Just What IS Marketing Automation?

Before you start making investments or changing your marketing strategy, you’re probably wondering if you even fully understand what, exactly, Marketing Automation is… and that’s OK! 

Marketing Automation is a very, very powerful multi-channel marketing tool that, when deployed correctly, automatically contacts and engages your leads and customers in the best channel and with the most relevant messaging specific to that contact.

Great, that’s a description of what Marketing Automation does, but what is it?  That’s a question that is a little more difficult to precisely answer, as even the major Marketing Automation providers differ a little in their definitions.

Salesforce defines Marketing Automation like this:
“Marketing automation is technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically.”  

Meanwhile, Marketo defines it this way:
“Marketing automation is a category of technology that allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows, so they can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster.”

Hubspot is a little more holistic in their definition:
“Marketing automation is a combination of software and strategy.” 

So, what’s a common thread in these definitions? 

Marketing Automation is a deployment of one or more technologies that, working in concert, deliver your optimized, personalized marketing message to the right contact, in the right channel, at the right time, and makes it as easy as possible for the contact to act on that message. 

In some cases, this may mean that a small business automatically sends someone a marketing message when a certain action is triggered on the business website. 

In other cases, it may mean that lead data is generated, automated email sequences are triggered, and the refined lead data, including email and website interactions, is fed to the company’s call center to create a highly personalized customer contact.  

In still other uses, it may mean that lead data is automatically harvested from various campaigns, fed to a CRM, automatically analyzed and a highly personalized, very custom marketing campaign is initiated for each individual lead. 

Whatever your business’s specific use case may be, one thing is universally true: No other marketing investment your business makes can deliver the return on investment that a healthy, properly designed marketing automation deployment can.  Whether it powers a single campaign or your entire business, you won’t find a higher ROI in any other marketing channel.