Getting a Handle on Marketing Automation

by GSV Operations

Most marketers today understand the general need for marketing automation to improve their ability to execute timely and effective digital marketing activities. Tools of the trade can save time, money and resources and typically hinge on the level of need and maturity of the business.

Automation not only saves time by putting tech to work on mundane and repetitive tasks, it can also produce personalized workflows to engage prospects and yield valuable metrics to guide next steps in the marketing roadmap. Listed below are some automation activities and tools that we often recommend to our SaaS companies.

Key Automation Activities & Benefits:

• Campaign management and automated integration into your CRM
• Email marketing utilizing drip campaigns and segmentation
• Form, landing page, and microsite creation and optimization to support ad spend and campaigns
• Social media marketing and scheduling
• Smart or dynamic content in emails and on microsites
• Lead scoring and management for sales enablement
• Search engine optimization support
• Improved analytics

Preferred Automation Platforms: 

Automation System Management:

Depending on the maturity of the business and scope of work to be done, there are a handful of options in wrangling all the activities.

• Generalist In-House Digital Marketer – This is great option if you have someone who is capable of the content creation as well as the promotion of said content through the various channels utilizing your marketing automation platform of choice.
• Freelance Support – This can be a good configuration if you have good content creators in house who may lack some of the technical skills necessary to create automation elements like drip campaigns, lead scoring, microsites, etc. For a low retainer cost, they will often partner with your in-house staff to make an efficient team.
• Lead Gen Agency – Another good route is to hire an agency with the full task of driving digital marketing leads through the use of automation and ad spend. There are some advantages in this method such as having full success responsibility in one place, as well as being able to draw from the agency’s many different focused experts in a less-than-full-time arrangement. Good agency management and goal setting is critical to the success of this model.

Automation makes it easier to manage every marketing task, from basic e-blasts to campaign management to data analytics. The best automation tools and tricks are designed to scale along with the business. And if used properly, automation can tailor every interaction, creating individualized experiences with the brand and ultimately, an enhanced customer journey.