, it's easier to nurture leads (the seedlings) well enough to produce paying customers (a lush, full-grown plant).

But it doesn't end there. Customers are more than just the output of successful marketing automation. They should be at the center of everything you do, which means marketing automation should continue to play an important role in your relationship with them.

That's why the most successful marketing automation strategies don't consider customers an afterthought at the end of a traditional funnel. Instead, customers should be at the center of a flywheel that gets more efficient when you add force to that flywheel, and reduce points of customer friction.

Successful marketing automation strategies will reduce that friction and speed up your flywheel, helping you continue to nurture customer relationships well after they've been passed to Sales and the deal has been won.

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The Reality

Because of the popularity of marketing automation, a misconception has grown that marketing automation software can be a salve for any slowdowns in marketing growth -- including the need to generate new leads. This misconception leaves many marketers with sophisticated tools to automate the middle of their funnel, but no solution for generating new leads to nurture in the first place.

The consequence is that marketers begin buying lists of email addresses to nurture instead of generating inbound leads. While it seems like a quick fix, it's not a long-term solution, nor does it create the fertile ground for a healthy, long-term relationship with your customers. 

Many marketers also continue to think of marketing automation in the context of a funnel, instead of a flywheel. Generate a lead, put them in an automated email queue, and pass hand-raisers over to Sales. This creates a disjointed experience for prospects and customers as they move from Marketing, to Sales, to Customer Service. Instead of building a contextual, efficient experience based on each individual's needs, marketing automation becomes a way to force people through a funnel with arbitrary touch points and irrelevant content.

When marketing automation operates in a silo like this, points of friction are introduced that stall and strain what could have been productive, long-term customer relationships.

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