If you’re accustomed to thinking of marketing as a hands-on enterprise, it might be difficult for you to wrap your head around the idea of automating any part of it. That’s understandable. It’s your job to market your product or service, and it takes some adjustment to think about using software to handle what you’ve always done manually. To help you get to the point where you can see the benefits of automating some of your marketing efforts, let’s start by explaining what marketing automation is.

Explanation of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is an umbrella term used to describe any one of a number of tools that can be used to automate some aspect of your marketing efforts. For example, there are a number of automated marketing platforms you can access online that will allow you to enter specifications for specific, repetitive tasks. There are multiple types of software that can help you automate everything from follow-up emails, to social media postings, to lead nurturing.

The purpose of marketing automation is to ease some of the burdens of modern-day marketing. Before the internet, marketing was a simpler thing. Marketers still crafted content, but it was confined to things like print ads, direct mail, radio and television ads, and brochures and flyers. Those things took time to produce, but they would end up being used for a long period.

Today, online marketing requires a constant stream of relevant and valuable content. Customers expect to hear from their favorite brands on a regular basis. They want to see you and your company on various social media networks. Simply having a Facebook page isn’t enough. You need to create and curate content that will engage and inform your customers. What’s more, you also need to monitor what customers are saying and reply when necessary. Marketing is much more hands-on than it used to be, and it can be hard to juggle all of the tasks required.

That’s where marketing automation comes in. Not every task can be automated, but many of the most repetitive tasks can. If you’re struggling to keep up with managing email lists, posting on social media, replying to comments and online reviews, and following up with leads, then automation can be a lifesaver.

Examples of Automated Marketing

To help you understand the kinds of things that automated marketing can help you manage, let’s take a look at some examples. I will go over them very quickly here, and later chapters will discuss each option in greater detail.

Lead Generation

Every marketer knows that lead generation is essential. Without it, you’d be stuck selling to your existing customers. Customer retention matters, but you can’t grow your business without attracting new customers on a regular basis. You probably already have some kind of lead generation in place, but automating part of the process can make it a lot easier to manage.

Automated lead generation allows you to do things like assign scores to your leads based on how probable it is that they’ll buy from you. You can also use automation to more easily segment your content so that it reaches the people who are most likely to respond to it.

Email Marketing

Emails are one of the most commonly automated kinds of marketing. Without automation, you might forget to send a follow-up email to a lead who subscribes to your list. Automation makes it easy to send regular updates and offers without having to keep track of who has received each email. You can set up autoresponders and schedule them in advance, which leaves you free to focus on other things.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is one of the biggest challenges for marketers. Maintaining an effective social media presence requires ongoing engagement with customers, and that takes time. There are some parts of social media that you can’t automate, such as responding to customers’ comments and questions. The good news is that there are plenty of things you can automate. For example, you can use software to help you schedule the release of upcoming content. Facebook has a built-in scheduler for businesses and groups, which can help you to maintain a steady presence even if you’re busy doing other things.

Lead Nurturing

Another aspect of marketing that traditionally requires a significant amount of hands-on attention is lead nurturing. You’ve got a lead – someone who’s subscribed to your list or made a small initial purchase. You know they’ve got the potential to turn into a regular customer, but you have to nurture their connection to you to turn them into a repeat customer or increase their sales.

Automated lead nurturing lets you turn part of that process into a hands-off operation. There are multiple companies offering options that will help you automate things like drip marketing and follow-ups. Some of these things might be covered by automating your email responses, but emails are only one way of nurturing leads. Automating some aspects of your lead nurturing will free you up to spend more time on the things that can’t be automated.

Your job as a marketer gets more complicated as the world gets more technologically advanced. Twenty years ago you might have had only a few things to juggle – print media, telemarketing, and television, to name a few. You may still be doing some of those things, but now you also have to worry about online advertising, social media, mobile marketing, email marketing, and more. It’s a lot to handle.

Marketing automation can’t handle every aspect of marketing. It can’t conceptualize and create content. It can’t write your follow-up emails for you, and it can’t finalize a sale. What it can do, though, is takes some parts of your job and make them easier. It can eliminate some human error, and let you take a more hands-off approach to certain, repetitive parts of your job. That will free you up to spend more time doing the things that require personal attention.

More and more companies are turning to marketing automation as a way of streamlining their marketing services and saving time. As a matter of fact, there are more than eleven times as many B2B companies using marketing automation now than there were just four years ago. That’s a huge increase – and it’s only going to rise.

One area where marketing automation can help you is in creating and managing your online sales funnel. That’s what we’ll talk about next.