Marketing Automation

Demystify marketing automation

The term "marketing automation" may sound intimidating thanks to misleading and hyperbolic language used by legacy solution providers who offer pricey software.

But we're going to set the record straight.

This article will demystify marketing automation and demonstrate how you can take advantage of it to reduce your marketing load.

What is marketing automation?

As the term suggests, marketing automation involves automating marketing efforts. From simple tasks like publishing a post on your social media channels to executing a sequence of multichannel campaigns with few or almost zero inputs, there's a wide range of practices that marketing automation can help streamline.

Why do you need marketing automation?

By automating repetitive work like sending follow-up emails or posting content on social channels, marketers can get more time to focus on meaningful work like writing copy for web pages or analysing campaign reports that require critical thinking and judgment skills.

Furthermore, when businesses scale, their audiences often grow exponentially. Marketing automation can enable marketers to personalise campaigns on a massive scale—without compromising the individual attention delivered to customers in the initial stages of their business.

A step-by-step approach to starting your marketing automation

1. Identify the key areas that could benefit from marketing automation

Ask your digital marketing team what they do every day at work. Their answers could be writing content, sending emails, engaging with followers on social media, hosting webinars, surveying customers, and building reports.

Distinguish the activities that require human skills like critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and empathy from those where software can do the work without any human input.

Here is a list of things that you can and cannot automate in marketing. Please note that this list is not exhaustive. Use this to determine which areas of your business could benefit from automation.

Self-Help Action

Using the ideas from the table, prepare a list of marketing tasks that can be automated and validate it with your marketing team. This is the first and most critical step, so please take your time to brainstorm and generate the right list.

Channel	Tasks suitable for automation	Requires Human Input
Web Pages	Display dynamic pages/content for visitors based on their previous interactions. Showing pop-up forms or banners for select users	Writing content for web pages/blogs Designing graphics/elements SEO and technical work
Emails	Scheduling a single message or sequence of email campaigns Auto-responding to generic queries A/B testing and sending superior versions Transactional or triggered emails	Understanding and segmenting the audience list Writing copies for emails and subject lines
Webinars/Events	Scheduling shows on hosting platforms Sending invitation links to the audience Reminding the audience through emails and SMS Engaging in real-time Getting feedback through surveys Sending meeting recordings	Preparing content for shows Presenting and speaking at shows Asking contextual questions and engaging with attendees face-to-face
Surveys	Sending surveys to relevant target audiences Acknowledging survey participants after receiving responses Reminding non-participants to fill out surveys before the expiration Measuring results	Preparing questions for surveys Designing survey themes and layouts Studying results to make decisions
Social Media	Identifying points of high audience engagement and publishing the post on social channels Responding to generic queries on comments and direct messages Tracking and reporting engagement rates	Writing and designing posts for social media. Engaging directly with followers
Measurement or marketing analytics	Tracking and reporting campaign performance Updating marketers with live status	Examining reports to make informed decisions and creating more data-driven campaigns

Once you've identified which tasks you can effectively automate, calculate how many hours per day your team spends on those activities.

You have three members on your marketing team: Eva, Adam, and Olivia.

Eva spends one hour per day sending follow-up emails, Adam spends two hours per day responding to social media followers when canned responses could do the job, and Olivia spends three hours per day just building reports and sharing them internally.

All of that work is equivalent to six hours per day. If the average wage for each team member is £30 per hour, you could save £180 per day just by automating three areas of marketing. Imagine how much you could save and grow when you leverage marketing automation in all possible areas.

Multiply the hours saved per month with hourly wages to estimate your budget for investing in a marketing automation solution.

In the above case, you could save more than £3,960 per month by using a marketing automation platform, so your investment in marketing automation software should be below £3,960 to have a positive ROI.

2. Quantify your findings

3. Evaluate different solutions

After defining your potential use cases for marketing automation and having a clear investment budget, evaluate multiple solution providers to find the perfect one that satisfies all your criteria.

If your brand is omnichannel, you may consider using a unified marketing platform with automation features to automate your multichannel campaigns.

Zoho Marketing Plus is a unified marketing platform where you can automate your marketing activities end-to-end across channels like emails, social media, webinars, surveys, analytics, and more. This also enables your marketing team to manage all marketing activities from one place without switching through multiple tools.

If you're considering Zoho Marketing Plus, you can try it for free for 30 days.

We also recommend that you evaluate multiple vendors that offer free trials so you can compare and find the right solution to meet your automation needs.

Understanding workflows and automating the entire campaign in one stretch can be challenging and error-prone when getting started with marketing automation.

The best way to start is to focus on one channel or campaign at a time. After getting a grasp on the platform, set multiple workflows and automate campaigns across all marketing channels.

Using Zoho Marketing Plus, you can create automated marketing campaigns from hundreds of pre-existing templates or drag-and-drop options, so you spend less time setting up workflows and more time strategizing the campaigns and understanding how the automation works for your business.

4. Start with a simple automation activity

5. Measure the results

Once you finish executing your first automated campaign, it's crucial to examine the results and compare them with manually launched campaigns to measure any progress made through automation versus your manual efforts.

Suppose your automated campaign outperformed the manual campaign; congratulations! You've done a great job! Keep it up.

If the results are not promising, no worries—there could be two possible reasons, and we can fix that.

Audience and message - Did you target the right audience? If so, was the messaging compelling enough to make them resonate with your brand?
Workflow and strategy - Was the workflow executed without any relays? If so, evaluate your current strategy and experiment with a new one for the next campaign.

Patience is the key to success in marketing, and marketing automation is no exception. Keep trying new ideas and testing different methods, and eventually, you'll figure out what works best for you.

Work less, save more time, and enhance efficiency with marketing automation.

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the Bottom Line

This is an article written by Bala Krishnan of Zoho Corp. We are an authorised reseller and would love to help you with your journey of marketing automation!

If you are looking for a marketing agency to help you develop a strong marketing strategy, you’ve come to the right place.