Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for

marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to empha ...

departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks. Marketing departments, consultants and part-time marketing employees benefit by specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes which are then interpreted, stored and executed by software, which increases efficiency and reduces

human error Human error refers to something having been done that was " not intended by the actor; not desired by a set of rules or an external observer; or that led the task or system outside its acceptable limits".Senders, J.W. and Moray, N.P. (1991) Human ...

. Originally focused on email marketing automation, marketing automation refers to a broad range of automation and analytic tools for marketing especially inbound marketing. Marketing automation platforms are used as a hosted or web-based solution, and no software installation is required by a customer. The use of a marketing automation platform is to streamline sales and marketing organizations by replacing

high-touch High-touch refers to the involvement of personal attention and service. In business, the term often refers to situations where trust between the customer and employed individual(s) is necessary. High-touch areas include: medicine, wealth management, ...

, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions. A marketing automation platform allows marketers to scale lead management activities, such as coordinating and managing marketing campaigns, both online and offline), nurturing leads, and scoring leads appropriately to determine if / when it is ready for sales to engage.

Overview

Marketing Automation is a subset of

customer relationship management Customer relationship management (CRM) is a process in which a business or other organization administers its interactions with customers, typically using data analysis to study large amounts of information. CRM systems compile data from a r ...

( CRM) or customer experience management ( CXM) that focuses on the definition, segmentation, scheduling and tracking of marketing campaigns. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient and makes new processes possible. Marketing Automation can be defined as a process where technology is used to automate several repetitive tasks that are undertaken on a regular basis in a marketing campaign. Marketing Automation platforms allow marketers to automate and simplify client communication by managing complex omnichannel marketing strategies from a single tool. Marketing Automation assists greatly in areas like Lead Generation, Segmentation, Lead nurturing and lead scoring, Relationship marketing, Cross-sell and upsell, Retention, Marketing ROI measurement. Effective marketing automation tools leverage data from a separate or integrated CRM to understand customer impact and preferences. There are three categories of marketing automation software: ; Marketing intelligence: Uses tracking codes in social media, email, and webpages to track the behavior of anyone interested in a product or service to gain a measure of intent. It can record which social media group or thread they followed, which link was clicked on in an email or which search term was used to access a website. Multiple link analysis can then track buyer behavior - following links and multiple threads related to product A, but not B will show an interest only in A. This allows more accurately targeted response and the development of a nurturing program specifically targeted towards their interest and vertical market. This allows businesses to more efficiently and effectively reach target consumers who show, through their internet history behavior, that they will be interested in the company's products. Due to its interactive nature, this has been described as Marketing Automation 2.0. ;Marketing automation: Has a focus on moving leads from the top of the marketing funnel through to becoming sales-ready leads at the bottom of the funnel. Prospects are scored, based on their activities, and receive targeted content and messaging, thus nurturing them from first interest through to sale. Commonly used in business-to-business ( B2B),

business-to-government Business-to-government (B2G),Market Business NewsWhat is B2G or business-to-government? Definition and examples accessed 31 August 2020 also known as business-to-administration (B2A), refers to trade between the business sector as a supplier and a ...

(B2G), or longer sales cycle business-to-consumer (B2C) sales cycles, Marketing Automation involves multiple areas of marketing and is really the marriage of email marketing technology coupled with a structured sales process. Advertising Automation :Has a focus on automating the process of advertising, usually focusing on the campaign lifecycle management. Automation involves different areas such as media mix model, media planning, scheduling, campaign setting, adserving, and reporting. Applicable to just one or many of these elements, advertising automation focuses on automating either an entire aspect or their most mundane tasks - often with the use of

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

. A clear example is to be found in ad operations (also known as trafficking), which involves the activities around mapping adserver and analytics placement to different media and ad-tech platforms, creating

tracking pixel Spy pixels or tracker pixels are hyperlinks to remote image files in HTML email messages that have the effect of spying on the person reading the email if the image is downloaded. They are commonly embedded in the HTML of an email as small, imperce ...

s to disseminate across the different media, and management of the

UTM parameters Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters are five variants of URL parameters used by marketers to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across traffic sources and publishing media. They were introduced by Google Analytics' predece ...

