What Is Marketing Automation? A Comprehensive Guide

The last decade has seen major shifts in the way buyers engage with brands—especially in business-to-business (B2B) markets. With so many more media channels than in past years, and information so much more abundantly available, buyers are now more in control, operating under the radar and only engaging with sales teams when they’re ready to buy.

That change has shifted the balance between sales and marketing for most businesses: Marketing is now responsible for more of a company’s selling process. And marketing automation has emerged as a key platform of choice to help organizations embrace these changes. Marketing automation gives marketers the power to automate multichannel campaign delivery, collaborate better with sales, generate higher-quality leads, drive measurable revenue delivery, and measure return on marketing investment (ROMI).

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is software that helps businesses manage their marketing activities with minimal human intervention, improving operational efficiency. Automation allows marketers to plan, coordinate, deploy, and measure campaigns throughout the customer lifecycle, including initial and ongoing emails, social media interactions, web pages, content downloads, mobile notifications, and text messages.

Marketing automation uses data on the existing relationship between a brand and its prospects and customers to improve conversion rates through targeted and well-timed communications, content, offers, and product suggestions. It captures behavioral patterns, such as browsing and purchase history, so the system can automatically trigger relevant communications at key stages of the buyer journey. For example, after a prospect downloads a whitepaper, the system can automatically add them to a nurture sequence that delivers increasingly targeted content based on their ongoing engagement patterns, eventually routing them to sales when they’re most likely to buy.

Key Takeaways

• Marketing automation can transform marketing and sales integration to improve lead quality, conversion, and revenue generation.
• It automates customer journeys, delivering the right content, at the right time, in the right channel.
• It can help companies understand more about customers through advanced data tools and strategies.
• Standardized campaign processes, designs, and user flows help improve marketing efficiencies.
• With marketing automation, organizations can more effectively track and measure ROMI to prove the value of marketing to the business.

Marketing Automation Explained

Marketing automation allows businesses to deliver advanced digital, customer-centric marketing by effectively managing the dialogue with prospects and customers. It does this through campaigns that can be deployed to support different engagement strategies at key stages of each potential customer’s buyer journey. Marketing automation provides the core functionality for organizations to target buyers through advanced profiling and segmentation strategies, to connect media and channels to landing pages for lead generation, to gain insight through visitor tracking and lead-scoring approaches, and to nurture leads to create sales-ready opportunities.

Companies that effectively link marketing and sales processes while configuring their marketing automation platforms with an agreed-upon demand waterfall model—the mapping, definition, and alignment of key stages of the buyer journey and sales process to provide a consistent view for marketing and sales teams—can effectively manage and track funnel performance and unlock trackable revenue growth. Crucially, the best marketing automation deployments are dynamically iterative—the system and the marketers who use it continuously learn what works best and what doesn’t from the ongoing dialogue with prospects and customers and then continuously improve the marketing automation system based on what they learn.

With marketing automation, data-driven trigger campaigns (newsletter campaigns, welcome campaigns, keep-close campaigns, onboarding campaigns) can be automated based on user behavior or defined events, allowing standard processes and customer touches to be optimized and automated. For example, a process could be activated to automatically send welcome emails to prospects a set number of days following the completion of a contact-request form.

Marketing Automation vs CRM: What’s the Difference?

Marketing automation software is used by marketers primarily for campaign automation, management, and deployment, whereas CRM software is used by sales teams to manage the customer contact and pipeline process, including lead routing, contact and task management, lead status management, opportunity tracking, and revenue reporting. In addition, customer service teams use CRM software to track incoming customer complaints and share data on customer status, common issues and resolutions, and patterns that emerge among different groups. In organizations that lack full-fledged marketing automation systems, marketers may also use CRM software to manage campaigns but less comprehensively.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

A marketing automation platform monitors each interaction between a company and its prospects, then uses that data to trigger different events at specific times. For example, the system can send a push notification during a sale for an item a customer has expressed interest in or send an email about an upcoming event to customers who’ve attended similar events in the past. While marketing workflows vary with each business and their marketing platform, most marketing automation processes follow a similar sequence:

1. Event trigger: First, a prospect takes an action that initiates the automation—filling out a web form, downloading content, clicking an ad, interacting with a social media post, or visiting a specific webpage, for instance. This event signals initial interest and the system records the prospect’s information and behaviors to build a comprehensive profile. Many businesses incentivize customers to share their contact information in exchange for access to content, such as whitepapers or ebooks, that the system releases after collecting information.
2. Automation activation: Based on the type of trigger event, the platform activates a preconfigured workflow, such as a welcome email, a multistep nurture sequence, or a webinar invitation. Rules built into the system determine which paths the prospect is most likely to follow based on their profile, behavior, and established trends.
3. Lead segmenting and tracking: As prospects open emails, visit web pages, attend events, make purchases, or engage with content, the system tracks each interaction and updates their marketing profiles. Using this behavioral data, often contextualized with other business information (company size, industry, and job title), the platform segments prospects into groups and assigns lead scores that inform future conversion tactics.
4. Personalized content delivery: Based on a prospect’s customer segment and lead score, the system delivers targeted content aimed at moving them further through the sales funnel. For instance, a CFO might receive ROI-focused case studies, while a technical buyer will likely be more interested in integration specifications. This personalization extends across email, website experiences, targeted ads, suggested video content, and other channels.
5. Sales hand-off and continuous improvement: When a prospect’s lead score reaches a predetermined threshold, the system notifies the sales team and transfers the prospect’s full engagement history to the CRM tool. Sales reps can then follow up on the specific content and pages that resonated most, tracking their outreach efforts in the same system as the initial marketing. Meanwhile, marketers can analyze performance data through automated reports, comparing campaigns with conversion rates to refine workflows, messaging, content creation, and scoring models over time.

Marketing Automation Components

The core components needed to build and activate campaigns in a marketing automation platform include:

• Contact data: This involves uploading, importing, or syncing data from CRM systems and leveraging the marketing automation platform’s core functionality to build data segments that reflect your target audience.
• Campaign flows, nurtures, and triggers: Each step within a campaign flow will need emails, which are triggered based on prospect action or specific time intervals. Emails will need to link to landing pages that contain embedded forms to capture data and activate additional campaign steps and flows.
• High-value content: Automated campaign flows, nurtures, and triggers only work if the marketing automation platform is populated with an appropriate amount of content that is genuinely useful to prospects. The more granularly defined the campaign’s audience segments, the larger the number of discrete content assets that are required to power the campaign, and the more narrowly targeted they must be for each prospective persona.
• Lead-scoring models: To automate the process of when leads are passed to sales, a lead-scoring model is needed that combines profile fit and behavioral attributes to identify leads that have the highest propensity to convert.

By combining these components, a marketer could, for example, easily build a campaign to invite prospects to a seminar. A list would be uploaded with the key contacts a company wants to target. These contacts would then be added to a simple campaign flow that sends an invite email directing users to a landing page that outlines the agenda and contains a form so they can register their interest in attending. Once registered, an email confirmation would be sent, and reminders would then be automatically triggered at key dates in the build-up to the event. With an active lead-scoring model in place, each prospect’s interactions with the website content could be tracked, and sales could be alerted to the most highly engaged of those prospects.

Why Is Marketing Automation Important?

Manually collecting prospect data, tracking behavior across channels, personalizing content, and timing follow-ups require a sizeable team of marketing experts that most companies simply can’t support. Companies that build automated workflows into their marketing operations gain competitive advantages by offering high-quality experiences tailored to each customer’s needs at scale. And as the market shifts, teams can quickly adapt or grow operations without proportionally increasing headcount.

Marketing automation connects marketing, sales, and management under one system. This integration gives all teams visibility into the same pipeline and customer data when working with both new prospects and established customers. For marketers, automation aligns marketing efforts with earned revenue in real time, demonstrating ROMI to justify future marketing strategies and investments. Sales teams, meanwhile, gain higher-quality leads with detailed engagement histories that help salespeople give customers personalized attention and accelerate deal cycles. For management, this visibility helps create more detailed and accurate forecasts and enhances decision-making.

Who Uses Marketing Automation?

Businesses of all sizes automate some aspects of their marketing, with widespread automation common in midsize and large enterprises. For B2B companies with complex, multitouch sales cycles, automation helps marketing teams nurture prospects over extended periods without losing the attention to detail customers expect when placing large orders or working with long-term partners. Business-to-consumer companies rely on automated marketing processes to engage customers at scale, develop more personalized and far-reaching marketing campaigns, increase retention and conversion without increasing marketing and sales overhead, and quickly adapt to seasonal trends to stay ahead of the competition.

At the employee level, marketing automation is used by a number of roles, divided into strategy and technical teams. On the strategy side, the following positions commonly use automation to plan campaigns, create content, nurture leads, and refine strategies:

• Demand-generation managers: This role designs lead-acquisition campaigns, develops nurturing strategies, defines audience segments, and sets overall marketing goals for automated processes. Some companies may have a “lead-generation manager” instead, with the same responsibilities.
• Campaign managers: These team members orchestrate multichannel, automated campaigns, coordinating timing across email, social media, paid media, and events. They also monitor ongoing performance to assess successes and address underperforming elements.
• Content marketers: Marketing campaigns need assets—whitepapers, webinars, case studies, articles—and content marketers are the creative force that produces the brand-aligned content that automated workflows push to prospects and customers.
• Marketing operations specialists: These specialists manage the data that feeds marketing automation by building audience segments, analyzing campaign metrics, and offering recommendations to content marketers based on performance and expected demands. Their work includes prelaunch development and ongoing analysis after campaigns go live.
• Email marketers: Similar to content marketers, email marketers craft and optimize email content in line with the business’s communication style and priorities. They also conduct A/B testing to refine subject lines and messaging, developing segmentation strategies to target the right audiences. Their work includes writing eye-catching subject lines and engaging body text and scheduling emails with automated send sequences for carefully timed distribution.

On the technical side, there are three core roles that use the marketing automation system:

• System architect: Typically, this is a technical role held by someone trained to be an expert in the platform and who’s capable of configuring all core functionality including data rules, processes, steps, and triggers. This person will be the system administrator who maintains operational efficiency and data compliance.
• Web developer: This role includes the HTML development of emails and landing pages and their integration with website pages. This person will also guarantee that tracking scripts are in place, forms are configured, and integrations can be connected to third-party applications, such as CRM systems.
• Campaign builder: With the advanced settings in place, this role is responsible for building, activating, and reporting on all the campaigns required by the organization.

What Problems Does Marketing Automation Solve?

Marketing automation’s power is its ability to drive value in numerous areas, solve everyday marketing challenges, and help companies create excellent customer experiences that drive marketing efficiencies and growth. The biggest problems it can overcome include:

• Low lead volumes: With marketing automation, organizations can target, engage, and nurture buyers. Landing pages hosting gated content can boost the volume of leads a company generates.
• Poor lead quality: A lack of quality data makes it harder to profile buyers and assess lead quality. By activating campaign tracking and standardizing data-capture fields, businesses can confirm they’re capturing the right prospect information and behavioral intelligence.
• Lack of customer insight: By tracking campaign engagement across content, buyer journey stages, and personas, brands can gain deeper insight into the profile of their buyers. Those insights can lead to improved media, content, and messaging.
• Maintaining customer contact: Building a dialogue with customers to maintain brand awareness can be time-consuming and costly. With templated campaign flows and emails, such as newsletters and product updates, providing regular communication, marketing automation makes it easier and quicker to maintain customer contact.
• Data compliance: Without a compliant database that reflects the privacy regulations protecting prospects and customers, brands risk violating Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and similar regulations in different jurisdictions around the world. By building compliant forms with standard opt-in rules and contact preference centers, companies can maintain compliance and build more effective and marketable databases.
• Lack of ROI measurement: Tracking the ROI of marketing activities and campaigns is always a challenge. With CRM integration, campaign tracking, and tagging built into marketing automation, organizations can attribute closed business to the campaigns that generated the opportunities, making ROI a reality.
• Disconnected marketing and sales funnel: Marketing and sales typically operate in silos, making it hard to align on a single marketing and sales funnel. Marketing automation forces both teams to collaborate and build one view of the funnel, agreeing on lead definitions, processes, roles and responsibilities, and internal service-level agreements (SLAs).

What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation’s benefits are typically focused on three primary outcomes: improving marketing efficiency, reducing costs, and growing revenue. The following benefits demonstrate how companies use marketing automation in these key areas to improve their customer acquisition and conversion rates and increase the revenue each customer brings in through upsells and cross-sells.

• Handles repetitive tasks:

  Marketing involves a significant number of repetitive tasks—sending follow-up emails, updating contact records, classifying audiences, and generating reports, to name a few. Automation offloads these tasks from human marketers, giving them more time to focus on strategy, creative development, direct prospect and customer interactions, and high-value activities that require judgment. For example, rather than manually sending a welcome email to every new subscriber, marketers can build a single workflow that executes it thousands of times, updating it as needed when new priorities arise. Automated compliance tools also keep marketing records in line with accounting and regulatory standards for more reliable reporting.

• Scales operations:

  Marketers use automation to scale output without proportionally scaling resources or staff. With the right system, teams can manage campaigns for 100,000 leads using the same tools they used to manage 1,000. Reusable email templates, landing pages, and automated nurture paths allow marketers to launch new campaigns quickly, adapting proven frameworks rather than building from scratch every time.

