These are the Goals of Automation in Marketing

1. What does automation mean?
2. What different types of automation are there?
3. What goals does automation pursue in marketing?
4. How can I automate in marketing?
5. These tools can support you in marketing automation
6. Conclusion

Imagine you are the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) in a retail company and you want to reach a targeted niche audience in the international market. You are faced with the challenge of staying known and especially relevant in a rapidly changing digital landscape. Conventional marketing approaches do not show the desired results here, as consumers increasingly expect personalized and timely interaction. In order for you to succeed in a personalized shopping experience and to create unique experiences for large target groups, you must deal with marketing automation.

To make the whole thing more vivid, imagine customers were CDs. Different music is stored on each CD, in different quality. If you have ever burned CDs yourself, you know what I am talking about.

EY Data Journey

Now you want to sort them and put as many as possible into a marketing drawer. You quickly realize that this is only possible to a limited extent. Some CDs fit in many drawers and some, due to lack of information, fit in none. The same applies to customers and suitable marketing activities.

Marketing automation supports the implementation of personalization with a data-based approach on a large scale. What exactly is behind it and how it is implemented, you will find out in this article.

What does automation mean?

In the given context, automation refers to the use of automated processes, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other technologies to optimize and simplify various tasks in marketing. In short: Marketing that always works - even when you are not doing it.

The following specific aspects stand out in marketing automation:

• Data analysis and 360° customer view:The demand is great to bring fragmented customer data together at one central location in order to provide the best possible decision support for marketing activities in real time. The customer data flowing into the company is used, automatically enriched with inventory data and refined. This prevents your customers from appearing multiple times in your database, even if they move with different identifiers on the channels. The 360° customer profile ideally improves with every customer interaction and thus also the degree of personalization.
• Personalized marketing messages: To enable effective communication and address of customers, the balance between personalization and intrusiveness cannot be ignored. Here, a distinction is made between indirect and direct personalization. Customized Landing pages are an example of indirect personalization, which use the browsing behavior of users. Direct personalization is used by targeted marketing opt-in opportunities, here users decide for themselves which data they want to share. The independent collection of first-hand data on their own marketing and sales channels is essential for companies in order to continue to leverage competitive advantages in the future.
• Scalability: To make the personalized marketing messages flexible and keep up with the increasing demands of the market, scalability plays a crucial role. Thanks to automations, for example, campaigns can easily be expanded to new markets or new channels without increased resources. Even if new business opportunities arise for the company or the customer base grows, the automation can quickly be adapted and scaled.
• Intelligent budget planning:Budgets can no longer be planned based on the previous year's campaigns, decisions must usually be made quickly and situationally. This cannot be done by a person and that's why there are intelligent tools that take over.

What different types of automation are there? 

There are different types of automation that are used in different industries and application areas. In addition to marketing automation, there is also sales automation, which includes Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Self-service portals and Chatbot tools belong to customer service automation and in the Human Resource (HR) field, processes like Application management and onboarding can be easily automated.

What goals does automation pursue in marketing?

Depending on the customer environment in which a company operates, the goals can vary greatly. Regardless of B2B, B2C and D2C, marketing automation basically pursues the following three goals:

• Increasing marketing efficiency: Automation allows targeted marketing campaigns to be created and their effectiveness to be monitored in real time. Specifically, this means that customer contact points across channels and campaigns can be measured and the data automatically linked and unified. This way, you can quickly see which approaches worked best and which need to be adjusted.
• Reduction of manual tasks: Higher efficiency through reduced manual tasks is an obvious goal. In particular, automation of routine tasks creates more freedom for more strategic tasks within the company. This does not mean replacing people with machines, but rather critically questioning how employees can benefit from automated workflows, for example, a chatbot in customer service can preselect inquiries and then pass them on to the appropriate employees, who can not only take more time for the customers, but can also place targeted cross and upselling.
• Lead Management: In addition to known customers, anonymous visitors should also be addressed. So-called,Lead Nurturing – processes are automated with content that is based on personas and the respective customer journey phase. This makes it easy to play out suitable content and identify potential buyers long before they generate sales at the end of the Customer Journey.

In conclusion, it's about addressing the relevant customers at the right moment through the preferred channel with the right products and using data as effectively as possible with little manual effort.

How can I automate in marketing? 

Before it comes to tool selection, step 1 is clear goal setting. Define clear marketing goals that you want to achieve through automation. After that, it's about investing in the right tools that support your goals. With the right tools, you can then use automation to define target groups based on customer behavior, preferences and other demographic characteristics.

Email and social media automation is a quick win. Lead scoring models help verify and optimize the automated campaigns, and then only deal with relevant customers.

A crucial component is A/B testing to compare different approaches. It's fine to experiment here to maximize effectiveness.

Remember that automation does not mean losing the human touch. It's about automating repetitive tasks and using data efficiently to save time and space for creative strategies and human interactions.

Automated marketing will not take place in the future without human quality management and monitoring.

These tools can support you in marketing automation

The world of Marketing Automation Tools is big and it's no surprise that the MarTech landscape is constantly growing. The 2023 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic currently lists more than 11,000 tools. If you have some time, feel free to inform yourself on the interactive MarTech Map. You can get a small preview here:

Marketo is a lead management and marketing automation tool by Adobe that acts as a link between marketing and sales. With robust lead management features, it enables companies to capture, nurture and qualify leads across multiple channels. By automating lead management processes, businesses can ensure that leads are effectively managed and passed on to sales teams at the right time, leading to improved conversion rates.

Emarsys sees itself as an "Omnichannel Customer Engagement Platform" and was taken over by SAP in 2020. By extending the portfolios in the customer experience area through Emarsys, SAP enables their customers to have a highly personalized contact with end-customers in real time.

The Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing platform by Salesforce. It includes tools for email marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing, online advertising and marketing automation. With the Marketing Cloud, companies get a unified view of the customer. On this basis, they can create personalized omnichannel customer journeys.

If you want to find out which marketing automation software fits best, visit this Tool-Talk Article. There you will learn whether a Best-of-Breed approach or an all-in-one solution would be suitable for you.

Conclusion

In summary, marketing automation has had a significant impact on efficiency, personalization and the success of marketing activities. Especially, but not only for CMOs, marketing automation has become an indispensable tool to remain competitive in the modern, fast-paced business world. Through the right tool implementation, companies can achieve their marketing goals more effectively and at the same time create an improved customer experience.