— traditionally manually operated across different adtech platforms — that with advertising automation is automated. This generates an automated creation of placement, automated pushing of trackers to the various media, and automatic management of the creation of UTM parameters. While commonly used among big advertisers to simplify complex infrastructures and processes, advertising automation is paving the way to make advertising accessible to unskilled users. Advanced workflow automation :Encompasses automation of internal marketing processes. These include budgeting and planning, workflow and approvals, the marketing calendar, internal collaboration, digital asset creation, and management and essentially everything that supports the operational efficiency of the internal marketing function. Typically, these systems require a CRM or COM administrator to set up a complex series of rules to trigger action items for internal sales and marketing professionals to manually process (designing files, sending letters, sending email campaigns). This type of system increases the marketer's ability to deliver relevant content to relevant individuals at relevant times. Limitations may apply, based on the human resource capacity of an organization and their level of commitment to the tasks as they are assigned. Advanced workflow automation's can be created to support the entire customer journey, including awareness, consideration, decision and long term loyalty.

Effects of GDPR on marketing automation

As of 25 May 2018 the

General Data Protection Regulation The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European Union regulation on data protection and privacy in the EU and the European Economic Area (EEA). The GDPR is an important component of EU privacy law and of human rights law, in parti ...

came into effect in the EU, this has had a large impact on the way marketing teams and organizations can manage their consumer data. Any organization using marketing automation tracking is required to ask consent from the consumer as well as provide transparency on how the data will be processed.

Impact of marketing automation on consumers

Consumers are directly impacted by marketing automation. Consumers provide

data In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted. ...

for companies, and companies use algorithms to determine products and services to market towards the consumer. The products and services are personalized based on the collected data for each individual. The use of marketing automation is interpreted as an efficient customer experience while others interpret a loss of autonomy for the consumer.

Functionality

In order to effectively aid marketers in fully understanding customers and subsequently developing a strategic marketing plan, marketing automation platforms (MAPs) are designed to perform eight key tasks: * Development and analysis of marketing campaigns and customers * Management of marketing campaigns * Appropriate customer data organization and storage * Moving contacts from leads (marketing prospects) to customers *

Lead scoring Lead scoring is a methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization. The resulting score is used to determine which leads a receiving function (e.g. sales, partners, tele ...

to qualify leads by measuring their engagement level * Integration of multiple touch-points such as email and

social media Social media are interactive media technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of ''social me ...

Lead management Lead management is a set of methodologies, systems, and practices designed to generate new potential business clientele, generally operated through a variety of marketing campaigns or programs. Lead management facilitates a business's connection bet ...

* Campaign performance analytics (i.e.

open rate There are two types of "open rates"- one for electronic mail (aka e-mail; see below) and one for physical mail (aka snail mail via the USPS or other physical mail carrier). Email Open Rate The email open rate is a measure primarily used by mark ...

click-through rate Click-through rate (CTR) is the ratio of users who click on a specific link to the number of total users who view a page, email, or advertisement. It is commonly used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign for a particular web ...

s on emails,

conversion rate In electronic commerce, conversion marketing is marketing with the intention of increasing ''conversions—''that is, site visitors who are paying customers. Measures Conversion marketing attempts to solve low online conversions through optimi ...

s on landing pages)

Market

According to

Gartner Gartner, Inc is a technological research and consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut that conducts research on technology and shares this research both through private consulting as well as executive programs and conferences. Its clients ...

, the B2B marketing automation market grew 15% in 2020 and was valued at $2.1 billion. Gartner identified the following vendors as B2B marketing automation platform leaders as of August 2021: *

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

( Adobe Marketo Engage) * Creatio (Marketing Creatio) *

HubSpot HubSpot is an American developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah in 2006. Its products and services aim to provide tools for customer ...

(Marketing Hub) *

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ''o ...

(Oracle Eloqua) *

Salesforce Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, ...

( Pardot)

References