• Improves customer experience:

  Buyers expect relevant, timely communication when interacting with businesses. Automation helps marketing teams generate personalized messages based on each customer’s behavior, preferences, profile, and stage in the buyer journey in a fraction of the time it would take with manual tools. When a prospect downloads a security-focused whitepaper, for example, their next marketing email can speak to specific concerns that the company’s offerings address, rather than a generic pitch filled with information they already know or have no interest in. This relevance builds trust and leads to faster and larger purchase decisions than one-size-fits-all messaging.

• Enhances analytics and insights:

  Marketing automation platforms track every interaction a prospect has with a company’s marketing efforts, no matter how small—every email open, click, page visit, content download, or inquiry provides marketers with a detailed view of what’s working and what isn’t. Rather than waiting weeks to assess campaigns, teams can use real-time performance monitoring to identify underperforming assets and adjust strategies before more resources are committed to ineffective efforts. Furthermore, integrating marketing systems into sales and CRM platforms allows marketers to attribute closed revenue to specific campaigns to inform future investments, forecast revenue, and demonstrate ROI to leadership.

Challenges of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation projects are considered change management projects, considering all of the significant organizational challenges they entail. This is because of the number of different teams and stakeholders throughout the organization that need to buy into the marketing automation plan, contribute to the project’s development, and adjust their business processes in accordance. It’s not an overstatement to say that a well-executed marketing automation plan will likely transform the way a company goes to market. To help minimize risk and achieve a successful project delivery, consider the following challenges:

• Team alignment: The successful deployment of marketing automation platforms requires alignment of various teams, including marketing, sales, data, CRM, IT, website, and analytics. Clarify that all stakeholders know their role and what’s required to contribute to the success of the project.
• Management buy-in: Senior management may be skeptical of the value of marketing automation, so it’s critical to define clear goals, benefits, outcomes, key performance indicators (KPIs), and a business case that outlines the business value and return to the organization.
• Sales team buy-in: Marketing automation has the biggest impact on sales teams that are used to traditional ways of selling and owning the customer relationship. The concept of marketing automation and new digital techniques, such as lead scoring and nurturing, will feel daunting to some, so be prepared to share proof points and educational content that demonstrates the value to them.
• Marketing and sales integration: Without both teams pulling in the same direction and agreeing on a single marketing and sales funnel and related SLAs, your project will be hobbled. Both stakeholder groups should be involved from day one and understand the roles and responsibilities you envisage for each group.
• Having enough content: Without high-value content (ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc.) that prospects and customers are prepared to register and share their personal data for, the value of marketing automation is suspect, at best. To build a continuous dialogue from first touch to conversion, you need enough content to support the different stages of the buyer journey and effective behavioral lead scoring.
• Technical integrations: Integration with numerous platforms will be required to help build a deeper 360-degree view of the customer. The most important and critical step to effective and seamless data exchange is CRM integration. Field mapping, data processing, and data synchronization rules will need to be defined to establish a strong foundation for full funnel visibility.
• Lead quality: Don’t expect marketing automation to be a lead machine overnight. It takes time to build the optimum lead-scoring model that reflects the target customer profile and level of buyer behavior. It will require constant review, adjustment, and engagement with sales to arrive at the ideal model.

9 Common Marketing Automation Features

Marketing automation platforms provide functionality that can be configured to support the specific marketing requirements and use cases of virtually any organization. They typically include the following features:

1. Database and segment builders
2. Campaign management
3. Landing pages and forms
4. Lead-scoring models
5. Lead nurturing and campaign flows
6. Lead alerts and routing
7. Visitor tracking
8. Real-time synchronization of lead data
9. Measurement and analytics

