A well-thought out marketing automation stack is essential to streamlining marketing activities and performance. The driving factor lies in knowing how to use your marketing automation to benefit the overall business by identifying what a good marketing automation stack would look like for you.

Choosing the ‘’Right’’ Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to software used to help marketing teams automate a bulk of their marketing operations and activities. Choosing to automate repetitive tasks like bulk email sends, scheduling social media posts, analyzing and running multichannel ad campaigns and a lot of other important marketing processes becomes easier and effective. Marketing automation can also help boost understanding of campaign performance with their deep insights and intelligence features of today.

A common mistake made by most marketers of today involves the use of too many marketing automation systems or not using marketing automation platforms in an integrated manner to allow for success in multiple stages of the prospect journey, from gathering new leads to nurturing them and moving through the whole funnel.

This is what commonly leads to a disconnect between teams and prospects.

To optimize results from your marketing automation, marketing leaders have to spend time understanding their current marketing lags, setting in place a process or framework that allows marketing to send contextual content that moves users through the funnel. The details or answers to these points will help marketers adopt a balanced combination of the right marketing automation and marketing processes that can drive ROI.

To make your Marketing automation work for you, understanding your need and the nuances of different marketing automation platforms is the first step.

Know What Makes Marketing Automation Fail

Marketing automation helps marketers automate a bulk of their nurture campaigns and repetitive sends. But this is where marketers make the mistake of not balancing use of automation to build leads and marketing campaigns for each cycle of the customer journey.

Knowing how to use your marketing automation to not only nurture middle of the funnel leads but to also generate new leads, maintain a healthy lead pipeline throughout the year, establish a proper hand off of newly-nurtured leads to sales are just some of the steps that need to be put in place.

Thinking about how effective current lead nurturing campaigns will be six months down the line based on products typical sales cycle will also help optimize campaigns.

Marketing automation is meant to help marketing teams scale their campaigns, the basis for this lies in having a large database of leads. Once the core marketing process that connects with every stage of the buying journey is set, the foundation for automating marketing tasks is ready.

Adapt Your Marketing Automation to Changing Business and Customer Conditions

A good marketing automation system will allow marketers to adapt campaigns to suit changing market conditions while improving their access to data to boost understanding of evolving customer needs and their behaviors across multiple marketing channels. This is important information for marketing leaders for them to breakdown their lead’s challenges from six months ago and to approach them with new marketing messaging that can drive a better conversation.

If marketers are not using their marketing automation to deliver their leads the information they would need at the time they need it to influence a quicker buying decision, the main capability of the marketing automation is not being optimized.

The right marketing automation stack is one that can help large marketing teams manage and adapt multichannel marketing campaigns with ease and with the aim of influencing buying behaviors and decisions.

Put your Core Marketing Processes in Place

Your marketing automation is meant to help you turn leads into paying customers. But it can’t set core marketing processes in place for you.

This is where marketing leaders and key learnings from past marketing experiences come handy. Before adopting marketing automation, it is important to have the right steps in place to ensure a steady flow of users and leads to the website, defining the marketing messaging and sales messaging, ensuring there is a content strategy and content mapped to the buyer journey, ensuring the tracking of relevant lead behavior and user metrics.

End Note

Marketing automation can help you prioritize tasks and leads, scale marketing efforts and optimize marketing output. The ultimate goal of any marketing automation should be to help marketing drive additional revenue from before.