Marketing automation is critical in today’s marketing landscape. Utilizing automation software to optimize marketing tasks ensures consistent growth and lead nurturing. It can save you time and money, maximizing your efforts on all fronts. As a marketer, it’s essential to streamline your strategy, improve processes and boost revenue. Incorporating marketing automation in the right places can be the ultimate game-changer.

While automation is a fundamental tool in today’s marketing landscape, it can be tricky to know where to start. That’s why we’ve put together a list of our top five automation to focus on, taking your growth marketing strategy to new heights.

[Read more: The Best Tech Tools For Marketing Your Business]

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation utilizes technology and software to streamline marketing efforts. You can improve efficiency across all channels by automating marketing activities, particularly repetitive tasks like email marketing, ad management, social media posting, and lead generation. Better yet, you can personalize the user journey, nurturing prospects every step of the way.

Marketing automation software incorporates tracking and user analysis, giving you the tools to create a unified, cross-channel customer experience. It plays a critical role in the sales funnel, primarily when it comes to converting leads into customers. Beyond that, marketing automation allows you to cultivate customer relationships after the initial sale, driving repeat purchases and brand loyalty.

At its best, marketing automation brings software and strategy together. It’s a powerful concept, riddled with complex components and nuances. Get it right, and you can solve acquisition and retention in one go. It’s the cornerstone for long-term growth and optimization, a priority for your business.

Five Marketing Automation Strategies To Focus On In 2022

1. Chatbots

Chatbots are on top of the list for 2022’s automation trends. They play a critical role in lead generation, customer service, and engagement. Chatbots allow you to automate customer interaction, streamlining what can be an incredibly time-intensive task for your team. It’s a face for your company that’s available 24/7, laying the foundation for your conversational marketing strategy.

Use chatbots to help you answer simple questions on your website or social media profiles. Not only does this alleviate any frustration from customers, but it allows you to nurture a lead in a moment of intent. They’re on your site or profile because they’re interested in your brand or product. By optimizing your responses, you can improve conversions. Chatbots allow you to build relationships from the get-go.

On top of that, chatbots play a pivotal role in gathering customer insights. You can derive valuable information about your customer behavior, incorporating these findings into your content marketing. It’s one of the best ways to uncover customer pain points, allowing you to frame your product or service as the perfect solution.

2. Email Marketing Automation

Email marketing isn’t a new channel. Most businesses have been using it for decades. The introduction of marketing automation software and technology has revolutionized email marketing and CRM.

Focus on introducing a welcome series, personalizing your content based on user behavior. First impressions count, making a well-crafted welcome mailer an effective marketing automation tool. It’s an opportunity to educate leads on your brand, gather insights around their interests or demographics and prompt them to purchase for the first time.

Use marketing automation to service the sales funnel, guiding leads through a perfectly crafted journey to conversion. Based on their behavior, you can trigger a specific set of content. Perhaps the most significant benefit of automated email marketing is that it’s always on. Once you’ve built your welcome series automation, it ticks over in the background, ensuring you’re always drawing in customers.

3. Automated Social Media Marketing

There’s no question that social media continues to be a critical avenue in your digital marketing strategy. Whether creating a presence on a new platform or fostering an existing following, you need to service multiple channels simultaneously. That’s where automation saves the day.

Tech solutions like Hootsuite and Sendible allow you to schedule social media posts across various platforms. You can streamline campaign and community management by controlling everything from one place. Tools like Automate.io will enable you to capture Facebook leads with Ads, integrating with your CRM platform where automated mailers come into play.

4. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are essential tactics in marketing automation. They allow you to collect information about your audience, drawing recommendations for future campaigns from user data. AI models can identify the available campaigns for each customer, determining the next-best-action which you can use to inform your automation.

By incorporating AI into your digital strategy, you can scale the number of efficiently run campaigns. It allows you to analyze your audience’s online behavior, creating a personalized user journey with funnel-optimized content.

5. Inter-departmental Automation

There was a fundamental misalignment between sales and marketing teams in the past. Both overlooked the other’s contribution to business growth. Today’s marketing has to incorporate both, driving better inter-departmental alignment across all groups.

Use marketing automation to standardize processes, enhancing the customer experience through the sales funnel. Get everyone on the same CRM system so you can implement lifecycle marketing. Top examples include HubSpot or Salesforce.

Next, you’ll need to agree on lead scoring, determining the quality of potential customers. All departments should work with the same criteria while addressing any opportunity for retargeting. Ultimately, you need to combine all marketing and sales data to generate campaigns with the best ROI.

Top Tip: Prioritize Mobile-First Automation

As you incorporate marketing automation into your digital strategy, remember to prioritize mobile displays. With 71% of millennials allowing service providers access to their mobile data, the opportunity for personalization is at your fingertips. Marketers must develop mobile-first strategies with in-app ads, push notifications, and SMS at the forefront.

Start Automating!

Marketing automation offers increased efficiency, improved lead conversion, and scalability. It’s one of the best ways to optimize your output, ultimately generating a better ROI for your business. If you’re looking to grow your business in 2022, these five marketing automation strategies should be at the top of your list.

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1.  Watch our Free training on how to streamline & automate your coaching business to run like a well-oiled machine at any scale (even if you hate tinkering with technology)

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3.  Book a Smartify Session. We’ll go through a game-plan that takes your business processes from clunky and disjointed to a well-oiled machine that enables you to scale to your 7 figure dreams.

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