Hot 🔥 Marketing Automation Tools Your Business Needs in 2022

Matt Astifan -

Marketing automation helps you attract, engage, and nurture your leads and customers. It promises more conversions and sales, all with less work and marketing overheads. Finding the best marketing automation tools for your business can be a daunting and time-consuming task. Lucky for you, Web Friendly is here to help you out!

Getting started might seem intimidating at first however, with the right advice and the proper tools, it’s easier than you think!

In this article, we explain all you need to know about marketing automation so you can learn how to use it to grow your business.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a process that lets you automate repetitive marketing activities. It gives you powerful insights into your marketing strategy. And enables you to track lead behavior more effectively.

Automation allows you to personalize communication with your customers. And it lets you generate the customized experience that wins long-term loyalty.

In other words, marketing automation can help any brand:

  • Save time and money
  • Increase productivity
  • Increase leads and conversion
  • Improve customer experience

What is marketing automation used for?

Marketing automation is used to automate and streamline everyday marketing processes. It can cut down the time and resources consumed by repetitive tasks.

The reason it is popular today is that it’s customizable and adaptable. Thus making it work for any business.

Most people think of automated emails when they hear “marketing automation”. However, you can streamline more than emails, for example, you can streamline the following tasks:

  • Analytics and ROI Tracking
  • Social Media Marketing
  • Campaign Segmentation
  • Content Curation and Management
  • Email Marketing (sending, receiving, integrating calls, analyzing results, etc)
  • Lead Generation, Analysis, and Management

Integrating all that data into your CRM can improve your customers’ experience when interacting with your brand. You can use this data to customize the interaction your customers have with your website, support, and marketing emails.

How does marketing automation work?

Automation is a game-changer for businesses of all sizes. Let’s look at the steps required to make it work for you.

Step 1: Define Your Needs

Come up with a list of activities based on your current marketing workflow and the buyer’s journey. Then based on that decide the things your business can automate.

Once you evaluate what you want to automate, start researching the tools you’ll need to make it happen (more on that below 👇).

Step 2: Choose The Right Automation Tools

Your evaluation will help you decide on the right set of tools. There are plenty of marketing automation tools available on AppSumo which offer “lifetime deals” (eg, no monthly costs).

Get to know each tool and understand how to maximize it to your advantage. Read the comments and review, use free trials, and don’t be afraid to reach out to their support and sales team to ask questions.

Step 3: Implement Your Strategy

Keep in mind that strategies like Marketing Automation bring changes in the workplace but change is good when it increases productivity and output from your team.

So, consider these factors during the implementation process:

The Marketing Strategy:
Proper execution should start by having a good strategy.

The Implementers:
Implementers put everything into practice. Their attitude, experience, and skill will determine the success of the strategy.

Open Communication:
Proper communication makes everything run smoothly. This includes explaining new roles, tasks, policies, and guidelines to everyone involved.

Commitment:
Strategy implementation is a half-baked idea in the absence of commitment. You require persistence to see results from your marketing automation efforts,

Step 4: Optimize the Workflow

Optimize the performance of your marketing automation strategy with documentation. It’s important to document how your automation work so anyone on your team can quickly understand the mechanics. You can use a tool called Process Street or simply a Google Doc.

Do I need marketing automation?

In a word, yes!

As a business owner, you must remove expensive, mundane, manual tasks that you can automate.

Here are four examples you can start implementing today.

1. PPC Advertising Automation

Manually managing and optimizing your ad campaigns has become a complex task. PPC automation uses A.I. and machine learning to help you scale your SEM efforts.

Here are some ways PPC automation helps you :

  • Bid Management
  • Ad Creative
  • Improve ROI
  • Better Budget Spend
  • Find Opportunities for Growth

2. Email Marketing Automation

How much time do you waste on your email campaigns every day? There’s another way you could handle those repetitive tasks and improve your ROI.

Email Marketing can help you reach customers with the right message at the right time. Below, we look at some reasons your business should use email automation.

  • Boost your revenue with transactional emails.
  • Increase transactions by getting personal.
  • Sync up with the customer buyer’s cycle.
  • Keep leads engaged with drip campaigns.
  • Increase Sales from Cart Abandonment.

Our email automation tool of choice is ActiveCampaign 🙌

Learn more about email automation by Matt Astifan:
Basics Of Email Automation For Your Sales Funnels

3. Social Media Automation

Social media can feel like a big waste of time sometimes. But it’s essential to attract customers and build a good reputation. Automation can help us get rid of many tedious tasks. So we can spend more doing other higher-value activities.

Here are some examples of social media automation in action.

  • Save time by scheduling your social posts on a calendar.
  • Use chatbots to keep customer service “on” all the time.
  • Speed up your customer response time with suggested replies.
  • Automate reports to share with your colleagues and clients.
  • Curate content that your audience will love (without having to dig for it).

Our social media automation tool of choice is SocialBee 🐝

Learn more about social media automation by Matt Astifan:
What You Need To Know About Social Media Automation

4. Content Marketing Automation

Content marketing can be tedious, time-consuming, and expensive. With automation, you streamline repetitive tasks that don’t need human interaction.

Below are some of the ways Content Marketing Automation can increase productivity.

Better Customer Insights
Lead Nurturing
Omnichannel Monitoring
Saves Staff Costs & Increases ROI
Helps you keep existing customers

Our content automation tool of choice is SocialBee’s Concierge 🐝

How To Choose A Marketing Automation Tool

Ready to start with marketing automation? You need a few tools that support your business that integrate with each other.

As with any technology, you need to check the available solutions in light of several factors:

  • Your business objectives
  • Current capability requirements
  • Desired future state
  • Existing technology environment

Additionally, we recommend evaluating the following things more specific to marketing automation:

  • Costs
  • Limits
  • Support Options
  • Availability
  • Integrations
  • Broader Capabilities
  • Customer Feedback

Conclusion

Implementing the right marketing automation solution can do wonders for your organization. If you’re not careful, it can also be misused, wasting your marketing budget.

In this article, I gave you a complete overview of marketing automation, you learned:

  • What marketing automation is
  • Why you need it
  • Steps to implement it
  • Tips to choose the right tools

How are you going to get started with marketing automation? Let us know your plans in the comments below.

For more information, check out the following guides: