Marketing automation: measuring results correctly
The success of any company or business directly depends on how professional and competently built the marketing strategy is, how it will show itself in practice. But in implementation, this process is quite complex and multifaceted. It requires deep immersion in the niche, and along with this, serious time costs, professional knowledge and skills, constant monitoring. Even minor mistakes made at this stage can lead to the fact that the effectiveness of your work will be significantly reduced, and in some cases, completely reduced to a minimum.
That is why good specialists are highly valued in this field. But their pay will be impressive, and the human resource here is quite limited. The modern market offers business representatives, and marketers themselves, many opportunities to speed up these works, increase their efficiency, and minimize efforts during implementation. We will talk about one such solution in more detail today.
In particular, today's review will be devoted to such a direction as marketing automation. Here we are talking about the use of specialized software, thanks to which the same type and routine marketing tasks will be solved automatically after simple preliminary settings. Thanks to this, both marketers and business representatives themselves will be able to most effectively manage interactions with their potential buyers and the market as a whole, using any channels convenient for themselves, be it social networks, the official website of the company, e-mail and more.
Now we will dwell in detail on how marketing automation works, what advantages it provides for businesses and consumers. Let's look at the most popular ways of implementing it in practice, having familiarized yourself with which you can easily select those solutions that will optimally correspond to the specifics of your company and the features of the goods and services supplied to the market. We will also talk about how to properly control the results of automated marketing campaigns, what parameters should be paid special attention to. All this information will help you easily and simply implement automation of marketing processes in your business, while minimizing potential errors and difficulties.
Features of marketing automation
The basis of any marketing automation is a comprehensive collection, processing and analysis of information about the market as a whole, potential clients, competitors, how the audience interacts with the business. With this information, it will be possible to launch advertising campaigns aimed at specific consumers, offer individual users personalized products and services, perform the most correct setup of tools, including those that will track results and generate reports.
The marketing automation process itself can be divided into the following stages:
- Collecting information. Only with the maximum amount of data on the target market can we talk about launching effective marketing processes. In this case, information on the behavioral factors of potential clients is collected through open channels, be it social networks, email, website, offline surveys, etc.
- Analysis of the information received. The result of processing the collected data should be the definition of interests, preferences of potential buyers, the compilation of a target audience portrait, behavioral factors.
- Dividing the audience into separate groups, that is, segmentation depending on interests, age, social status, income level and many other parameters. Thanks to this, it will be possible to create offers aimed at specific consumers, which will increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your strategy.
- Content development. It is carried out taking into account the channels through which interaction with the audience will be carried out, as well as the individual interests and characteristics of each formed group.
- Launching automated processes, performing business tasks. After you have completed all the necessary settings, uploaded the content, specified the channels through which it should be distributed, as well as the date and time of its sending, your system will begin to work automatically, requiring minimal control from you.
- Tracking the results obtained, as well as their comprehensive analysis. This stage should be performed directly by the marketer, because only he will be able to see what indicators the launched strategy gives and, if necessary, make appropriate adjustments in order to improve it.
That is, automatic marketing is what will allow you to minimize your own efforts and time to implement the approved strategy. All those tasks that you must perform daily will be taken over by software products, and you will only have to monitor the reports and make appropriate changes, if necessary.
Benefits of marketing automation for business
Marketing automation is This is the direction that can provide in practice quite significant advantages primarily for business representatives. Here are just the main points:
- Increasing work efficiency in combination with time saving. Automation of tasks that are performed at a certain frequency, be it sending an e-mail newsletter, posting content in social network accounts, messengers, managing advertising campaigns will free up a lot of time that can be spent on more strategic and important business issues.
- Formation of improved reports, high-quality analytics. The software will collect and structure huge amounts of data, providing information in real time. Thanks to this, you will be able to instantly respond to changes, adjust the launched strategy to new conditions.
- Higher quality and flexible lead management. Thanks to automation, the human factor is minimized, the process of tracking the behavior of the target audience is simplified, distribution into separate groups depending on readiness to buy. Thanks to this, it will be easier to select the optimal strategies for promoting each category of buyers along the sales funnel, thereby increasing the chances that a person will still perform the target action.
- Ensuring a clear sequence in interaction with the target audience. This applies not only to the strategy itself, but also to the ability to maintain the tone and style of communication with the audience as easily and simply as possible, that is, to follow the voice of the brand. This is what will help present your business in the most positive light, emphasize its solidity, responsibility, respectability.
Using automation tools, you will be able to see how fast, productive and effective your marketing strategies have become and what benefits they have brought to the business. But, not only you but also your potential clients will benefit from such a solution.
