Marketing automation for companies

In the advancing age of digitalization, implementing automation has already become a best practice for companies of all sizes. To understand which business areas can be improved through marketing automation, it is first necessary to define the term. We analyze what this concept entails, how it works in a sales campaign, how it is used and what opportunities it offers.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation uses special software to perform routine tasks that save a company's resources and optimize processes. Companies can communicate with customers and collect business statistics using special tools, programs or add-ons.

Good examples of marketing automation include creating and sending email newsletters, maintaining social media activities and implementing advertising campaigns. By automating monotonous tasks, companies can reduce both the qualitative as well as the quantitative key figures of your marketing campaigns and your sales growth, as customers are more involved in brand communication. Employee efficiency also increases with more time available for complex tasks. 

How your company benefits from marketing automation

Digital marketing automation helps companies to increase their sales and optimize their advertising campaigns. The benefits are convincing: more qualified leads, higher conversion rates, improved marketing processes and less time spent on maintaining processes.

But what other benefits can a company achieve? And is it worth investing considerable sums of money? The answer is clear: yes - well-implemented automation of repetitive processes makes it possible:

• Setting up automatic processing for repetitive processes and focus on other things - strategy development, analysis and optimization of marketing campaigns.
• Receiving, storing, researching and processing data to potential buyers that the company has collected via various interaction points: Emails, website visits, in-app behavior or social networks.
• Attracting new visitors and retaining existing customers. The automation of the communication process based on the current database allows you to create personalized offers that meet the needs of different customer groups.

Areas of application for marketing automation in companies - the most important marketing processes

Marketing automation is of great benefit to all companies that want to interact with their current and future customers. Regardless of what industry they are in and what their turnover is. With this technology you can:

• divide the customer base into groups.
• reduce the workload of your employees by relieving them of routine tasks.
• Save resources for advertising campaigns.
• eliminate the human factor as a source of error and reduce the number of errors.
• Increase your company's turnover, profit and profitability.

Let's look at some key business areas that lend themselves to the implementation of digital marketing automation:

SEO and website performance

With SEO, you can partially or fully automate the following processes:

• Technical inspection: The first steps in any project are usually the quality assessment of a website and the elimination of technical errors. An automated website check detects the problems of a website within a few minutes and delivers the results in an easy-to-process format.
• Rank tracking: SEO aims to improve the ranking of your project for specific keywords. Tracking search engine rankings is an important measure for understanding your company's online performance. Automation tools help to optimize this process and track changes in page rank.
• Backlink monitoring: Backlinks help to improve the credibility, authority and ranking of a website. However, it is almost impossible to track them manually. Fortunately, there are tools that check your backlinks regularly and notify you immediately if one of them disappears or has been changed.
• Website monitoring: It is almost impossible to predict where errors may occur on a website. It is also not always easy to detect changes on a website that affect its performance. Therefore, consider using an automated website monitoring tool. It will help you keep an eye on your online resources.
• Monitoring the competition: An indispensable measure to keep your brand present in people's minds. Gain insight into your competitors' advertising efforts and use their strategies to your advantage. Automation can facilitate data collection and alert you to changes on their websites and external optimization.
• Reporting as the key to business success: By automating this process, you save valuable time that you would otherwise have to spend on manual data collection. Instead, you can concentrate on analysis and strategy planning. 

Currently, marketing technology offers a variety of options, whether you want to cover a single process or need all-in-one SEO software. One SEO platform like SE Ranking can serve as a comprehensive solution for website audits, rank tracking, competitor analysis, SEO reporting and much more.

Lead filtering and management

Automation is essential for marketers to quickly assess a customer's readiness to buy. The process of identifying, acquiring, grouping and selecting leads takes place in several steps:

1. Lead capture: To do this, a Customer Reference Program Specialist (CRP) uses information already in the database as well as additional information from the website and/or online store, mobile applications, social networks or email campaigns.
2. Lead evaluation and classification: Automated scoring and profiling software categorizes the target group according to potential, urgency, buying behavior and engagement to better understand your customers. You can also prioritize your leads by company size, potential revenue or industry. This helps you to focus your marketing investment on the most promising companies and customers, increasing your return on investment (ROI).
3. Lead assignment: By segmenting and filtering according to various criteria, companies can create and manage subsets of their customers that are suitable for marketing initiatives such as messaging or advertising campaigns.
4. Sales qualification: People who show the right level of interest are forwarded for qualification, while those who do not are left in the system for further interactions and remarketing.
5. Lead maintenance: The customer is always kept up to date with all relevant information and receives attractive offers - so you create a constant demand for your product.

Customer service and support

Applications for the automation of customer service have become increasingly important in recent times. This category of tools typically includes call handling and Internet self-service. They transform customer service departments from costly to profitable. In conjunction with other applications, especially those based on artificial intelligence They help to ensure that every customer contact with the company is used to sell additional services (cross-selling) and more expensive products (up-selling).

Other automation options include

• Automated workflows: To speed up many processes and reduce the workload for routine activities.
• Chatbots: To answer the most common customer queries. They are designed to provide useful information without human intervention.
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR): Allows users to access interesting information via a special voice menu by pressing buttons in sound mode.
• E-mail automation with templates for reading, recognizing and answering standard questions or for automatically answering and queuing e-mails for further processing by an employee.
• Self-Service Help Center and frequently asked questions (FAQs): Provide helpful information without the intervention of a company representative.

Social media marketing

Publishing posts manually is a challenging and cumbersome process, especially if you have multiple communication channels and different content. With digital marketing automation, you can publish and schedule posts much faster.

By using dedicated programs for automatic social media publishing, setting up an autoresponder, handling requests and creating analytics reports, you can increase your brand's appeal while keeping response time to a minimum.

• Identify peak timeswhere the audience is most active.
• Create in advance a Queue for contributions.
• Process requests in a specific order (by time of receipt of the request, importance, etc.).
• Answer You can use frequently recurring standard questions with automatic answers.
• Create reports and evaluate the performance of your social media channels.

Conclusion

Marketing automation services enable the use of collected data for more successful advertising and lead generation activities. They help to simplify standard processes and make more informed decisions based on statistics from your brand's emails, blogs, social media and websites.

However, digital marketing automation should not be seen as a miracle cure. It is not an option that you set up once and then forget about. Rather, it's a set of marketing technologies that, when used correctly, make the customer journey more engaging. This gives you the opportunity to focus on creative tasks and further strategic planning.