Complete Step-by-Step Marketing Automation Guide For Beginners 2024

Marketing is a vast field consisting of various activities. Now, there are certain activities like social media marketing, email marketing, launching ad campaigns, etc., which can be very time-consuming, unless optimized with the help of a marketing automation guide. Most of the time, major tasks are repetitive, there is a need to perform the same tasks over and over again. These tasks can result in ineffective management and can sometimes lead to failure of your marketing effort. This can result in lower ROI and reduced customer engagement. In such cases, the utilization of a marketing automation guide can help significantly. Marketing Automation is a mechanism that regulates retiling practice and multi-functional operations over numerous channels as a matter of course. In this marketing automation guide, We’ll learn about the importance of automation, the benefits of using marketing automation, how marketing automation works, how marketing automation can be used in small businesses, different marketing automation tools, and marketing automation implementation and strategies with this marketing automation guide. Let’s dive right into our marketing automation guide…

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a technology that helps companies in managing their marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically. With marketing automation, B2B companies can target prospective customers easily with automated messages across email, web, social, and text.

Importance of Marketing Automation:

1. Time-saving:

You can easily schedule your campaigns ahead of time with the help of marketing automation tools. This results in you can use your working hours productively by putting more focus on your other projects. Marketing automation systems have the added advantage of being able to schedule different posts for different audiences. Marketing automation can help you save a lot of time. You can schedule social media posts, email marketing campaigns, client appointments, etc.

2. Increases productivity:

Marketing automation helps your team perform repetitive tasks. Which gives them sufficient time to brainstorm new ideas and boost productivity in other areas. Moreover, doing the same tasks over and over again will lead your team to lose interest and hence lose productivity. If you automate tedious tasks by scheduling them in advance. Your marketing team can focus on more important tasks like planning and decision-making.

3. Offers a consistent brand experience:

Marketing automation tools can help your business have a consistent brand experience. There is no scope for human error if the automation is done correctly. Everything is timed to perfection. All your marketing campaigns will be in one place and this will ensure that your brand’s tone of voice remains consistent throughout your marketing efforts.

4. Marketing automation is data-driven:

The marketing environment is ever-changing and evolving, hence brands need to adapt to the changing circumstances. This poses a dire need to have data-backed processes. Marketing automation ensures that all processes are backed by data and are easily measurable and easy to adapt. A good marketing automation tool will help you have access to KPIs critical to growth.

5. Personalization:

With the help of automation, it is easier for you to create a unique experience for each one of your customers. It will increase engagement and boost your sales. Marketing automation can offer highly tailored marketing communications which makes marketing automation the right solution for your marketing problems.

6. Improved ROI:

With the help of marketing automation, companies can target their customers more specifically. Marketing automation can enable you to use your marketing to spend efficiently, and effectively and helps in putting your efforts in the right direction. In today’s age, All your marketing efforts should be based on ROI.  Marketing automation software is the best way to keep track of and measure the impact of your efforts. It can help you to improve your marketing and sales communications with a business-growth mindset. According to SharpSpring State of Marketing Automation for Agencies (2017), “45% of agencies rely on marketing automation platforms to show ROI, and 42% use marketing automation to measure performance.”

10 Key Benefits Of Marketing Automation:

There are many benefits of marketing automation platforms for B2B marketers at companies of all sizes. B2B marketers face a lot of challenges like market dynamics and pressure of increasing ROI, So when faced with these kinds of challenges, marketers can gain these benefits with the use of a marketing automation platform:

• Increased marketing efficiency. Marketing automation programs can help in increasing marketing efficiency by automating, time-consuming and manual tasks.
• Enhanced ability to generate better-qualified leads. Automation can help in generating and identifying qualified sales leads.
• Better alignment of sales and marketing goals. Automation can help you to have better alignment between sales and marketing goals as other less important and time-consuming tasks are taken care of by automation.
• Improving customer experience: Automation can help improve customer experience as customers will receive automated responses to help them solve their queries instantly. This way, the customer’s time for waiting for a response and hence will improve his experience.
• Improved lead conversion and ROI: Marketing automation will help you reduce the need to employ staff for doing repetitive and low-impact tasks. This way you can streamline your marketing team and cut off extra costs. Your marketing team will be able to freely focus on the high-impact tasks that are more valuable to your organization. This improves the ROI of your money invested in your employees.
• Empowering your team to improve results: As we said earlier marketing automation campaigns are data-driven, we can use the results from this data and analyze how our campaigns are performing. Analyzing performance can help you identify the faults in your automation, as well as the customer’s experience. These things can serve as feedback and help your marketing team in improving results.
• Increasing customer lifetime value: Marketing isn’t all about attracting new customers but also retaining the existing ones and keeping them happy and satisfied. A key to boosting revenue is keeping your existing customers happy and satisfied and encouraging them to spend more with your brand. Automation can help in increasing customer lifetime value through retention and loyalty strategies. Automation can help in automating responses, review requests and feedback, sending exclusive offers, and such. This can help in improving your retention rate by keeping your existing customers engaged.