Advantages of marketing automation for buyers
Now we will highlight a number of advantages of marketing automation that are specific to buyers:
- Receiving personalized newsletters and content. Clients will not receive offers that are not of interest to them a priori. This means that their dissatisfaction will be minimized, and the level of trust in the company will increase. But the most important thing is that they will receive materials that take into account their preferences, behavior, that is, they will contain benefits for people. This is what will contribute to increasing satisfaction and involvement on the part of potential buyers.
- Improved user experience when interacting with a brand. This is achieved primarily by providing a person with a more relevant offer, up-to-date information. This will also help increase the level of trust in the business, and form stable consumer demand. People who are satisfied with everything in cooperation with a particular brand will not look for other offers. They will know that at any time they will be able to purchase the product or service they need in a place they are accustomed to.
- Convenient, simple methods of communication. You will be able to send messages to your clients through various channels, be it social networks, email, messengers, SMS messages, etc. This is what guarantees convenient receipt of information for users, the absence of irritation and discontent on their part.
At the same time, users will not understand at all whether you use automated solutions in your work or not: they will simply maintain interaction with your brand, receive useful information for themselves with a certain frequency, which you initially set in the settings.
Ways to implement automation in marketing
Above, we have already mentioned that the modern market offers a fairly wide variety of automation methods that can be used directly in marketing campaigns. Now we will highlight those solutions that are most often used in practice today and give excellent results. In particular, we are talking about such techniques as:
- E-mail newsletter.
- Remarketing as an automation tool.
- Post publications in social networks, blogs.
- Launching automated webinars.
- Automated management of advertising campaigns.
- Preparing personalized product recommendations.
- Automation of marketing chatbots.
- Using automated SMS marketing.
- Creating analytical reports automatically.
- Automated feedback forms, questionnaires.
- Using CRM systems to manage interactions with the audience.
- Automation of internal and external SEO processes.
We will consider each of these points in more detail. in detail, we will highlight its main advantages so that you can choose the best solution for yourself and implement them as efficiently, quickly and easily as possible
E-mailing in marketing automation
E-mailing is a technique that allows you to send messages to potential business clients that take into account their behavioral factors and individual preferences. As an option, this could be a subscription to news, participation in webinars, information about an abandoned shopping cart, providing personal discounts and bonuses.
Automation of e-mailing will help solve a number of key tasks facing businesses, namely:
- Collecting information about users. In this case, you will be able to get enough data on how the potential audience interacts with the business, as well as individual goods or services, and note for yourself the main preferences and interests. This means you will be able to better understand your target audience and subsequently adapt your marketing strategies to it.
- Creating a set of templates for different formats and mailing options. This will make it much easier to prepare relevant offers. Alternatively, you can make several templates for mailings on the topic of promotions, for informational mailings, and more.
- Ability to segment your audience. With quite a lot of information, you can divide your audience based on their interests, place of residence, purchase history, gender, age, and many other parameters.
- Automation of the link processor itself. You simply set the date and time when your information should be sent, and the program does the sending itself. You can also tell the program to launch a mailing after the user performs a certain action, for example, makes a purchase, subscribes to you on a social network, etc.
- Comprehensive analytics and optimization of launched strategies. All information about how many users opened a particular letter, how many of them followed the corresponding link - this is only part of the information that software packages will automatically collect and provide to marketers. As a result, you will be able to understand which mailings worked better than others, that is, provided you with good conversion rates.
- Personalization of content. Using the appropriate applications, you can get all this information, which will help you launch personalized mailings that take into account the individual preferences of a particular person, his interests. It will also be easy to add an appeal by name.
- Quick and easy integration with other tools that most marketers use in their daily work. In particular, these can be various analytical tools, modern CRM systems.
Remarketing as an automation tool
Here we are talking about displaying advertisements to those people who have already interacted with your business or visited the site. This is what will remind customers about you, as well as encourage them to make new requests. Among the main advantages of using automated remarketing in practice, it is worth highlighting:
- Collecting data on the user audience. You will be aware of which pages of the site people visited, how long they stayed on them, what products they were interested in. That is, as a result, you will get fairly accurate user profiles.
- Fine-tuning advertising campaigns. Choose the platforms that are optimal for your business, fit within the allocated budget, correspond to the desired frequency of impressions, etc.
- Formation of audiences depending on the actions performed by users: visiting the site, leaving contact information, subscribing to the newsletter, adding products to the cart, placing an order, etc. Will help to create personalized offers.
- Automation of the process of displaying advertisements. The optimal time for display is selected taking into account when the activity of the user audience will be the highest.
- Analytics, performance testing, optimization of strategies. Thanks to the availability of detailed, structured information, you will be able to see in real time where your idea is going, whether the theoretical figures match the real ones, make changes, including those that the system itself will suggest.
