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Most people don't get into marketing because they're passionate about tracking clicks. At its heart, the art of marketing is about creativity, ingenuity, and human connection.
But it can't be all about colourful designs and great content. There's a lot of mundane work which needs to happen if campaigns are going to get anywhere. This is where a lot of marketers fall down. Many of us are bright, enthusiastic ideas people, but show us a spreadsheet and we wilt. Analysing data? Tracking interactions? Lead scoring? Please, no.
Enter marketing automation software. While it can't do everything for you, it can take on an awful lot of the donkey work. Giving the more repetitive, process-driven tasks of marketing to software frees up human marketers to do more of what they do best: connect creatively with customers.
How marketing automation software helps
- It can streamline your marketing by organising campaigns and content under tags, timescales and so on.
- It can quickly pick up on patterns, for example of customer and content interaction, and flag interesting or problematic things for your attention.
- It can track interaction with your content, which helps with a number of marketing essentials, including customer segmentation and lead scoring.
- It can help marketers create a smooth, intuitive flow, guiding customers through their journey.
- It can gather, present, and to a certain extent analyse data.
- It can pipe particular data and processes through to the relevant departments quickly and efficiently, ensuring a speedy resolution for both customer and company.
- It can help with nurturing leads and ensuring your content is being seen by the right people at the right time.
All in all, it's a pretty useful thing. A necessary thing, in fact, if you do a large amount of marketing online. Tracking customer interactions, gathering data, and getting content seen by the right prospects would be a stunningly laborious task without automation.
Having said that, it's a mistake to remove the human element entirely. Marketing automation software works at its best with a little guidance. Let it do the repetitive, data-gathering work, but you need to be telling it what data to gather, and then using that data in the right ways.
How to optimise your use of it
- Revisit your strategy before automating any process. This will ensure the automation you set up is on the same page as your overall marketing tactics, messaging, and goals.
- Use it to enhance rather than replace communications. Marketing software enables you to reach more people than would otherwise be the case. It's good at finding people. But relying on it to communicate effectively with those people is not always a wise strategy. Keep the human element, and emphasise personalised communications over flat, automated messaging.
- Use your software to nurture customers as well as to sell. Automation is a great way to keep checking in with current customers, or to manage customer journeys. But ensure the software is providing access points for human communication, not acting as a stand-in for that communication.
- Use the data to gain valuable insights. Marketing automation software is at its best when presenting you with data on customer interactions and behaviours. But it's not enough just to glance over the patterns and leave the machines to it. From enhancing your lead scoring activities to optimising content creation, the information the software provides can improve your marketing no end. But you need to pay attention to the data and put its insights to work.
