Marketing can be quite a stressful business. The pressure to perform, increasing competition and constant changes in the marketplace can cause headaches. But there is a way is to reduce that stress while increasing the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. In this blog, Sebastiaan de Ruiter talks about the role of marketing automation.

Marketing automation according to Gartner

Gartner defines marketing automation as "software that helps marketers with customer segmentation, customer data management and campaign management. It enables marketers to offer real-time, targeted, data-based campaigns, along with improved efficiency and productivity. First, let's see what that software can help you with then.

Increase efficiency

For starters, marketing automation can help you increase your efficiency. If you can do a good number of your marketing tasks faster and easier, it saves a lot of stress. At least, it did for me. All those emails you have to draft and send, the a/b testing of campaign after campaign, how wonderful if that could be done automatically?

Improve personalization

Another area in which marketing automation can help you tremendously is personalization. We all know that building a strong relationship with your target audience is crucial these days. This becomes a lot easier if you can automatically collect and analyze data with the right tooling. In turn, you can use that to tailor new content. A task that is impossible to do manually and based on your own insights.

Gain more insight

Using marketing automation tools also leads to more measurable results. Set clear goals in advance. What do you want? More leads? More traffic to your website? A higher ranking in Google? Thanks to marketingautomation, you can quickly see what actions your leads are taking and how they respond to your campaigns. Try doing that without software.

Applications of marketing automation

There are several applications of marketing automation, and which ones are best for you depends on your organization and your goals.

• Email Marketing

E-mail marketing is probably the most well-known application of marketing automation. There are plenty of platforms to automate your e-mail marketing. Interested parties can subscribe and unsubscribe themselves, you can send campaigns very efficiently and track who clicked where and who unsubscribed. The days of manually drafting emails in Outlook and then combining them with Excel lists of contacts are long gone. At least, those who feel like it can still do it that way, of course, but whether you're running an effective email campaign then? I venture to doubt it.

• Lead Generation

Lead generation today is mainly grafted onto online methods. It's all about collecting - legitimately - contact information from leads. You used to grab the Yellow Pages, call as many companies as you could and ask to speak to the marketing manager. That's unthinkable today. You have to entice potential customers online to come forward at some point. Without automation, that's an almost impossible task. Ok, the French fry shop on the corner can still sell some fries to spontaneous passersby, but in the world of B2B I wouldn't hope too hard for that.

• Social media marketing

Social media marketing is a challenge in itself. With all the different platforms you have to keep up with and all the comments you have to respond to, your courage can sometimes get the better of you. Especially for larger organizations, it is impossible to manage this manually anymore. Fortunately - for you as a business owner - there are forms of automation that ensure the right, personalized content is posted in the right place at the right time.

Want to know more about our solutions?

Marketingautomation provides solutions for increased efficiency, better personalization and more measurability in marketing campaigns. It enables us to communicate more and more diverse, be more personal and get more creative. Want to talk further about the benefits of marketing automation for your organization? That's always possible, of course! Give a call to (0)20 820 83 82 or email info@comrads.nl. We would love to get to know you.