Post publications in social networks, blogs
Today, each of you will be able to choose the software solution that will help you automate the following tasks:
- Creating text, graphic content using specialized templates, as well as a set of tools that allow you to edit pictures, text with a couple of clicks.
- Segmentation by individual channels. You will be able to speed up and simplify the transformation of content for different social networks, blogs, taking into account their personal requirements.
- Setting a schedule for automatic publication of posts. Plan your publications for a week, a month or more, evenly distributing them over time. This is what will allow you to ensure the regularity of content on the network and, as a result, maintain a high level of brand presence on the site.
- Flexible campaign management, multi-accounting, tracking progress for each account, ad.
- Analysis of effectiveness, obtaining visual and structured information about all publications, including user feedback and many other parameters.
- Integration of additional tools that complement the overall business promotion strategy.
Launching automated webinars
Now you can easily conduct various webinars even without the constant participation of the host. In this case, the automation of events will occur in the following sequence:
- You prepare the content, record it in advance. This is what will become the basis of your subsequent online webinar.
- The script is configured in the corresponding tool. Here you specify the time of its broadcast, the moment when it is worth posting a poll, showing certain slides. The viewers will not even have any doubts that the broadcast in front of them is not being conducted in real time.
- Interaction with the audience is configured directly during the event and after it. You can connect automatic responses to the most frequently asked questions, sending thanks in response to a comment or additional materials, invitations to your subsequent webinars.
- Collecting information and structuring it, analyzing. All information about the number of participants in your webinar, the duration of their presence, the number of reactions left, questions asked, interaction with additional materials will be sent to you literally in real time.
Automated management of advertising campaigns
Here you can use tools that can automate the process of creating, launching and subsequently optimizing advertising campaigns. Thanks to automation, you will be able to:
- create advertising as quickly as possible, using various ready-made templates for this;
- segment the audience and set up targeting based on the information received, including demographics, behavioral characteristics, preferences, thereby increasing the relevance of the ad;
- the ability to conduct A / B testing in automatic mode, comparing different modes by a large number of parameters, as well as their automatic sorting by efficiency;
- competent budget distribution, determining rates in real time, based on the features of the site, as well as the current situation;
- compile automated reports, analytical research to make adjustments to the launched advertising strategy.
Preparing personalized product recommendations
Here we are talking about systems that can analyze user behavioral factors and recommend certain products or services based on them. A good example in this case is the recommendation algorithms that work today on such platforms as Amazon, Netflix. Here, automation solves the following problems:
- collecting user information, including purchase history, views, search queries used, etc.;
- dividing the audience into separate segments based on their interests to provide personalized offers;
- analysis of behavioral factors, frequency of purchases, types of purchased products, duration of stay on the site, the number of internal transitions made;
- preparing personalized recommendations to increase interest from potential buyers, improving their user experience;
- A/B testing of different recommendation options to determine the most effective solution;
- flexible and convenient integration with email platforms, CRM systems, messengers, social networks, etc.
Automation of marketing chatbots
If desired, you can automate the work of the chatbot, providing convenient communication with clients in real time, regardless of the day of the week and time of day. Such software agents are able to provide answers to the most popular questions, systematically move buyers along the sales funnel and redirect them to a real manager when there is an immediate need for this. Such chatbots can be embedded in instant messengers, social networks or websites.
In this case, the benefits of automation will be as follows:
- creating several scenarios for answers to the most common questions will speed up customer service, increase their loyalty and the chances that they will be interested in your products;
- recognizing requests in automatic mode: implemented using artificial intelligence and natural speech processing;
- collecting data and their subsequent analysis, including working with key metrics such as response time, frequency of requests;
- forwarding complex questions to real managers: if such a question is not in the saved database, the program will automatically forward it to your specialists;
- integration with additional tools and services, including e-commerce platforms, social networks, CRM systems, ensuring the collection information.
Using automated SMS marketing
Automation of SMS mailing is what will allow you to inform potential buyers about important promotional offers, new product launches, planned events and any other events with minimal effort. With this solution, you can:
- collect information about the audience and segment it by various parameters;
- set up appropriate triggers for various user actions, such as subscribing, adding a product to the cart, registering on the site, etc.;
- conveniently select the frequency of mailings, the optimal day and time when the open rate will be the highest, and the likelihood of you being caught in spam will be minimal;
- monitor results, create analytical reports based on key parameters, including the number of clicks, opens, orders;
- create templates for future mailings in case of sending a message about a promotional campaign, birthday greetings, information materials;
- automatic management of user subscriptions, quick processing of requests, connection of additional tools, including CRM systems.