• Creating space for strategic thinking: Marketing automation helps you free up space for strategic thinking by minimizing the time for repetitive and low-impact tasks. It can help free up time for your team which would otherwise be spent in performing less important tasks. It can help keep their minds fresh and aid in activating their creative skills, and strategic thinking, and hence, they will be able to deliver more and better results.

Apart from these benefits, marketing automation features can also include:

• Personalizing communications with all your prospective and existing customers.
• Nurturing leads without much extra effort.
• Generating leads through landing pages and lead capture forms
• Tracking milestones that are important to your business
• Helps in boosting conversions by targeting customers based on data.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

Companies have to do a lot of tasks and some of them are monotonous, time-consuming, and many times, repetitive, for example, follow-ups, reminders, reporting, and drafting emails. The above-mentioned exercises aren’t challenging however they puzzle you against essential things to be done that can have a significant bounce at the crux. These kinds of tasks can distract you from more important and meaningful tasks. With the help of marketing automation, you can enable automation on these kinds of tasks that are otherwise done manually. This can help the management in cutting out the distractions and put their full attention on other important tasks. You can set up automation for once and then forget about them, as once automated, it would not require constant attention from your end. How does Marketing Automation work? Marketing Automation circulates peculiar data to live, depending on performance and knowledge, with the intention of termination of further marketing. Examples include :

• You drop an email encouraging unique leads to visit a webinar regarding your outcome.
• Leads are required to fill up an entry form to attend the seminar. Everyone who RSVPs yes is deliberately filtered into a unique enumerated e-mail (this will take place in the Market Automation tool).
• Everyone in that enumeration usually started to secure an email. It arouses support by a Thank You mail to every person who showed up for the webinar. Subsequently, within a few days, they got an attachment to download a narration on an equivalent thesis.
• Eventually, when leads download the recorded information they are spontaneously forwarding the data to the selling unit so that they can pursue them (because these leads are experienced enough and declining buying operations).

How Can Marketing Automation Be Used in Small Business?

Marketing Automation is not restricted to organizations with heavy funds or limitless records of clients. It is capable of building a dynamic influence on organizations of all categories, particularly micro-businesses that are effectively and efficiently impoverished you've seen in this marketing automation guide. Here are some methods of Marketing Automation Strategies that can be used in micro businesses: Builds relationships: Recent clients hardly shop from a business when they initially studied a concerned product or service. Thus, Marketing Automation, such as customized emails is vital to intensify and nurture that tie-up. By assisting your customers to master your concerned product and goal over daily and helpful emails, you will manage to boost and multiply in modifying prices. Helps you follow up on potential sales: Follow-up emails addressed to the audience who visit your website, abandon their wagon, or additionally aid your customer’s inquiry can benefit in the entire action. Alternative Marketing Automation attributes, such as follow-up reminders, freeze your selling unit on top of the most competent leads. Tracks the customer journey: With marketing automation, you will be capable of recording their exploration and then observing moderately, how long it takes a customer to purchase from your website, what instructions they need to shop, and what purchasing mechanism is leading to the highest conversion.]

Marketing Automation and Sales

Marketing automation is helpful in a customer's journey from beginning to end, from developing an understanding to encouraging a determined user base. Exclusively, it is influential in the modification stage i.e. converting rates stage, assisting you in raising funds. Here are three approaches to Marketing Automation that can help in promoting sales : Generate leads: Landing pages are an essential means in your Marketing Automation stock. When coupled with gated content and auto-responder emails, they design an automated chamber that captures unique leads and begins right away to promote them. Customize campaigns: Emails and landing pages may give support to create new leads, regulate how professional those leads are, and recycle information like website response to excel development of those leads regarding conversion. Take advantage of triggers: Trigger emails are a new way of Marketing Automation that strikes the mailbox of customers in the early hours like immediately after they leave the cart or finish a free trial. When combined with awards and upsells, they behave as an effective nudge to place orders. By automating your campaigns, these tasks will continue to run in the background, while you focus your attention on bigger projects. Here are some of the things marketing automation allows you to do more effectively:

• Email marketing
• Landing page creation
• Cross-channel marketing campaigns
• Lead generation
• Segmentation
• Lead nurturing and scoring
• Cross-sell and up-sell
• Retention
• Measuring ROI
• Website personalization

What are marketing automation tools?

