What Is Marketing Automation? How Does It Work For Brands

For any B2B business, lead generation and MQL conversions become a root cause of worry, so much so that nobody even eats anything before the first standup of the day.

Marketers breathe lead-generation ideas and inspirations. The goal is to make a lead resonate with their innate desires, core aspirations, and the urgency of time so that they end up converting. Marketing strategies brew on the potential flame of B2B conversions, and most marketers are turning to quick marketing automation strategies to strengthen lead touch base and be at their beck and call. 

Running effective lead nurturing campaigns with marketing automation software increases response rates and nudges prospects. It establishes a round-the-clock touch base with them to accelerate rebound lead queries and future conversions. 

Marketers feel insecure about which part of the campaign they can benefit from the most. Do clients want strategic retargeting, ad copy, or a brochure with product features? The truth is that they want all of it and nothing at the same time.

The marketing automation system is a "drag and drop" campaign iteration where you can add and delete nodes as you please and set a turnaround before getting into touch with your leads. The whole software setup is designed to meet your prospects at the same stage in the purchase journey and not use a "spray and pray" marketing approach to attract baits, 

But you don’t need to be a Fortune 500 company to benefit from marketing automation. Any company or business that relies heavily on digital marketing and email marketing should consider a marketing automation service for lead generation and business growth.

How does marketing automation work?

A robust marketing automation strategy involves countless mundane tasks, such as follow-ups, email reminders, and real-time lead activity reporting. These are easy but time-consuming tasks that are vital to the success of your marketing efforts.

A great marketing campaign automation strategy always keeps the customer in mind. Savvy marketers use automation for all of their digital channels as part of a holistic omnichannel approach. This ensures that the customer is met with the right message on the right channel at the right time

Here is an example of a marketing automation system for an ed-tech CRM company that works with universities and premier educational institutions to optimize their enrollment cycle.

Source: Merrito

Marketing automation example

Here’s an example of marketing automation in action:

• You send an email inviting new leads to attend a special keynote for your virtual event
• Leads fill out a form to attend the keynote, and their information is collected
• This information is funneled into a new email list by your marketing automation tool
• Everyone in the new email list receives an email nurture campaign with content designed to drive them further down the marketing funnel

The end goal of this process is to pass along marketing-qualified leads to your sales team. This process is designed to make it easier to source, nurture, and convert leads. With less time spent on less strategic, time-consuming tasks, it is easier to focus on co-marketing programs that drive revenue.

Why do marketing automation systems matter?

Marketing automation systems are becoming more sophisticated and interconnected than they used to be. With more complicated programs come more involved processes, tracking, and monitoring. Marketing automation makes it easy to create automated workflows for these tasks.

These small but necessary tasks eat away at your time: scheduling tweets, setting up email campaigns, monitoring digital ad performance, etc. All of these tasks are crucial but small compared to larger strategies you could be using your time developing. Marketing automation is the key to shifting your focus from the routine to the strategic.

In order to fully integrate a digital marketing automation platform, you need to purchase software sophisticated enough to mobilize email drip marketing automation campaigns, segment email lists, schedule social media posts, and more. Once the sequences have been set in motion, the software will take care of the day-to-day tasks that used to suck away valuable time.

Don’t cut corners and waste your money on a cheap solution. Automation software works alongside other popular marketing automation solutions, like CRM and marketing database tools. Investing in the right marketing automation systems can not only make your day-to-day life easier, but it can also make your current marketing tools even more effective.

Marketing automation process

The marketing automation process enables B2B and B2C marketing teams to get closer to their leads and centralize their databases for a complete picture of lead progress. Being wary of a prospect's ideal consumer profile (ICP) aids in the success of marketing automation services. However, the process needs to be defined and categorized into the following subtasks. 