1. Database and segment builders: Working with these tools, marketers select from firmographic and behavioral data to filter and identify individuals that reflect the targeting criteria for their campaigns. By selecting prospects based on job roles, company revenue levels, and geographies, and overlaying that with data about which contacts have opened emails or visited key web pages within a certain timeframe, marketers can easily identify prospect segments aligned to a given campaign’s needs.
2. Campaign management: Campaign management tools allow marketers to build campaigns that consist of multiple assets, including emails, landing pages, and forms, and even integrate with wider channels. Campaign management tools let you replicate and adjust parameters to support different types of campaigns—newsletters, product launches, event invites, content promotions—making it easy to repurpose at scale. This drives campaign efficiencies, reduces costs, and helps marketing teams deliver campaigns at speed. A/B testing, personalization, and dynamic content are typical features within campaign management tools.
3. Landing pages and forms: Landing page templates provide conversion optimized experiences for lead generation from referring channels, such as search, social, and digital advertising. Capturing prospect data in return for value-based content helps organizations convert anonymous website visitors to leads. Lead-capture forms with progressive profiling (soft conversion) allows you to capture more prospect detail with each content conversion. Landing pages that focus on a specific offer, call to action, and high-value content experiences drive greater conversion, bringing more prospects into the funnel.
4. Lead-scoring models: Lead scoring is an automated process that qualifies prospects based on their profile fit (using data captured through forms) and digital behavior (interactions with campaigns, web pages, and content). By combining these scores, you can start to rank and prioritize leads, identifying those that have reached the marketing qualified lead (MQL) threshold and should be handed off to sales. To start building a lead-scoring model, consider the most important profile attributes that describe your perfect customer, such as job roles, seniority levels, company revenue, or employee size levels. Then identify the key web pages that you believe indicate high levels of buyer intent—such as case studies and cost calculators—and score those pages in terms of levels of importance. When both are combined, you have the ideal customer profile to start lead scoring against.
5. Lead nurturing and campaign flows: Lead nurturing is the process of creating multistep campaigns that drip-feed relevant content and messages at the appropriate stage of the customer journey, orchestrated across multiple channels. This is typically done through drag-and-drop journey builders through which marketers set and automate activities based on user behavior. When planning lead-nurturing campaigns, think about the stages of the customer journey (awareness, interest, learn, etc.) that nurturing emails will be triggered for, and then align content assets with those different stages. Think about how long a prospect might stay at each stage of the journey, as this will determine the email cadence required to build a dialogue and maintain contact.
6. Lead alerts and routing: When a lead has been created, automated processes can determine who the lead should be routed to and notify that person. This is also the point where the lead will be transferred to a CRM to allow for lead qualification and lead stage management. Lead alerts typically include the prospect data, overall lead score, and recent campaign activity with which the prospect engaged.
7. Visitor tracking: Tracking visitors allows marketers to understand their prospect and customer behavior. It includes referring media channels, email opens, clicks, website visit recency and frequency, pages accessed, and content engaged with or downloaded. This not only provides deep insight into your audience profiles and personas but allows you to build a 360-degree view of the customer. Opening the data via dashboards can help sales teams more quickly build a profile of the buyer, yielding more accurate sales approaches and delivery of more relevant and engaging communication.
8. Real-time synchronization of lead data: Synchronize lead history to and from CRM and marketing automation systems to keep prospect information up to date, including lead information and the historical record of customer interactions on all digital channels. This gives salespeople an accurate picture of the prospect’s journey and most recent engagement with the brand, so that follow-up communication can be tailored based on the content and website pages with which they engaged.
9. Measurement and analytics: Campaign reports help analyze data on user behavior, content engagement, multichannel interactions, and campaign efficiency. What’s more, metrics-oriented dashboards make it easier for marketers to track and attribute all marketing efforts and prospect conversions through the various funnel stages, creating the opportunity for marketing teams to provide real ROI. By understanding the prospect conversion metrics through each funnel stage, marketers can start to predict future campaign performance and outcomes more accurately, as well as the levels of investment required to achieve those outcomes.

Typical Marketing Automation Integrations

Nearly all marketing automation platforms provide integration capability in the form of APIs that make it easy to connect different platforms within a marketing technology stack, integrating data to build a 360-degree view of the customer. Integrations typically fall into three categories:

• Third-party integrations: These are integrations through APIs that connect the most common CRM, analytics, and website platforms to marketing automation systems. However, they usually require technical resources to configure data transfers with API calls or file imports/exports.
• App clouds: These are app libraries compiled and authorized by the marketing automation vendor. They include prebuilt, out-of-the-box app connectors that unlock seamless integration with the most popular content, personalization, webinar, event, and data tools.
• Marketing clouds: The most advanced marketing automation platforms from the leading providers also have wider CRM, personalization, content, analytics, and customer data platforms. These are part of the same product family and can be bought individually or connected as a holistic, integrated marketing platform. They provide marketers with an advanced marketing technology solution that meets the needs of more sophisticated use cases.

