Digital Marketing Automation’s Benefits, Examples & Tools [2023]

If you are here and reading this article, marketing automation already rings a bell for you!

So, what is marketing automation that is recently extremely popular amongst digital marketers??

Marketing automation is a software tech designed to execute repetitive marketing tasks automatically. Businesses use marketing automation for lead generation, increasing sales, managing customer relationships, and many more.

Marketing automation benefits bring utmost advantages for any industry to maximize their revenue every second that spend to reach their business goals.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

Imagine today’s world where the internet has become the most significant source for searching and buying products and services.

Companies can now find new sales leads online via websites, social media and online advertising.

But, keeping up with the latest trends has become time-consuming and requires much more human resources. As a result, many companies struggle to coordinate their resources, processes and technologies.

That is where digital marketing automation benefits shine. Marketing automation helps companies automate and streamline repetitive marketing processes with efficient processes and generate faster revenue.

That way, marketers can focus on strategic tasks such as planning, developing, conducting research, measuring KPIs, and more.

Besides automating and streamlining, marketing automation can enhance customer experience. Companies can collect customers’ data to customize personalized offers, nurture leads and convert those to sales.

Once you embrace all automation benefits in digital marketing, it will ease everything for you to step up your career by learning ”how to get a job in digital marketing in Canada”

What Does Marketing Automation Mean in the Customer Journey?

A well-established customer journey helps companies identify critical touchpoints and connect with the customer. Understanding their journey will lead to a high conversion rate for companies.

But every customer has a different journey, and businesses need to establish those journeys to match their customers’ needs.

With the help of marketing automation, the “if-then” logic is used to identify different customer journeys to fit different customer paths and generate the right content for the right customer at the right time.

The Customer Journey For Marketing Automation

The customer journey is steps that customers take, usually divided into 3 phases: before, during and after purchasing products or services. According to Vendasta, modern customer journeys are awareness, findability, reputation, conversion and advocacy. In each stage, customers need different information to move forward with their decisions.

1. Awareness

   Awareness is a stage of how customers discover a company’s product and service. Awareness can be seen as an advertising form created through social / search advertising, email/ text marketing and Word Of Mouth.

2. Findability

   As consumers’ behaviors change over time, the customer journey involves searching for websites, locations, or products and services details to fulfill their needs. The companies that dominate the marketing world are typically the most findable ones.

3. Reputation

   Reputation represents products or services’ online presence performance and influence. Typically, consumers seek online discussions regarding products and services to make decisions. The most common platforms are online reviews and social media.

4. Conversion

   When customers finish their research, they are most likely ready to make purchasing decisions. With the nature of today’s world, website or e-commerce channels are one of the most popular channels for customers to purchase products and services.

5. Advocacy

   After purchasing products or services, customers’ experiences can influence other customers’ decisions. Usually, their experiences are shared via online platforms.

Types of Marketing Automation

People often think about email marketing when we say “digital marketing automation”.

However, marketing automation has more capacity than just managing email marketing. These are different types of marketing automation to streamline marketing practices:

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can automate sales, orders and product data.
2. Search Engine Optimization tools (SEO) are commonly used to identify words that potential customers use to search on the internet.
3. Analytics and Segmentation Automation is used to visualize and identify market and customer data patterns.
4. Lead management is used to generate and score marketing leads.
5. Social media marketing manages many aspects of social media marketing, such as content publishing, scheduling, monitoring, and analytics. There is an ultimate guide to becoming a social media specialist to begin your career in this field.
6. Email Marketing Automation is used to set up web-based forms, auto-responses, and various reports (click-through rates, open rates, nonsubscriber, and more).
7. Digital advertising and promotion identifies and automates ad creation processes and paying ad strategies across digital channels

Let’s have look at a real-life marketing automation examples that how it can tap into different customers and their habits.

Brilliant Marketing Automation Examples

Barack Obama’s 2012 Presidential Campaign

Believe it or not, automation is used by Barack Obama’s team to help filter volunteers for campaigning his second term in 2012. The automation was used to capture the volunteer’s information such as zip codes, addresses and emails.

With the help of an automated process, the Obama team was able to rule out unqualified volunteers and quickly selected qualifying potential volunteers. As the result, the campaign was a success and Barack Obama was re-elected for the second term.

Thomson Reuters’ Marketing Campaign

A Canadian/ British media agency well known for its focus on professional, financial and legal publishing, Reuter implemented marketing automation into its marketing process.

Aiming to improve its emails campaigns for better quality leads, automated marketing helps Reuters to redirect its sales and marketings team leading to improvement of customer segment and targeting. As a result, the company’s sales increase by 23% while conversion time increased by 72%.