• Goal identification: The first step to building a digital marketing automation framework is to identify your ultimate goal, whether it is securing an MQL, a click-through rate, or lead inbound. Based on your goal, you can map a decision strategy for how your leads will proceed down the funnel. 
• Audience segmentation:  Not following a "one size fits all" approach could be a good addition to marketing automation and for that, you need to segment your audience. Audience segmentation would give you a clear picture of what each prospect signs up for and their demands from the company. Segmenting your audience based on intent can build a good future roadmap of reaching out to the right prospect at the right time. 
•  Sales rep routing: For prospects that become active and send updates, routing them to the relevant sales representative based on a scheduling technique like first come, first serve (FCFS) or round robin can help tackle the sales objections right away without any lead leakage. 
• Content resources: When your audience is segmented within your lead management system, focus on sending the right content enablement material as a continuation of a sales call or first-time introduction of a brand. Be careful in this stage, as if you send across any unwanted or bulk email resource, the lead might drop their interest and become inactive. 
• Automation setup: Once the content is ready, you can set up automation workflows on your platform. These automated workflows are a series of events that get triggered based on the status of your lead and lead profile strength. The entire series of events also depends on which lead engaged with the content, filled a form, signed up, raised a request for a callback, or booked an appointment. These automated nodes trigger one or the other function based on the decision tree forecasting method.
• Lead capture: Through the automation setup, you can track, manage, and capture leads and send them directly to your lead management software or CRM software. The marketing automation solution allows you to store contact information and connect a dynamic API to your database for data transfer. Once the lead is captured, you can run more marketing automation campaigns based on their intent and nudge them further down the purchase funnel.
• Lead nurturing: Once the lead is captured, it goes through a series of lead nurturing tasks where sales and marketing teams send personalized content resources, early bird offers, newsletters, and other marketing material. But the catch is to run these triggers carefully lest you end up sending an out-of-place content resource to someone who might be at a different lead stage. 
• Lead scoring and qualification: Marketing automation platforms often include a separate dashboard for lead profiling and qualification. This metric is influenced by the number of times a lead tried to establish contact or left the buying funnel at a random stage in the past. Those scores add up to form a cumulative lead score, which is an estimated metric of that lead's activity and intent. 
• Measurement and optimization: It is essential to track the performance of your online marketing automation campaigns and analyze metrics like open rate, response rate, click-throughs, registrations, calls, and so on. 

Types of marketing automation

Marketing automation workflows could have different end outcomes and can be used by any department to run a specific lead operation. Here are some examples of types of marketing automation that you might encounter.

• Sales and marketing automation: Sales and marketing automation services are drip marketing practices used to streamline customer communication and lead generation. It includes automating tasks such as lead generation, lead status, lead sourcing, lead nurturing, email marketing, social media management, customer relationship management (CRM) activities, and more. 
• Content marketing automation is a process for automating content distribution and delivery based on your prospect's interests. It uses software tools and systems to formalize a content approach for sales leads and trigger the right resource at the right time through the right channel. This includes content scheduling, urchin tracking module (UTM) tracking, content personalization, email marketing, and web analytics. 
• Advertising automation is an automated workflow that helps custom feed lead lists to Google and Facebook audiences for retargeting ads. It also helps with ad creation, placement, targeting, and optimization. By leveraging customer data and advanced analytics, you can run your ads exactly based on your audience's browsing behavior. This helps get better results and a better return on investment for the business. 

Best marketing automation practices

It’s not enough to purchase digital marketing automation software and go. Automation software still requires maintenance and routine checks. There also needs to be a strategy involved for how you’re going to automate marketing processes. Adhering to a few best practices can help your team get the most out of automation.

Here are some of the best tips for building your own marketing automation strategy:

Avoid spamming your leads with useless content

It can feel really exciting when a new lead finally hands over their contact information. A world of possibilities opens up and many marketers are eager to start nurturing these new leads. Don’t fall into the trap of using marketing automation so much that you end up harassing your leads.

It’s important to use marketing automation to deliver relevant and personalized content to your prospective leads. Potential customers don’t want to receive emails from you bragging about your latest award win.

People are spammed with marketing emails every single day. They are looking to you to provide value. This means only sending relevant content from the beginning.

Building this trust with your content will eventually lead to bigger conversations. But if you jump the gun and send them too many emails, or emails that don’t apply to them, you will lose them before that can happen.

Focus on delivering the right message to the right people. It’s not about the quantity of touchpoints you can have with a lead, it’s about delivering the right piece of content at the right stage of the buyer’s cycle.

Revisit your goals early and often

Marketing automation tools run on pre-set specifications designated by marketers. Until that information is updated or adjusted, it will continue to run as expected. As your team goals shift and change from quarter to quarter, you’ll need to revisit your marketing automation platform and update your specifications.

Doing this early and often will keep your data-tracking consistent with your goals. If you wait to update this information after your goals change, the data will not be 100% accurate. This makes pulling reports and forecasting much easier. It also ensures that you’re running campaigns that align with projects that drive revenue and have proven value.

Integrate marketing automation with your inbound marketing strategy

Inbound marketing focuses on content that aligns with your customer needs at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Marketing automation allows you to use your own marketing data to determine what data should be delivered to leads and then set automated processes to deliver that information.

This also means understanding each stage of the buyer’s journey for your business and knowing what content customers need to move them to the next stage.