Common marketing automation integrations across these three categories include:

• CRM tools: The most common and critical marketing automation integration, CRM integration helps manage contact, lead, and opportunity data across both platforms. It also allows effective tracking of KPIs, pipeline value, and overall ROMI measurement.
• Website systems: Marketing automation tracking scripts, landing pages, and forms will all need integrating within your website so you can track user behavior and capture lead data and referring media channels for effective attribution.
• Data tools: With data at the core of marketing automation, data cleansing, enrichment, and augmentation tools will help you to build and maintain audience data. This data is key to building advanced audience segments, personalization, and dynamic content.
• Webinar platforms: Content is critical to audience engagement and conversion, and webinars are one of the most frequently used content formats because they’re very good at securing high-quality leads and sales dialogue. Integrations allow marketers to build pre- and post-webinar email nurture streams, with triggers based on user engagement.
• Content tools: Integration of digital asset management and sales platforms makes it easier for marketers to add content to email and landing pages from one central content library.
• Data management platforms (DMPs): For organizations with advanced media and programmatic needs, integrations with DMPs allow third-party data to be infused into their marketing automation platforms. The data can be used to build advanced audience segments for media targeting and remarketing.

Marketing Automation Example

A hypothetical B2B electronics distributor plans to host a webinar to generate leads among enterprise prospects. First, the marketing team uploads a target contact list into the marketing automation platform to add all relevant contacts to the campaign while the event team writes the announcement details. Once these assets are scheduled, the system sends an initial invite email with a direct link to a landing page that lists the event agenda alongside a registration form. When a prospect registers, the platform automatically sends a confirmation email and schedules reminder messages at key dates before the event with an increasingly detailed itinerary and instructions. Meanwhile, the content marketing team creates additional assets related to the event’s topic for the automated system to post on the company’s website and social media at ideal times throughout the marketing campaign to bring in additional prospects.

Behind the scenes, a lead-scoring model tracks each prospect through metrics like page visits, email opens, additional content downloads, and website searches for related content, assigning scores to each prospect based on engagement. As prospects cross predefined thresholds, the system alerts the sales team and passes along this data, allowing reps to follow up with context about the topics that most resonated.

After the webinar, the platform triggers a follow-up nurture sequence for attendees, delivering related content designed to move them further through the funnel. This includes an automated onboarding process for interested customers, as well as ongoing content subscriptions that allow users to opt in to varying levels of content focused on topics that interest them. Throughout this entire process, the system monitors campaign performance in real time to refine messaging, timing, ad spend, segmentation, regulatory reporting, and scoring criteria based on incoming data and ongoing analysis.

Many businesses use similar automated workflows for product launches, ongoing newsletter campaigns, loyalty campaigns, customer onboarding programs, and other marketing initiatives.

Getting Started With Marketing Automation

Despite the many benefits of marketing automation, relatively few companies have achieved excellent deployments because of the organizational challenges that must be overcome. Chief among these are business process change management and the need for close collaboration among multiple departments—especially marketing and sales. Beyond that, there’s the need for technical acumen, rigorous management, and an attitude of continuous improvement. Taking all this into account, the most successful marketing automation deployments usually start small and are run by teams prepared to build quickly on initial proofs of concept.

Here’s a step-by-step high-level plan for deploying marketing automation:

1. Pick a small pilot campaign, in one region, with a small team of people to prove the value before wider rollout.
2. Align management and sales stakeholder goals with marketers’, making sure each is clear on the short- and long-term marketing automation benefits to expect.
3. Define the outcomes you seek, in terms of leads or pipeline, sales increase, retention, or growth.
4. Develop the blueprint for achieving those goals, defined in terms of the personas that influence or decide purchase; the different buyer journeys each of those personas pursues; the content and messages that will influence them, rationally and/or emotionally, at each stage of each persona’s journey; and the trigger events that indicate transitions between journey stages. This is the essence of the “nurture stream.”
5. Test your assumptions about personas, their journeys, and their content needs via digital body language analysis and predictive modeling, using the results to refine your personas and enhance all levels of the blueprint.
6. Get consensus from marketing and sales stakeholders on the initial lead-scoring approach, and what characteristics constitute a qualified lead. Plan to make this a “living document” that evolves during execution to embrace new insights into prospect behavior.
7. Begin execution—program the blueprint into the marketing automation system you’ve chosen, commission the content, build the initial audience database and/or launch awareness campaigns that draw people into the nurture stream.
8. In two to four weeks, plan a round of campaign optimization based on immediate results. At this stage, assess email open rates, click-through rates, subject line performance, and performance of key content assets and make adjustments to tweak performance.
9. After six months or so (actual timing is based on the duration of your customer’s expected buyer journey), analyze results against stakeholders’ goals to see what benefits accrued and what learning you can use to improve/optimize the nurture stream. If you’ve integrated your CRM, you can evaluate stats like pipeline value and revenue closed.
10. Based on the attributes of your successful pilot, build a business case for expanding marketing automation to more business units and regions.
11. Consider connecting your marketing automation system to additional data sources and technologies to improve the sophistication of campaign delivery and orchestration and to build a more complete picture of customer profiles.