McAfee Marketing Campaign

A well-known software publisher “McAfee anti-virus” software was also one of the companies that employed digital marketing automation to improve its conversion rate.

Sending mass emails can lead a company with enormous leads, however, the leads are not always presented as qualified. After using automation, McAfee was able to increase its conversion rate 3 times higher and generate far better leads by providing the right information to its customers at the right time.

How Has Marketing Automation Affected the Job Market?

Over the past few years, the interest in marketing automation tools has increased, and marketing automation has been one of the fastest-growing technologies in Canada.

A 2020 survey from Research and Markets predicted that by 2027, the global marketing market size would reach $8.42 billion. Additionally, the spending on marketing automation tools is expected to grow tremendously to approximately $25.1 billion annually by 2023.

According to The ultimate Marketing Automation stats, 51% of companies use marketing automation, and more than 58% of B2B companies say they are planning to integrate the technology.

At the same time, Forrester found that marketing automation tools are no longer used only in big companies. But it has become more commonly used by small and medium-sized businesses.

Marketing automation becomes a crucial investment for companies to compete on a larger scale. As a result, the demand for automation specialists is skyrocketing. Companies of all sizes are now searching for skilled marketing automation specialists to plan and manage marketing automation.

Tips to Prepare Yourself for the Marketing Automation Career Path

1. Gain digital marketing certification in marketing technology (MarTech)

To become a marketing automation specialist, you need a wide range of marketing and technical skills. Getting a formal education will help guide you to start your career in marketing automation, especially when you do not have previous marketing knowledge.

Cornerstone College offers Digital Marketing Specialist Co-op Diploma for you to begin your career in the digital marketing industry.

Our Digital Marketing Specialist Co-op Diploma covers all online digital marketing courses such as Google web analytics, WordPress development, SEO, online marketing strategies, social media marketing, and online displays with search engine business approaches.

On top of that, you can sharpen your skills with our Advanced Digital Marketing Co-op Diploma, which covers the latest topics such as advanced digital marketing strategies, marketing automation, advertising strategies, and growth marketing.

2. Learn what skills you need from professionals on LinkedIn

The easiest and most effective way is to browse LinkedIn profiles to see what skills people in the marketing automation field have in common. According to Swiftdigital, these are skills that are commonly needed in marketing automation:

1. Tech-savvy
2. Communication skills
3. Content creation
4. Creative writing
5. Data analytic
6. Project Management
7. Data-driven decision making
8. Understanding of the use of database

3. Get familiar with marketing automation software

Knowing how to manage marketing automation software will kick start your career paths farther than your competition. With our Advanced Digital Marketing Co-op Diploma, you will acquire digital marketing certifications, such as Semrush, Hubspot and Hootsuite.

Best Free Marketing Automation Platforms

There are dozens of marketing automation platforms and each of them has some features that make their marketing tools special to be used efficiently.

Any marketing platform that we mention below will maximize marketing automation benefits for your business goals.

Let’s check some of them together to get some idea about which marketing automation tool is the best option for your business or industry.

HubSpot Marketing Automation

HubSpot is an advanced marketing automation software that offers a free trial. The tool also provides an upgrade version to access many more marketing features such as SEO suggestions, personalized messages, call to action, and much more.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the inexpensive and easy-to-use tools in the market out there. The tool facilitates functions to create, execute, analyze emails and ads. In addition, there are functions that users can use to manage subscribers, view click-through rates, generate customized reports and track emails.

SendinBlue

SendinBlue is a powerful marketing tool designed for universal use. With the functions available in SendinBlue, users can create clean and professional newsletters, custom forms and contact fields and more. The free email marketing plan allows users to send 300 emails per day and store unlimited contacts.

Drip

Drip is An email and SMS marketing automation platform building for an e-commerce business. The platform allows companies to collect customer data, customized emails and SMS sent directly to customer devices.

The platform offers a free trial period for the company to explore pre-built options such as an abandoned cart, after purchase emails and welcome emails.

BenchmarkONE

Like other digital marketing automation software,  BenchmarkONE offers a free plan where users can optimize tag functions based on customers’ interests and the stage of their journeys. The platform also allows users to create more lead generation and provides email marketing basics.

GoViral

Affiliate marketing is the main concept of the GoViral platform. The software encourages the company’s subscribers to refer the product/service to their friends and reward a bonus in return.

The platform is totally free and is the best match for small to medium companies that want to gain more audiences and buyers.

Q&A for Digital Marketing Automation

Conclusion for Marketing Automation

If you are thinking about working in marketing automation – don’t wait.

As the marketing automation trend becomes more and more relevant. You can benefit from gaining knowledge for your future career or career shift.

It is also crucial for you who are planning to build a business in the future.