What is digital marketing automation?

The term ‘digital marketing automation’ refers to the process of software to automate digital marketing activities. Many digital marketing departments automate monotonous tasks such as email marketing, social media posting as well as digital ad campaigns. They do this not merely for the sake of efficiency, but so digital marketers can offer a more personalised experience for their customers. The technology of marketing automation renders these tasks much simpler.

Digital marketing and sales departments make use of digital marketing automation in order to automate online marketing campaigns as well as sales activities to both grow revenue and maximise efficiency. When digital marketing automation is used effectively to process repetitive tasks, employees are free to tackle higher-order problems and, the best part is, is that human error is reduced.

Digital marketing automation assists with lead generation, lead nurturing and scoring, in addition to measuring overall ROI on campaigns. The time- and cost-saving effects of automation improve as an organisation grows in size and complexity. Good digital marketing automation systems are designed to scale alongside your business.

Digital marketing automation done right

Digital marketing automation involves a combination of software and strategy. It should permit you to nurture prospects with highly personalised as well as useful content that assists with converting prospects into delighted customers.

Think of successful marketing automation as growing a garden. To make sure the flowers in your garden bloom beautifully, you need fertile soil which lays a foundation that is ripe for growth. In addition, you need seeds to sow as well as water and light to cultivate those seeds into a lush and blooming plant. With good digital marketing automation, it’s simpler to cultivate leads (the seedlings) well enough so as to produce paying customers (a lush, full-grown flower).

Nurturing a long-lasting customer

Customers are more than merely the outputs of successful digital marketing automation. They should be at the centre of everything that you do. This means that digital marketing automation must continue to play a significant role in your relationship that you have with them.

This is why the most successful digital marketing automation strategies don’t consider customers to be an afterthought at the end of a traditional funnel. Customers must be at the centre of a wheel that becomes more efficient when you add force to it and reduce points of customer friction. Successful digital marketing automation strategies will lessen that friction and accelerate your flywheel, assisting you with nurturing customer relationships well after they’ve been passed to sales and the deal has been closed.

How does digital marketing automation work?

You amass customer data through many interactions with that individual through the following channels:

• Emails,
• Website visits,
• App usage, and
• Social media.

This information helps you to create a 360-degree view of each customer.

From this point on, digital marketing automation does all the heavy lifting:

• Streamlining segmentation as well targeting processes in order to determine the correct audiences quickly and to scale.
• Tailor-making messaging to each customer automatically built on their profile.
• Creating relevant as well as personalised messaging across email, mobile, social, web experiences, and beyond. This process is carried out with only few simple clicks.
• Delivering personalized experiences for your customers, whether you have 100 or 100 million, efficiently and effectively.

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications – for example chatbots – can assist with automating the delivery of that data or funnel potential customers to webpages, online documents or – alternatively – forms that assist to make sales or gauge a potential customer’s current or upcoming interest in purchasing a company’s goods or services. Digital marketing automation tools can also administer customer satisfaction and product usage surveys, and then collect, measure as well as segment the response data.

Digital marketing automation takes away the hassle from your digital marketing strategy and allows you the opportunity to streamline, automate and evaluate tasks as well as workflows. Your organisation will be able to scale efforts as well as better how you target customers. The beauty of digital marketing automation is that it can assist your company to maximise on efforts that have already proven successful. Attracting new audiences through using effective digital marketing strategies is step one however if you want to do more to nurture those people – so that they become customers – this type of marketing automation something that you need to definitely include in your business.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

To learn more about other aspects of digital marketing, check out our course page. Follow this link to find out more.