11 Steps to Getting Started With Marketing Automation

Four Marketing Automation Best Practices

In the best deployments, marketing automation becomes a self-learning process. These four best practices all leverage data produced by the marketing automation system in processes that aim to improve the system’s performance:

1. Review lead-scoring models at key intervals: Scoring models will need refining based on the volume of leads being generated and their overall quality. It takes time to arrive at the ideal lead-scoring model and to find the right tolerances to trigger quality MQLs. Define when marketing and sales will meet to review lead, opportunity, and pipeline performance.
2. Continually improve data quality: Without quality data, your marketing machine is like an engine making do with dirty oil. Define processes to keep data clean, enriched, and compliant with relevant regulations. Building customer preference centers can help keep data fresh by allowing customers to update their contact records and select the communications they want to receive.
3. Define KPIs for measuring funnel conversion: Tracking the progression of contacts through each stage of the marketing/sales funnel (for example, suspect to prospect, prospect to MQL, MQL to sales-accepted lead) allows marketing and sales to identify average conversion percentages. Those percentages can then be used to help forecast future pipeline and sales outcomes at the campaign planning stages.
4. Continually refine, adapt, and build new content: Over time, you will start to understand what types and formats of content convert prospects to customers, and what prospects prefer to engage with at different stages of the customer journey. This will help you build out more advanced content strategies for different personas and journey stages.

Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Software

Selecting the right marketing automation platform is a balancing act of cost, functionality, and support. Create a scoring system outlining your key requirements to make it easier to <<<<<<< HEAD compare and prioritize the following considerations among your potential vendors:

• Functionality: Although most marketing automation platforms provide similar functionality, not all are equal. Prioritize the functionality you need based on the use cases most relevant to your organizational goals. Use cases could include, for example, deploying programmatic media, targeting and engaging audiences on mobile devices, incorporating dynamic content within web environments—or all of the above. By understanding your digital marketing priorities and the use cases that will support them, you can identify the most important functionality aligned with your marketing automation roadmap. You can use this information to create scenarios for vendors to respond to as part of your procurement process, giving each vendor an opportunity to demonstrate how it would deliver on the scale and depth of your exact requirements.
• Integrations: Integration with your existing tech stack is critical, as is the ability to plug in new tools as your marketing automation efforts scale and your organization’s maturity increases. Confirm that the levels of integration and customizations that you require can be supported now and in the future. Use cases that will be most dependent on integrations are the ability to connect with other advertising technologies (adtech) and marketing technologies (martech) to activate data-driven media and the ability to build out a prioritized tech stack customized to the growth needs and marketing maturity aspirations of the organization.
• Product development: Marketing automation isn’t something you want to switch out or upgrade often, so you need a platform whose vendor is going to continually innovate and adapt along with the continually shifting marketing landscape. Consider vendors with sufficient research and development/innovation roadmaps, releasing new functionalities at key cycles. For example, ask how they’re adapting to advances in predictive analytics, machine learning, and AI—all of which are important at various stages of the marketing automation process.
• Training and support: The ability of the vendor to provide support and education is just as important as the platform they provide. The success of your implementation will be in large part due to the onboarding and upskilling of the teams that will manage the platform within the company. Check if vendors have active user communities, user groups, and continual learning and educational content.
• License and cost model: Different vendors price and license their marketing automation platforms based on a combination of variables, including database size, email send volumes, number of marketing users, functionality, and integrations. Choose platforms you can still afford as you scale, or you could end up locked into an agreement and platform with an unrealistic and unachievable TCO.

Grow Your Business With NetSuite’s Marketing Automation Software

Marketing teams that rely on disconnected tools for campaign management, lead tracking, and sales handoff often struggle to connect revenue to specific efforts and identify which prospects deserve immediate attention. NetSuite CRM marketing automation consolidates these functions into a unified, scalable platform with purpose-built automation tools that help marketing teams segment audiences, deploy multichannel campaigns, capture leads through native web forms, and score prospects based on engagement. NetSuite’s real-time data sync and reporting capabilities align marketing efforts with sales and finance records to optimize marketing spend throughout each campaign. With built-in analytics that monitor campaign ROI from a prospect’s first interaction to completed sales, teams can directly track each campaign’s impact on revenue and make faster, better-informed investment decisions.