Choosing the right marketing automation software is a major and complex decision, and should be taken with great care and precision. It shouldn’t be taken lightly or made in haste. Your choice of marketing automation will directly impact your business’s performance and growth... Here are some of the top marketing automation tools available:-

1. Keap/ Infusionsoft
2. HubSpot
3. Klaviyo
4. Mailchimp

1. MARKETO: Marketo is a software-as-a-service(SaaS) marketing automation platform designed to help businesses assess and automate marketing tasks through digital channels. Once Lori Wizdo said “Systems like Marketo are essential to the modern B2B marketer because B2B buyers are increasingly self-directed and control their buying cycle more than vendors control the selling cycle” Some of the Marketo software features are – lead management, email marketing, consumer marketing, lead scoring, web activity tracking, CRM integration, digital ads, lead nurturing, and many more… 2. HUBSPOT: HubSpot is an American developer and marketer of inbound marketing software, sales tools, and customer service systems. This software provides tools for social media, web analytics, landing pages, SEO, content management, and customer support. HubSpot also offers services such as templates, extensions, consulting services, and an online resource academy for learning inbound marketing and certification programs. Recently, in November 2019, HubSpot acquired PieSync, a customer data synchronization platform. 3. SALESFUSION: Salesfusion is a marketing automation software that is designed to help B2B companies align marketing and sales to generate more and more revenues. This software eliminates the divide between sales and marketing. With Salesfusion’s approach, you create a unified funnel to gain clear visibility into the buyer's journey and set the sales and marketing efforts. Salesfusion addresses problems with CRM-style relational databases and native integration to the leading CRM platforms. Some of Salesfusion’s features are- campaign management, lead capture and scoring, social marketing, website visitor tracking, CRM connection, email marketing, and many more. 4. COMMUNICATOR: CommuniGator is a provider of digital marketing software and services, specializing in email marketing, online brochures, surveys, and event management. Beyond software, it offers support, consultancy, HTML design, and campaign management services. These are the names of such services provided by CommuniGator- strategic digital marketing planning, copywriting, and content delivery, email marketing seminars, data sourcing and segmentation services, etc.

Marketing automation implementation and strategy

Marketing Automation Implementation:

1. Study top performers in your market.  There are top performers and leaders in almost every industry. But they are leaders for some reason. They can exploit new technologies effectively. As they are high performers in the market. So, probably they use marketing automation. The basic things you have to study about them are:-

• How do they approach marketing automation?
• How Often do they send emails to their leads?
• How do they structure their content?
• What kind of content do they send to their prospects?

Another option is you hire teachers or these leaders to teach you how to use this marketing automation. 2. Use dynamic content to engage your customers. To get the best results out of any automated marketing tool,  you must have dynamic content. Dynamic content is also referred to as "ADAPTIVE CONTENT", smart content is the term for the aspects of a website, ads, or email body that change based on activities or past behavior of the viewer. One way to understand users’ and customer’s past behavior and interests is to embrace content marketing fully and start building trust with your customers. According to some reports 47% of customers viewed and engaged with 3-5 pieces of content before interacting. That is why you should not only create content but great and dynamic content. No wonder 96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders. If you gather enough data about your leads, it’s a lot easier to convince and engage them with your content. 3. Choose smarter software In today's time, Most people have a mindset that to keep up with modern marketing automation, they’ll need all of the latest software, but the reality is that you need the right software, not just the newest products. Most of the time, it happens that sticking with your old programs that do their job well will be beneficial for the company. If we look a little closer at the market, we'll find that old software is still trending and is one of the top programs around, new programs offer excellent marketing tools and powerful integration, you don’t need to ditch your old software just because it seems out of date. 4. Automate team collaborations. The communication gap is one of the most occurring problems in the workplace. Many times, It happens that departments are unable to get information across to other departments. This problem even sounds worse when you have customers around. According to a survey, 86% of the employees believed that a lack of collaboration was responsible for their workplace failures. Today, with the use of automated marketing tools, you can make all the information about a customer available to every department Which helps every department and team to interact with their customers.

Marketing automation strategy:

1. Create a plan.  To implement anything, all you need is a great plan. Planning simply means "thinking before doing". Choosing marketing automation is a complex decision to make. So, it's important to keep your eyes on every possible aspect. And know your needs that you want to do with this. Some questions that should be considered while planning:-

• information from the previous program?
• When do you want to push your first campaign?
• Do you need agency assistance?

2. Know your goals  Understanding your goals and expectations with your program is one of the toughest and most important decisions to make. In this early stage, you should consider all the aspects and then jump to any decision because it will directly reflect on your work. 3. Educate your team Choosing and providing education to your team is a must. Every member of the team should know their roles and responsibilities properly. All have to be software-friendly also. Because without team collaboration you will always invite failures to yourself. And make an environment at your workplace where everyone feels free to communicate and adapt to new things in the coming future. 4. Collect data and choose metrics After making your team ready, the collection of data and choosing the correct metrics is the next step. Always try to maintain your key data/information very precisely so you can use it for future purposes. Losing information may lead to future failures or inefficiency in your work. 5. Develop campaigns. After collecting data and choosing the right metrics, the next step is to develop effective campaigns. Campaigns should be developed with great care and focus. Automation can be done for tasks that are otherwise too time-consuming or tedious if done. This way marketing automation can help us in many ways, by automating repetitive tasks, boosting ROI and supporting lead generation, keeping customers happy and satisfied.