Why Marketing Automation Is The Future of Digital Marketing?

Every business, irrespective of type, needs marketing to perform well in the market. Getting to know the latest trends is probably the most important job of a marketing expert. One such trend in digital marketing is marketing automation. In recent years, it has become one of the essential tools of a business. Many successful businesses credit such tools for their victory in the market.

So, in this blog, we will briefly why it is the future of digital marketing and how it benefits organizations.

What is digital marketing?

Any kind of marketing that involves the use of electronic devices and software comes under digital marketing. You must have seen ad banners on websites. It is also a digital marketing practice. Online communication platforms play a vital role in this kind of marketing.

Inbound marketing has become much more efficient due to the advent of digital marketing. You can filter your audience and attract potential customers. Take a look at the following list:

1. Email marketing.
2. Social media marketing.
3. Activity tracking.
4. Personalization of content.
5. Search Engine Optimisation.
6. Content Marketing.

All these techniques are a part of digital marketing. When combined, it gives you a powerful marketing strategy and a wider reach with a small investment.

What is marketing automation?

We listed some activities that fall in the digital marketing area.  What if you have an autonomous assistant working for you to do those activities? Well, obviously we are not referring to a human assistant. A software solution, widely known as a marketing automation tool, is a revolutionary concept in marketing.

It makes your everyday tasks simpler by automating them. For example, consider email marketing. Assume that you have a wide range of customer bases. In this case, automation can help you segment and send personalized emails to each of your customers. Similarly, the software lets you automate almost every repetitive task. It gives your marketing employees more time to focus on core activities.

Benefits of marketing automation

How does an AI-powered tool help businesses? Let us take a look at the benefits of marketing automation:

1. Improves marketing efficiency.
2. Generates more and better quality leads.
3. Enables prospect behavior tracking.
4. Facilitates coordination between sales and marketing teams.
5. Improves lead conversion rates and ROI.

How automation is the future of digital marketing?

There are many tools that make automation software useful. But, we have shortlisted the ones that pose a solid threat to the conventional marketing ways.

1. Social Media Marketing

Many people use social media nowadays. Likewise, social media is one of the most-interacted tools by potential customers. Hence, it is an opportune platform for anyone looking to market their products/services.

You need to have an efficient social media strategy to turn your viewers into paying customers. A marketing automation tool will streamline your strategy by automating the workflow.

Social media is not going out of trend for decades to come. So it is a strategic move to invest in a tool that helps you establish your social media presence.

In addition to workflow automation, you also get insights and statistics that help you refine your strategy. Through manual marketing, you cannot monitor the efficiency of your social media platform.  Whereas you can distinctly track how and where you get your site visitors from.

2. Email marketing

Ever since the introduction of email marketing, it has managed to stay on top of the formal modes of communication. There are many advantages to using email for marketing.

Marketing automation software has tools that gather crucial information from your site visitors. It leverages user data for personalization. You can create a target audience to send your emails to. Using a simple interface, you can design your email templates to create attractive content.

You can also include your recipients’ names in the tagline. People are more likely to open a mail that has their name in the first line. Imagine having to type every customer name manually. With automation by your side, you do not even have to hit the send button. It follows the workflow to send emails automatically to all your customers. You can also take a look at the email marketing strategy for further details.

3. Event marketing

What better time than the holidays to sell superhero merchandise? However, it is not very simple. You need to understand when you have to set up such a sale. It can be quite confusing for your marketing team to find a suitable time and day. When you employ automation software, it takes care of finding the best time for you to conduct your sale.

It informs you of the upcoming events that you can use to your advantage. Thus, it is a futuristic tool that helps you ascertain the future of your business. Your marketing team will have more time to tweak the marketing strategies based on the automated reports from campaigns.

4. Automated reports:

The best use of marketing automation software is generating reports. That too without human intervention. Report creation is a process that takes too much of the productive time of employees. Now, you can simply generate reports for the variables you desire using the software. It saves time and prevents any errors caused by human negligence.

Challenges in using marketing automation

Despite these tools, there are many initial challenges that you need to overcome. Let us take a look at them.

1. Underutilization:

The first challenge is that the marketing team doesn’t use the software to its full potential. Either there is not enough training or there is no time for the executive to learn about the tool.  You can set up training sessions for your employees to overcome this challenge.

2. Unable to adapt:

Most marketers are not comfortable shifting from their old practices. For example, bulk emails used to play a major role in digital marketing. Customization requires some time to set up, but after that, you don’t need to spend any additional time sending emails. Some marketers simply do not feel personalization is necessary.

3. Complications in process integration:

Marketing and the sales team always work side by side. But before establishing a sudden link by introducing the marketing automation software, you need to set up integration processes. You need to find a way to streamline the application of an automation tool between both teams. Some businesses that never had any integration experienced a negative ROI due to the sudden changes in the workplace.

Conclusion

Although there are complications in marketing automation, it proves useful in creating efficient marketing teams. With the combination of powerful tools such as email automation, it clearly is the future of digital marketing. Start making smart decisions by choosing the future of digital marketing today.