Here are some common lead stages your company might use:

• Anonymous: someone who has been researching your company, but has not filled out a lead form or given your company any personal data
• Known: someone who has self-identified and is now part of your customer funnel
• Engaged: someone who has engaged with campaign or marketing materials but has not been qualified by sales yet
• Marketing qualified lead (MQL): someone who has been qualified by the marketing team and has been passed to sales
• Sales qualified lead (SQL): someone who sales has accepted as an open opportunity lead and begin actively nurturing
• Close/Won: someone who converts from a lead to a customer
• Close/Loss: someone who decides not to convert from lead to customer

There are many strategies you can use to reach leads. If you want to be competitive, you need to have a presence where your competitors are. Email marketing is the most popular inbound marketing strategy used alongside marketing automation.

Sixty-four percent of marketers say email marketing automation is their most used marketing automation technique. If you’re not focusing a lot of attention on email marketing but you’d like to use marketing automation, it’s time to start learning.

This doesn’t mean other content channels should be ignored. It just means email marketing should be given special attention when building your automation strategy.

Keep your content helpful and relevant

There are two key factors necessary for successful automation: market segmentation and marketing attribution.

The combination of these two things will allow you to deliver high-quality content to your audience at pivotal sales touch points. This added value makes it more likely that leads will continue to engage with your marketing.

Eventually, you’ll be able to pass these leads off to sales and tie your marketing programs directly to revenue. There’s no better way to show the value of your marketing.

Market segmentation

Market segmentation helps companies divide their target audience into smaller audiences based on shared factors. These groups are created because they often have similar buying patterns, work at companies of similar size, and have the same budget range. Each market segment can then be marketed to with specific materials that address their business needs.

Market segmentation makes it easier for marketers to build audience personas. These personas inform everyone in your company about how to sell to potential customers. As marketers, it allows you to create personalized content designed to sell. When you know a lead’s pain points and motivations, you’re better equipped to explain why your solution is the answer to their problems.

Marketing attribution

Marketing attribution is a strategy that helps determine which marketing efforts directly drove sales or conversions. Attribution helps companies focus the best use of their marketing budgets and contribute to revenue goals. Marketing attribution is not designed to replace marketing automation. In fact, these strategies can work seamlessly side-by-side to create best-in-class marketing campaigns.

Attribution helps marketers make the best decisions possible by allowing them to pinpoint which marketing strategies drive revenue. This information can help you decide which campaigns to move forward with and create your automation strategy.

Automating your marketing operations without an ineffective strategy doesn’t help drive revenue growth. You need both working alongside each other to be successful.

Make your customers part of the conversation

There’s a lot of focus on customer acquisition when it comes to automation. But you can use marketing automation for much more than converting leads. Current customers should be part of the conversation when it comes to marketing automation. You can use the same strategies you did to acquire them to keep them engaged.

Don’t stop providing value after you’ve won a deal. Customers expect continued help and thought-leadership now that they’re paying customers. Deliver that same personalization and relevant content to keep your customers happy. It will work in your favor when it comes to resigning contacts!

Benefits of marketing automation

There are few parts of your marketing strategy that wouldn’t benefit from marketing automation. It provides universal value to projects, allows you to fine-tune your strategies, and most importantly, saves you time on tasks that can be handled by technology.

• Doing more with less budget/fewer software solutions: Marketing automation's drip functionality helps you send personalized communication, track lead progress, and leverage advanced analytics to improve your lead generation campaigns. You can start and end a marketing automation workflow based on preset goals and reiterate the campaign all the way until MQL generation.
• Generating high-quality marketing qualified leads: The automated workflows trigger unanimous actions at the same time that aids in higher sales opportunity and optimizes lead nurturing efforts. With a focused and targeting communication approach, more leads fall into the bucket of verified leads. 
• Optimizing and reporting on user engagement: Marketing automation provides a centralized performance tracking dashboard where you can view the status of your leads in real-time. This helps you improve your campaign outreach and renew your strategies so that you can act in the nick of time when your leads are warm.
• Proving the ROI of marketing programs and campaigns: Marketing automation service gives a real time picture of your marketing conversions. Running paid or strategic marketing campaigns with marketing automation would allow you to see the lead additions in real-time and a swift increase in lead responses that would optimize revenue on investment. 
• Increasing the number of deals closed or won: Personalizing communication at the exact time your lead is searching for a brand content resource could multiply the chances of deals closed or one. The marketing automation platform acts its magic only when it knows that a lead would be available for further collaboration. 
• Accelerating the total time to close in sales cycles: The whole platform runs on a centralized ERP or CRM software which automates lead capture and lead engagement for the sales and marketing teams. Having appropriate information about a lead can result in a quick touch base, thereby accelerating the time to close sales cycles.
• Lowering the cost per acquisition for leads: With the increased success of lead conversions, marketers would not consider expensive lead sources to attribute to their sales workflows. This would lower the cost per acquisition (CAC) cost per leads and also disable expensive third-party publisher platforms that charge a lot for leads. 
• Bridging information gaps between sales and marketing: The centralized marketing dashboard can be viewed or accessed by any member of the sales and marketing teams, thereby eliminating silos and encouraging work transparency. 
• Creating personalized messaging for each stage of the buyer’s journey: The marketing automation workflow nodes are triggered 

