8 Types of Marketing Automation to Solidify Your Marketing Strategy

As a marketer, when it comes to your routine, there’s a never-ending list of marketing to-dos.

This is why marketers see a friend in marketing automation.

Even though marketing automation is not a new concept, a common myth is that its automation capabilities are used just for email marketing. Marketing automation goes way beyond that.

Let’s dig into how different types of marketing automation can add value to your marketing operations.

What is ‘marketing’ in marketing automation?

To kick start your marketing automation engine, you need to add the right marketing components, like:

• What messages do you want to send to your customers?
• What segment of your contacts do you want to target?
• What actions/behavior should trigger a send?

Your marketing automation software can present your customers with the right message at the right time. Thanks to it, you can:

• Nurture leads
• Create personalized customer experiences
• Reduce overheads
• Boost marketing productivity
• Build better customer relationships

8 Types of Marketing Automation

We’ve broken down the 8 most important types of marketing automation and how they can ease your marketing efforts. They are:

1. CRM Automation

CRM is the cornerstone of all your marketing efforts and, when it goes hand-in-hand with marketing automation, it can be your best bet to streamline tasks, generate more leads, and boost conversions. It offers a centralized place for you to quickly access customer data, such as email addresses, purchase history, and other demographics. It can help with your internal tasks as well, including lead scoring or alerting your team about new prospects. You can also see where a specific lead is in the marketing funnel and you can send out relevant content to guide that lead to conversion.

2. Social Media Marketing Automation

Social media marketing drives engagement but it can use a big chunk of your team’s time, efforts, and leave less time to create awesome stuff. With social media automation in place, it can do the heavy-lifting, like scheduling and publishing content across multiple channels easily or even automating responses. Additionally, you can even track how many website visitors found your site via your social media accounts. HootSuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social are a few social media automation tools that can help B2B marketers.

3. Advertising Automation

You can’t change your copy based on each customer’s individual actions or behavior. This is where advertising automation can help with retargeting as it automatically ramps its strategy in response to consumer behavior. For instance, if a customer visits your product webpage, advertising automation will respond by displaying your product ads on the sites they browse next. You can connect automation with any advertising tool you’re currently using, be it Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or Twitter Ads.

4. Mobile Marketing Automation

We know that the future is ‘mobile’. So, why not make your efforts mobile too. With mobile marketing automation, you can personalize marketing campaigns at scale and target mobile users more effectively. It can trigger notifications, in-app messages, custom offers, and product recommendations in real-time. Also, it can automate and trigger messages based on time or actions.

5. Marketing Automation Analytics

Marketing automation analytics unlock the power of your data. You can access insights from your campaigns without having to spend hours combing through big chunks of data. It lets you track all sorts of campaigns, including email, social media, blog posts, articles, websites, ads, and more so that you can capitalize on your strengths and create winning marketing campaigns.

6. Email Marketing Automation

Usually, prospects interact with your company several times before they become customers. This is where drip email campaigns can share useful content about your company, product, or trends in the industry to build trust and nurture a relationship with the customer. You can also use dynamic content to boost user engagement and conversions. With predefined rules, you can trigger email messages based on the actions your customers take. For instance, sending your customer a ‘welcome email’ when they sign up.

7. Lead Management Automation

Generating and managing leads is every marketer’s highest priority and lead management automation can help automate the cycle of acquiring and qualifying leads. So, once you have your lead qualification criteria set, all you have to do is set the relevant trigger for each action the customer takes so that you don’t miss out on any opportunity. For instance, you set an internal marketing notification when a prospect visits your pricing page twice and downloads an asset, so that you can get your marketers ready to nurture them.

8. Omni-channel Automation

Omni-channel marketing is about creating a unified brand experience across multiple channels. By automating omni-channel marketing processes, your marketing team can segment and tailor personalized strategies to target individuals or even define when to deploy what kind of content, so you don’t bombard your customer. Additionally, you must ensure that each channel has its own unique message, while still being tied into the brand’s core strategy.

Don’t limit the power of marketing automation to your email campaigns and embrace the aforementioned types to scale your marketing efforts and delight your customers every step of the way!

Got marketing automation on your mind? Talk to us!