NetSuite’s Marketing Automation Dashboard

Marketing automation has the capability to transform the way a brand goes to market. It provides an always-on demand engine that automates customer experiences and continually generates sales-ready leads. It unites marketing and sales behind a single funnel and provides the functionality to accelerate marketing revenue generation and track ROMI. For marketers who are serious about embracing digital marketing, marketing automation could potentially be their most potent tool.

Marketing Automation FAQs

What is marketing automation used for?

======= compare and prioritize among your potential vendors.

Functionality. Although most marketing automation platforms provide very similar functionality, not all are equal. Prioritize the functionality you need based on the use cases most relevant to your organizational goals. Use cases could include, for example, deploying programmatic media, targeting and engaging audiences on mobile devices, incorporating dynamic content within web environments — or all of the above. By understanding your digital marketing priorities and the use cases that will support them, you can identify the most important functionality aligned with your marketing automation roadmap. You can use this information to create scenarios for vendors to respond to as part of your procurement process, giving each vendor an opportunity to demonstrate how it would deliver on the scale and depth of your exact requirements.

Integrations. Integration with your existing tech stack will be critical, as will the ability to plug in new tools as your marketing automation efforts scale and your organization's maturity increases. Ensure the levels of integration and customizations that you require can be supported now and in the future. Use cases that will be most dependent on integrations are the ability to connect with other advertising technologies (adtech) and marketing technologies (martech), to activate data-driven media and the ability to build out a prioritized tech stack customized to the growth needs and marketing maturity aspirations of the organization.

Product development. Marketing automation isn't something you want to switch out or upgrade often, so you need a platform whose vendor is going to continually innovate and adapt along with the continually shifting marketing landscape. Ensure the vendor has a sufficient research-and-development/innovation roadmap, with new functionality being released at key cycles. For example, ask how they are adapting to advances in predictive, machine learning and artificial intelligence, all of which are important at various stages of the marketing automation process.

Training and support. The capability of the vendor and the support and education they provide is just as important as the platform. The success of your implementation will be in large part to the onboarding and skilling-up of the teams that will manage the platform within the organization. Check if vendors have active user communities, user groups and continual learning and educational content.

License and cost model. Different vendors price and license their marketing automation platforms based on a combination of variables including database size, email send volumes, number of marketing users, functionality, integrations and more. Ensure you can still afford the platform as you scale, or you could end up locked into an agreement and platform with an unrealistic and unachievable total cost of ownership.

Grow Your Business With NetSuite's Marketing Automation Software

Perhaps more than with most technologies, marketing automation is one where organizations benefit by starting small and then scaling up. The Oracle NetSuite family facilitates this with multiple system levels. NetSuite CRM can help companies getting started with marketing automation to automate their entire marketing process. It enables targeted marketing campaigns and helps to optimize ROI.

Conclusion
Marketing automation has the capability to transform the way a brand goes to market. It provides an always-on demand engine that automates customer experiences and continually generates sales-ready leads. It unites marketing and sales behind a single funnel and provides the functionality to accelerate marketing revenue generation and track return on marketing investment. For marketers who are serious about embracing modern digital marketing, marketing automation could potentially be their most potent tool.

Marketing Automation FAQs

What is marketing automation used for?

>>>>>>> a50da6d262 (Update publish date and add interlinking)

Companies use marketing automation to deploy and automate targeted outbound campaigns and inbound marketing to generate more leads, increase lead velocity, deliver better quality opportunities for sales, and measure return on marketing investment.

Which marketing automation is best?

While the best marketing automation platform could be different depending on the specific use cases and needs of a given organization, the best marketing automation deployments are those that embrace a model of continuous improvement. Such deployments are marked by business processes that leverage data generated by the marketing automation system to improve the company’s marketing automation program.

What is a marketing automation workflow?

A marketing automation workflow refers to a step-by-step campaign flow that automates the delivery of content across email and other channels. Workflows can be set up to reflect different communications and campaign types, such as newsletter campaigns, welcome campaigns, keep close campaigns, and onboarding campaigns.

What are some examples of how marketing automation works?

The most common examples of marketing automation deployments involve campaigns that are set up to achieve the following communication needs:

• Cross-sell and upsell campaigns
• Contact acquisition and database growth
• Demand generation to acquire new customers
• Ongoing customer communications (newsletters, updates)
• Product launch campaigns
• Thought leadership content promotion
• Event and webinar promotion and registrations
• Customer onboarding
• Partner communication campaigns