How to create a winning marketing automation strategy

Organizations should create a marketing automation strategy to streamline digital marketing tasks, optimize campaigns, and segment content and customer experiences across the customer journey. The use of automated technology to streamline marketing processes and workflows ultimately helps organizations achieve their business goals.

Both executives and their employees are increasingly aligned: both expect marketing automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to eliminate unnecessary busy work. A Salesforce study¹ found that 71% of employees believe that generative AI will eliminate many time-consuming manual tasks and free them to work on strategy problem solving.

Organizations use marketing automation to meet customer experience trends across the buyer’s journey. Examples include an expectation of quicker answers to their questions and access to relevant content that helps them make decisions.

Marketing campaigns rely on advanced technologies like to optimize their automation strategies. The use of AI in marketing produces several benefits, which include greater efficiency, higher return on marketing expenditure and happier marketing employees.

There are several benefits of marketing automation across email, SMS, social media, display and content marketing. It increases productivity, reduces costs and errors, and helps employees focus on the most important tasks. Therefore, making marketing automation work should be a priority of every organization.

Successful marketing automation strategies should identify and create several key performance indicators KPIs, such as the improvement of click-through rates, conversion rates and customer retention. Organizations that introduce automation to their marketing strategy are more likely to meet and exceed their stated marketing KPIs.

B2B and B2C companies can have different approaches to automation due to the potential audience for their marketing and differing customer lifetime value (CLV). Both types need to build buyer personas and track their audiences across the omnichannel environment.

For example, a B2B buyer persona might be a business owner, senior executive or middle-management decision-maker. A business owner might be price sensitive and most interested in services or products that boost profitability. A senior executive cares less about price and more about how the service or product will help them run the business. The middle manager might want something that makes their jobs easier or enables better collaboration with their team members.

B2C personas can span demographics and psychographics. For example, a PC manufacturer might target gamers, creatives and business employees are three different types of personas. A sporting goods manufacturer might target personas based on where they live, which might relate to the team or teams they support.

Each persona’s buyer’s journey is slightly different. For example, a B2C customer might read about a new computer monitor in a technology publication or a YouTube video. Then the B2C customer might search for prices and availability on e-commerce sites or see whether they can purchase it directly from the company’s website.

B2B buyer’s journeys might take longer and involve more steps. An executive that needs to license a new type of software might read an industry report about the product category and sign up to read white papers from the leading companies. They might even sign up to read the newsletters of specfic companies before making a final decision.

However, because B2B sales targets have longer lead times and fewer targets than B2C companies, those teams’ B2B marketing automation strategy might focus on lead nurturing and live opportunities. B2C companies might focus more of their goals on reach and conversions.

Organizations that build buyer personas and collect and analyze customer data can create customer journey maps that align to their customer behaviors. They know the touchpoints of their existing and potential customers and their demographic information. They know whether customers spend time on social media, email, mobile apps and other platforms. This is where audience segmentation comes into play. Organization that should create ideal customer profiles so the organization can produce and distribute personalized experiences.

Organizations can identify the right customer profiles by surveying existing customers or those who have purchased competitors’ products. Organizations can also study the demographics of either types of customers or use analytics tools to identify what people are saying about the organization or its competitors’ products in social media and other online destinations.

The organization can also segment their audience into groups based on whether they have already purchased products or not, how frequently they’ve purchased products and where they are based in the world.

Marketing automation solutions augment, not replace, humans. While 27% of executives expect marketing roles to be automated due to generative AI, according to the IBM Institute for Business Value, many believe that automation will create jobs.

“We know what jobs [generative AI] will disrupt, but we don’t know what jobs AI will create. And I’m sure it’ll create many, many jobs,” said WPP CEO Mark Read.

They are a collaborative tool to help the marketing team focus on what is most important and let a machine handle the rest. For example, an organization that creates landing page templates can use an automation platform to build many different versions. The marketing employee can then look at the duplicated content and make tweaks based on their expertise to reflect the brand voice. Marketing automation software can help automate the social media posts and email marketing distribution. It can help create and replicate content. In fact, 76% of respondents to the Salesforce study said they expected to use generative AI to help with content creation and writing copy.

Marketing automation platforms can assist with several key areas:

• Customer and prospect data management: Automation platforms can collect customer information, use AI to append missing data and clean incorrect data and aggregate information about the database to help with market intelligence.

• Content creation: Automation platforms can collecting internal and external information and present it in easy-to-read formats. Marketers can take that information to make their own content or start by using generative AI tools to create sample drafts that they can then edit to match their own voice.

• Distribution: Marketing automation platforms take that content and distributes across several omnichannel platforms, such as newsletters, blogs, websites and social media.

Holistic marketing automation software platforms, such as Hubspot and Salesforce, help organizations automate most of their marketing function. Then, there are other tools that focus on a specific function, such as email marketing and customer support or customer relationship management (CRM). These tools increasingly use AI technologies like natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning (ML) to supercharge those marketing efforts. Organizations should ask potential service providers how they use AI today and how they plan to use it in the future.

Marketing automation tools and sales automation tools provide more value to the all-important sales process if they work together. The sales team needs qualified leads to keep their sales funnel robust. Therefore, the two automation technologies should work together to streamline lead management.

Ideally the automated marketing tools help the lead generation process. They can capture lead information and provide lead scoring of new customers.

Connecting the two automation tools can also better identify upsell opportunities, increasing the customer lifetime value (CLV) of its customers. For example, an existing customer who continues to open emails and reads content about another product the organization offers might be ready to buy a new product for the company.

Marketing automation platforms are an expenditure whether an organization purchases or builds technology or licenses a software-as-a-solution (SaaS) model. The pricing varies depending on how many employees use it, what features the organization activates and how much content the organization produces and distributes.

Organizations must estimate the costs of these platforms and plot out the cost savings or revenue increases they produce.

Organizations that use marketing automation must establish and track metrics. The automation solution should increase efficiency, which enables the organization to produce and send more assets to a larger audience. It should track each campaign to see whether automation produces benefits.

• Email marketing: For example, a company that has prioritized email marketing automation should measure how much quicker it takes to put together and send emails versus managing everything manually. Then, it should track KPIs such as clickthrough and open rates. It should track if subscribers increase or whether the automation is causing people to unsubscribe.
• Social media: Organizations that automate social media posts so track replies, engagements and views.
• Ad campaigns: B2B companies should measure how many qualified leads they gain compared to when more manual processes were used. B2C companies might instead track total leads. Both should also track how many conversions they get.
• Content marketing: Organizations should identify how many readers there were for each piece of content on each platform. If those numbers flatten or decline, it might mean that the automation is not set up properly.

Automation initially introduces some new complexities as organizations must monitor the automation process to make sure it works correctly. Also, employees relearn activities and prepare for how this technology creates automation workflows. The best way to unveil marketing automation is to do a small A/B test where the organization automates half of the campaign delivery and does the other half manually.

For example, an organization might begin by automating half of an upcoming email campaign, such as a welcome email or an email confirmation for a webinar signup. Next, the organization can automate the follow-up emails that remind subscribers of the next action they need to take. Identifying if the automated emails increase customer engagement and the efficiency of delivery demonstrates the automated campaign is working.

Marketing automation strategy requires close attention and a willingness to course correct when necessary. Organizations should monitor their progress as they introduce new technologies and new use cases to improve the process when possible.