Create analytical reports in automatic mode
To solve this problem, there are specialized software solutions that can automatically collect information, analyze it, and create structured reports that clearly display the effectiveness of launched marketing campaigns. In this case, you get the following features:
- collection and analysis of information about user activity, behavioral factors from the site, social networks, review sites, advertising platforms, CRM systems and more;
- automatic creation of diagrams, infographics and other visual elements that provide visual information about the analysis results;
- creation of reports and their sending in accordance with a pre-specified schedule: you simply add what data you want to see in such a document;
- integration with various additional tools that allow you to flexibly manage financial reports, marketing and advertising, as well as with modern CRM systems.
Connection to automated feedback forms, questionnaires
To understand how well your business meets the needs of your user audience, it is important to receive feedback from them. Here, tools that allow you to automatically collect reviews and feedback from customers will be an excellent solution. For this, special forms or surveys are used. This type of marketing automation will allow you to:
- make surveys as personalized as possible, adapt them to the profile of the target audience and its specific segment, which will increase the level of engagement on the part of respondents;
- collect data, process it automatically and generate visual reports that will be easy to study later;
- automated mailing with additional reminders about the request to take a survey, as an option after purchasing a product or service, which will increase the number of feedback;
- collect information, generate reports on its basis for subsequent analysis and processing;
- connect such forms to CRM systems and other platforms that you use when managing work with clients.
Using CRM systems to manage interaction with the audience
In this case, you will be able to automate general customer management processes, including tracking their interaction with your business, history of requests, purchases. The functional capabilities here will be as follows:
- data collection with their subsequent centralization, structuring, providing access to information about the history of purchases and many other data;
- audience segmentation with subsequent automation of interaction with them: you yourself set the parameters by which you want to divide your potential buyers;
- automated customer management: the system will accept requests, assign them a certain status and distribute them among sales managers depending on their qualifications, workload;
- creation of tasks and reminders that will be sent automatically, as an option, a reminder to managers about the need to contact clients at a certain time;
- creating reports, analyzing data, the ability to connect to other tools that your company uses in practice.
Automation of internal and external SEO processes
Using automation in practice, you can significantly improve and speed up both internal and external SEO processes. Other advantages of this solution include:
- Keyword analysis will be performed automatically. The platform itself will select the most relevant queries, having analyzed the search results of the closest competitors and potential value for business.
- Backlink analysis. Here their number is determined, as well as the sources from which they lead, the number of transitions.
- Constant monitoring of search results positions for certain key queries. The information received will allow you to understand which phrases are in high demand among users and focus on them.
- Replenishment of a comprehensive site audit in order to identify errors and inaccuracies that prevent its effective promotion in search results. Also, the relevant services will be able to provide you with recommendations for improving indicators, such as increasing page loading speed.
- Automated work with content, reporting. These tools will help you find interesting ideas for content, create a short description, meta tags, provide detailed reports on conversions, traffic, and current position.
How are the results of marketing automation measured?
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of automated marketing, you will need to take into account the following parameters:
- the number of email openings, SMS mailings, the number of clicks on links;
- conversion rates that come from the advertisements you launch;
- social media engagement level;
- customer lifetime value, that is, the number of orders that will come from the same person throughout the entire period of their interaction with your business;
- customer acquisition cost.
Modern CRM systems and tools such as Google Analytics can be used to collect such information. specialized analytical panels. The choice is actually quite wide and you just need to navigate this diversity, choose those solutions that will be most convenient for your work. It is also important that they correspond to the types of automation that you will use in your marketing.
Additional recommendations
If you want the automated marketing campaigns you launch to work perfectly and give good results in practice, use the following recommendations:
- Build a customer journey map. This way, you will see the path a particular person takes from the moment of first contact with you until they place an order. Based on this information, you will be able to automate the sending of messages that will systematically move a potential buyer towards performing a target action and will help to retain their attention in the future.
- Be sure to provide for user segmentation. You should divide your target audience into separate groups depending on their behavioral factors, gender, age, place of residence and other parameters. This is what will allow you to make your offers as personalized as possible, increasing the likelihood of attracting the buyer's attention.
- Determine your key marketing goals. This is what will allow you not to waste time on trifles, but to move step by step towards achieving the set task. Based on such goals, you will be able to adjust the overall strategy, choose the most suitable tools for its implementation.
- Check out the variety of tools that are presented on the modern market and choose those that will meet your goals and business needs. It is also important that they are easily integrated into the systems that your business uses in practice. This is what will speed up the execution of many works and help to retain the attention of buyers.
Following such recommendations, you can significantly increase the efficiency of your work and get the maximum result for your business in practice.
Summing up
As you can see, marketing automation is a really useful tool for any business, especially for medium and large ones, because here the volume of daily work will be more than impressive. Thanks to specialized tools, you will be able to configure settings so that many marketing processes will proceed without your participation, which will minimize the human factor and improve the management of interaction with the audience.
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If you have any additional questions, you can look in the FAQ section or contact technical support specialists who work around the clock for advice.