All of these benefits of marketing automation allow you to create a more cohesive brand narrative across your marketing channels. Customers will feel valued by the hyper-personalization along every stage of the marketing funnel. This in turn helps you build trust that can be leveraged to convert leads to customers.

Challenges of marketing automation

Just because marketing automation lets you “set and forget” certain tasks doesn’t mean it’s a low-effort endeavor. There are a few common challenges that teams often face when building their first marketing automation process.

• Complexity: The complexity of the marketing automation dashboard and algorithmic understanding makes it difficult for marketers to utilize it with the same efficiency as other easy tasks like sales pitching or content creation.
• Data quality: Due to algorithms running in a loop, you might pass irrelevant data to your consumers that will affect the overall quality of data and lead to ineffective targeting. 
• Content creation: Automation requires a steady stream of content. Keeping your pace with content creation is a heavy load, that might slow your writing and design teams.
• Personalization: While marketing automation encourages personalization, it still can't step into a customer's individual interests, passions, likes, dislikes, and preferences. 
• Compatibility: The marketing automation platform might face compatibility issues based on the operating system you have deployed for your CRM or ERP implementation. 

How to choose the right marketing automation software

Most of the hard work required to create your own marketing automation process only needs to happen once. The marketing automation process takes a lot of work on the front end in order to run smoothly in the background.

The biggest challenge is choosing the right marketing automation software.

These tools provide a central marketing automation integration across sales and marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) and day-to-day lead outreach tasks. It is a centralized database from where the marketing automation system retrieves important information to feed to the marketing automation algorithm and distribute relevant resources to leads that have approachability and time. 

The marketing automation process also helps marketers create segmented, personalized, and timely marketing experiences for customers or prospects. These platforms provide automation features across multiple aspects of marketing, including email, social media, lead generation, direct mail, digital advertising, and more.

Most automation platforms have the same core set of features. Before making a purchase, explore the differences between a few of your favorite choices. It might even help to consult a software buying guide. All of these steps will help you make an informed purchasing decision that works best for your business needs.

Best marketing automation software

A key component of online marketing automation tools is user-friendly features. With these features, teams can easily track marketing KPIs, campaign metrics, and revenue. 

* Below are the top five leading marketing automation software solutions from G2’s Spring 2024 Grid® Report. Some reviews may be edited for clarity.

1. HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub has been a leading growth platform since 2006, and today, over 68,800 total customers in more than 100 countries use HubSpot’s award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers. HubSpot offers a full stack of products for marketing, sales, and customer relationship management; powerful alone, and even better when used together.

What users like:

"I really like that HubSpot can do so many things: contact management, email, webpages, conversations, ads, and now some ABM and revenue attribution functionality. While there may be better point solutions for each, the ability to have all of them in one platform, at a comparable level, is highly valuable as a SMB / Mid Market marketer. Also, their support is excellent, with online chat as an immediate way to solve any issue that arises."

– HubSpot Review, Joe K.

What users dislike:

"There are duplicate records in our database and it isn't always easy to merge. We're charged by marketing contact so the tier can go up before you know it. If you lose marketing contacts and you fall in a lower paying tier, you still get charged for the higher tier- you can't go back. I think this is unethical. It's tricky in that way for a startup. I wish I could tag people in social posts, and upload a photo + a video in a social post. The social media capabilities are quite limited. We also spend a lot of money creating custom templates for the web and email with a Hubspot Developer."

– HubSpot Review, Meghan B.

2. Insider

Insider is a agile marketing automation solution tailored for businesses that want to optimize their strategic outreach and lead generation processes. It features a user friendly interface, advance analytics tracking, secure messaging, file sharing, data masking, efficient task management, live chat and video conferencing extensions.

