What is Marketing Automation?

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the software marketers use to communicate with their audiences, manage their databases, and extract valuable insight on the success of marketing efforts. It eliminates the manual work involved in deploying campaigns, segmenting audiences, qualifying leads and passing them to sales.

Why Do Marketers Use Automation?

Email has historically been the method of communication of choice for many marketers, with digital and social making its mark in recent years. The value of marketing automation is that you can create templates for programs and assets that have proven successful in the past. The data-driven marketer uses marketing automation to continually test what different audiences are engaging with and its effect on the path to purchase.

Marketing automation is not only the engine used to communicate to audiences, it also encompasses the data management processes that allow for effective marketing. Marketing automation software acts as a gatekeeper for new leads or leads that are not “qualified” for sales yet. It’s the place where all the marketing activity that prospects and customers engage in is held, so it serves as a database of its own, as well as a rich source of analytic data.

How Do Marketers Use Automation Software?

Many marketing automation systems are used to append, normalize and manage the data inflow that each lead in the database may have. It contains the functionality to set up campaigns that listen for high value marketing activities that surface leads with an intention to buy and use a score as a way to prioritize for sales enablement.

Ranking prospects and providing contextual information to sales is one of the most impactful ways marketers leverage marketing automation. Using marketing automation in partnership with sales typically results in more relevant marketing and more timely transitions into different stages of the buyer journey.

The software used to automate marketing is closely related to sales CRM systems which contain databases of contacts, and many times the databases are mirrored. Sales and marketing alignment allow for more effective operational processes.

The channel, medium, and cadence in which marketers communicate with their audience varies, as well as the ways in which they choose to report on this. Marketing automation tools generally function as an analytic engine providing reports on email metrics, lead metrics and the effectiveness of online assets the marketing team is leveraging. By including a tracking link on your website, you can track activities from the top of the funnel and report on everything in between to prove ROI.

How Do Call Tracking and Marketing Automation Work Together?

By having a marketing automation system that integrates with CallRail, the gap is bridged between leads that engage via a phone call and all the marketing in between that influences that lead to become a customer. Tracking phone calls and leveraging certain keywords in marketing automation can serve up the most personalized experience to delight your audience, and improve the bottom line.

CallRail offers integrations with marketing automation software platforms including Marketo and Hubspot. Learn more about how call tracking and marketing automation integrations can improve your business–request your no obligation demo of CallRail, or go ahead and start your 14 Day Free Trial, no credit card needed.