What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation broadly refers to the use of digital technologies and software to drive more efficiencies across a wide-range of repetitive, manual marketing tasks. Typical examples of marketing tasks that can be automated include social media publishing, email responding, lead generation, and even content creation.
Aside from saving marketing teams time and resources, using marketing automation software effectively enables marketers to leverage data to standardize each step of the marketing funnel and customer journey, allowing them to deliver personalized, relevant content and messaging to the right audience, at the right time. This ideally results in a better understanding of a customer’s unique challenges and needs to help nurture stronger relationships.
How do I choose the best marketing automation software for my team?
Marketing automation solutions come in all shapes and sizes, and while many platforms promote themselves as an “all-in-one” solution, any given solution will inevitably have its specialty—whether that’s content management, digital asset management, customer relationship management, analytics, etc.
Therefore, when considering marketing automation platforms, a good start is to ask yourself: what does my business want to achieve with the technology, and what results do I expect? And of course: what’s my budget? To get a better overview of different marketing automation providers on the market and the features they provide, it’s recommended to leverage comparison sites such as G2 and Capterra.
If you need some resources on digital technologies essential to modern marketing and digital experience, check out our guide on The Core Four: Essential Marketing Technologies.
