If I'm right, you like to use the live chatbots to provide real-time customer service, scheduler tools to post social media content across networks or CRMs to generate and nurture leads. How do you see them helping you build, manage, and monitor your digital marketing campaigns in real-time with the core purpose of increasing revenue and refining workflows?
This is just a tip of the iceberg of how AI-enabled technologies are pervading across multiple digital touchpoints! Artificial intelligence has become so pervasive in the digital world that there are even a whole bunch of different uses and benefits associated with it.
With the industry of digital marketing becoming more advanced with each year, the way in which businesses operate will soon change. The popular use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the workplace forever, especially when it comes to running a business digitally. But how exactly does artificial intelligence influence digital marketing and what can you do with AI?
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a technique for automating repetitive or complicated tasks. For example, if you're selling digital products on your website, and you have the process of creating sales pages written down in a manual process, you can use marketing automation to create these pages automatically, based on rules and conditions that you create in a software program.
An AI media library automatically finds the right photos and videos for your website. AI marketing tools can automate your email campaigns, landing pages, webinar tools, and more. AI-powered websites can do a lot of the data entry work for you.
Myths about Marketing Automation
Here are three myths I see. They're only for enterprises, for instance. It originated as a form of enterprise marketing, however, it has become accessible to a wide range of businesses of every size.
Second, many people consider marketing automation a complicated and difficult process. Instead, it is relatively simple. Marketers can deliver immediate ROI using the best marketing automation software.
The third myth is that marketers believe they must have their entire marketing strategy figured out before implementing marketing automation. With market automation, you can scale your business as it grows. Your ROI can be clearly seen with the right solution, and you can scale your business as it grows.
How Automation to Impact Digital Marketing
Automation is not all about replacing people; it's all about reducing manual work. Instead of hiring someone to manage challenging marketing dynamics in an ever-changing business environment, you can leverage the power of marketing automation tools, such as HubSpot, Salesforce, to name just a few, to effectively manage ROI pressures.
The core functionality of any B2B marketing automation platform is email marketing, but as tools in this area are constantly evolving, they can also be used for integrated digital marketing that allows for campaign development, multi-channel data capture, and ROI reporting and analysis.
Benefits & Challenges of B2B Marketing Automation
No matter how sophisticated or large your business is, marketing automation can help you:
- Increasing marketing efficiency and improving ROI
- Gaining a deeper understanding of ROI and demonstrating marketing ROI
- Monitoring and evaluating performance in order to identify what works and what doesn't
- Increasing the ability to generate more leads and more importantly, more highly qualified leads
- Marketing segmentation and personalization enhanced
- Enhancing productivity as a whole
- Increasing the quality of customer service
- Understand the buyer's journey and what prospects are doing
- Increasing lead nurturing and conversions
- Marketing and sales are more aligned
In order to talk about the benefits, we must also address some of the challenges that may arise from using your marketing automation platform.
You may face challenges that vary by platform and by user, but generally, some of the most common challenges are the following:
- There may be resistance to marketing automation among marketing and/or sales teams
- Getting used to it can be tough with a steep learning curve
- Weak onboarding and amplification of time taken to set-up and deploy the platform for the user's specific requirements lacks full utilization of all features
Tips to Maximize Marketing Automation
See below for tips on how to use your marketing automation platform to its full potential.
Market Segmentation
B2B market segmentation lets you send targeted messages and content to your contacts based on their engagement and interests. You will see a higher open rate, a higher engagement rate, and a smooth conversion from prospects to customers through email marketing.
You will still have opportunities to do business with them further down the line if they turn to you when they need assistance, even if they do not become your customers right away.
Repetitive Tasks Streamlined
Automating repetitive tasks is the best option. Automation will not only save you time, but it will often result in jobs being done much better than by a human. This means your marketing automation platform is much more efficient and faster without human error. Consider automating CRM updates, trigger-based emails, and nurturing prospects based on their personas.
Besides automating repetitive tasks in your marketing technology stack, you should also think about integrating your other platforms.
Automated Lead Scoring and Notification
When combined with lead scoring, marketing automation is incredibly powerful. Especially when a sales cycle is long, assigning lead scores will help you determine who, when, and how to follow up with each client. Market automation can inform you who to follow up with and when it is most appropriate based on various indicators, including engagement with messaging, visits to your website, behavior on the site, etc.
Monitoring & Analysis to Cut Churn
You can easily identify prospects or leads who are losing interest or those who do not renew subscriptions or purchase further goods or services by monitoring data and gathering insights from your marketing automation platform. You can identify gaps in your response to customer needs and, therefore, reduce churn rates with these insights.
Workflow Automation
Automating your marketing also means building workflows, which can help you in many areas of digital marketing, from lead nurturing to customer retention.
Social Media Management
One of the obvious benefits of marketing automation is scheduling social media posts in advance, analyzing the performance of the posts, and strategizing future posts.
What Can’t Be Automated in Marketing?
When it comes to marketing, things that can't be automated are often the things you don't want to automate. Art, design, and marketing strategy require human creativity and critical thinking ability that cannot be automated.
How Will Marketing Automation Change in the Future?
As new automations replace more processes and use more advanced tech, the future of marketing automation is here. In the data analysis role, advancements such as machine learning and artificial intelligence can assist further in helping marketers develop better campaigns.
It may be possible to leverage this AI to forecast trends and create campaigns based on informed predictions from data in the future, though this is still some time away.
Automation is also transforming customer service roles. It's no secret that automated phone trees exist, but this is being taken a step further via things like web chatbots that greet your clients and help them find what they're looking for.
The need for marketing automation technology is crucial for companies that haven't yet made the investment, since those that use automation tend to outperform the competition.
Final Words
Automating marketing campaigns and processes is emerging as a vital part of digital marketing, reducing redundancy and letting data drive campaigns and strategies. That said, you're missing out on a huge lead generation boom that your competitors have already tapped into.