What users like:

"Choosing a favorite is difficult. We love the entire Insider suite of products. Being in the banking sector keeping our customers informed, transparency, and building trust is the top priority. Insider helped us achieve this and more. As a result, through word of mouth and positive feedback by our existing customers we were able to acquire nearly 50% more customers than what we usually do in a month."

– Insider Review, Nisa D.

What users dislike:

"We are a little worried that we might need a lot of support from Insider's Account Management team every time we start using a new product. We hope the integrations with the other products are equally seamless and fast."

– Insider Review, Selcuk O.

3. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign's category-defining Customer Experience Automation (CXA) Platform helps over 100,000 businesses in 170 countries meaningfully engage with their customers. The platform gives businesses of all sizes access to hundreds of pre-built automations that combine email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and machine learning for powerful segmentation and personalization across social, email, messaging, chat, text, and more.

What users like:

"It's an extremely easy to use, intuitive piece of software. I love that I can see exactly how my automations look and how easy it is to update them down the road if I make some changes to my marketing strategies. In client work, I've used Ontraport and Infusionsoft - I love that I can recommend Active Campaign to absolutely everyone - even when my clients are just starting out. When I made the change from Mailchimp to Active Campaign, it instantly felt like I was ready to play a bigger game."

– ActiveCampaign Review, Dawn M.

What users dislike:

"One thing that I continue to get confused by is with the Automations. Sometimes contacts in the automations don't get the emails. Like the automation skips sending an email to a contact who is hoping to get the email, and I can't figure out how to override that!"

– ActiveCampaign Review, Becky H.

3. Braze

Braze is a growth marketing platform that helps you deliver more personalized experiences across owned marketing channels like email, SMS, in-app notifications, and web. Braze also offers advanced analytics and real time segmentation to empower businesses to slice and dice their data in an intelligent manner

What users like:

"Braze is very powerful in orchestrating marketing and service messages across different channels such as in-app messages, push notifications, sms, email and web messages. It does not require technical skills to set up a journey which has many decision points. My record of creating a campaign with an audience is within 12 minutes, so you can create a campaign while listening to Ravel's Bolero."

– Braze Review, Martin S.

What users dislike:

"The reporting side of Braze can be a bit tricky to manage. There are several ways that we can create a report. Some of the quicker report builds have a limit of comparing 5-10 campaigns/canvases at once, which can be a bit frustrating."

– Braze Review, Seeta P.

4. Mailchimp All-in-One Marketing Platform

Mailchimp’s All-in-One Marketing Platform helps small businesses market smarter so you can grow faster. Mailchimp puts your audience at the center so you can send marketing emails and automated messages, create targeted ad campaigns, build landing pages, send postcards, facilitate reporting and analytics, and sell online.

What users like:

"The simple, WYSYG platform with HTML block support ensures that all users, whether seasoned HTML pros or base-level marketers can create beautifully designed marketing pieces. The basic layouts are easy to fill in as needed and offer just enough customization without being overwhelming. You can also create your own template by dropping in your own HTML blocks, but not all HTML features are presently available."

– MailChimp All-in-one-Marketing Platform Review, Megan G.

What users dislike:

"Sometimes it is very slow to load. Also pricing structure - the costs can become prohibitive, leading to a potential downside for budget-conscious users or those with rapidly expanding contact lists."

– MailChimp All-in-one Marketing Platform Review, Mike H.

5. Klaviyo

Klaviyo is an email automation platform that helps you deliver more personalized experiences across owned marketing channels like email, SMS, in-app notifications, and web. Klaviyo also integrates with leading e-commerce platforms and tools like BigCommerce, Magento, Shopify, Stripe, WooCommerce, and more.

What users like:

"Great integration with Shopify made segmentation easy. We've been able to been some detailed segments based on Shopify data that has helped reach targeted audiences"

– Klaviyo Review, Michele V.

What users dislike:

“I believe it can be a task for a beginner to learn its working and processes easily and he/she has to go through various articles and tuitorials to be fluent with it. Also it's plans are on the expensive side and one might not even use all of the feature it offers wasting a part of their plan. It also needs to work out it's campaign automation features as I faced several issues while sequencing them. Otherwise it's a great platform and must have for e- commerce stores.”

– Klaviyo Review, Ravi S.

Let the marketing sweat "drip"

Building a seamless automation process doesn’t happen overnight. Failure is part of the process and there are plenty of ways to automate your marketing that popular blogs don’t talk about. The best way to learn is to do the work, test everything, and create your own unique strategy that works for your business needs.

Solve individual ROI-based concerns for your target accounts with best account orchestration platforms.