In digital marketing, marketing automation refers to a set of processes and techniques that streamlines all the activities involved in presenting your business to prospective clients and customers. It involves the use of special technology and software to manage all your marketing needs and content including emails, social media and website posts, campaigns, pitches, and many more.
Automating your marketing processes involves collecting relevant data, experiences, and preferences and using this information as a workflow to target the right customers on the internet. These messages could either be emails (promotional and not spam), SMS/MMS, direct messages, and general content seen on social media, each one tailored to a particular customer’s journey with your brand at any stage of the B2C and B2B relationship. Instead of sending out tailored emails one-by-one to thousands of prospective leads, hoping to make a few conversions, the software can do all the gritty work for you and increase your chances by a statistical 20%.
Essentially, marketing automation increases efficiency, maximizes profit, and streamlines the entire marketing process for any brand or business.
Blocking out unnecessary complexity
With technology advancing so rapidly, the digital marketing industry is becoming far too complicated and difficult to maneuver for a lot of people. The whole point of automating your marketing processes is to make your life easier and streamline the foundation of your entire business operation. Of course, it shouldn’t be a complicated thing to do. Through a single interface of any chosen software, you can schedule email drops, manage all your subscriber information and interactions, and create excellent campaigns through a single button click.
Essentially, a good deal of what is required has already been worked into some pretty advanced platforms and technologies. Also, there are specialized teams of people who work to take all the marketing issues off your hands.
According to Madhu Gulati, an Indian-American entrepreneur and CEO, a businessperson shouldn’t have to spend thousands of hours every day trying to navigate the world of marketing, often having a frustrating time making any solid progress. For many people, even with all the outstanding technology available today, the processes are still as complicated as ever.
Madhu is the founder and CEO of Marrina Decisions, a US-based marketing operations agency focused on helping B2C and B2B firms coordinate their marketing automation and operational activities, all targeted at increasing visibility, demand generation, sales and marketing funnel preparation, building solid customer networks, and increasing ROI exponentially.
“Technology without humans causes problems because technology is only as good as the humans who manage it,” says Madhu. “It does not have to cause headaches – it should take them away. So, in pursuit of happiness, I found a bunch of people who love technology as much as I do. Together, we decided to enjoy our 90,000 hours at work and help you enjoy yours too. You leave the technology to us and get back to what you’re here to do.”
A standard marketing automation team uses software such as Adobe’s Marketo Engage, Eloqua, Pardot, Sales Force Marketing Cloud, and/or several more to manage marketing processes by identifying the right customers through behavior tracking, building and scaling campaigns with great ease, and determining how each step in the system impacts revenue.
At Marrina Decisions, some of the services include marketing campaign managed services, Marketo-managed services, Marketo optimization, email marketing services, Marketo migration and quick launch, and other data services. When working with a proper team of trained marketing automation certified experts, you gain access to other additional services including “auditing of existing systems, mapping out migration strategies, campaign design and scoring, evaluation of data cleanliness, reviewing client competency for migration, testing and conducting of performance reviews, and finally, inventory on all of your assets, campaigns, processes, and data to be migrated.”
“Marketing should be one of the most easily enjoyed aspects of business and entrepreneurship,” said Madhu, a past employee of Market2Lead and Marketo, now the CEO of Marrina Decisions, partner of Adobe. “Sadly, the complexities that arise with technology or simply the ‘fear of tech’ often makes it a dreadful process for so many people. Automating your systems or letting a fully functional team handle it for you is often the quickest step to unlocking the full benefits of digital marketing for quick ROI.”
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