Marketing automation uses software to automate monotonous marketing work. Marketing departments can automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns – not just for the sake of efficiency, but also to provide a more personalized experience for their customers.

The technology behind marketing automation makes these tasks faster and easier to do.

When we look at the common challenges faced by businesses, we know that generating leads and keeping customers engaged throughout their journey remain top of mind. Along with these goals, businesses face an explosion of data being collected, but struggle to put it to use.

Marketing automation software can help overcome these challenges by putting data to work by streamlining our workflows.

Most businesses consider marketing automation a middle-of-the-funnel tool, ideal for nurturing leads through automated email sequences. And while email marketing is a great use for marketing automation, this approach can lead to a disjointed experience for prospects and customers as they move from marketing, to sales, to customer service.

Prospects are forced through an imaginary sales funnel with arbitrary touchpoints and irrelevant content. Instead of reacting to individual customer needs, businesses serve up the same playbook on repeat.

However, automated marketing strategies should be deployed across the customer lifecycle. When marketing automation is thoughtfully integrated, it creates a fertile ground for healthy, long-term relationships with your customers. When done well, marketing automation delivers three main benefits to your business:

 marketing automation is a combination of software, strategy, and customer-centricity. It allows you to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to delighted customers, and customers to loyal advocates.

To get the most out of marketing automation, businesses should weave automation throughout their business to break down silos and unite teams with processes that save time. Combined with the human touch, marketing automation can create a flywheel that keeps your business growing.

Start by focusing on the customer journey, rather than on the needs of your business. Identify potential touchpoints that could benefit from marketing automation and build processes that ease the customer from touchpoint to touchpoint.

Organize contacts using a CRM that integrates with your marketing automation software, so every action the customer takes is tracked as another data point.

Use these data points to connect customers to the next step of their journey – whether that’s educational content, a salesperson, or a customer success check-in. The benefit of marketing automation is being able to use this white-glove approach with thousands of customers at a time.

A great marketing automation strategy gets your teams in sync by prioritizing tasks and making hand-offs a breeze. Contact records can be owned by the marketing team until the lead is warm and ready to be contacted by sales, at which point automation assigns and notifies the sales rep. When the customer purchases, customer success is notified, and can see all the past conversations and actions taken by the customer on their way to the sale. Not only is the process seamless and efficient, but it also builds a long-term relationship between the customer and the business.

Marketing automation is powerful, which also means to make it work, you must understand all its components and nuances. This page has compiled some of our top resources that will help you understand those nuances so you can make marketing automation work for your company.