Digital marketing automation

Digital marketing is everywhere, and there’s no sign of its adoption slowing down anytime soon. Gartner estimates that 80% of B2B sales interactions will occur in digital channels by 2025. Pair this with the fact that 33% of buyers already desire a seller-free buying experience, and the need for savvy digital marketing becomes even more apparent.

Companies of all sizes need to embrace a digital approach, which may mean modernizing their existing tools and capabilities, including their digital marketing automation solution. From advanced lead generation and scoring to automated workflows that save time and money, automated digital marketing software is set to innovate the ways companies find and target prospective customers. But what is digital marketing automation? What are its benefits, what functions can it serve, and how do you find the right tool for your business? Keep reading to find out.

What is automated digital marketing?

Generally speaking, marketing automation—like any other form of automation—involves the automating, scaling, and streamlining of certain tasks. While automation has its roots in the 1940s-era automobile industry, the basic premise has been expanded to touch nearly every industry today. In the case of digital marketing, automation tasks include activities such as personalizing emails, scheduling and monitoring social media, lead generating strategies, and more. The result is that you are more productive and have more time to focus on high-value tasks that require a human touch.  

With digital marketing automation, marketers build workflows that include triggers and actions. When a trigger occurs (e.g., a contact signs up for an email list), an action will happen (e.g., an email is sent). While this is a fairly basic scenario, other marketing automation examples illustrate more advanced automation capabilities.

For instance, industry-leader Dow Jones used Oracle Eloqua’s lead scoring models and CRM integrations to build customized, personalized experiences (also called nurture paths) to target their prospects with the right information at the right time. They developed 12 new nurture paths, doubled the number of forms, and grew their email marketing campaigns by 36%. This resulted in Dow Jones increasing their marketing-originated revenue by 14% year-over-year and increasing their marketing-influenced revenue by as much as 57%.

We’ll dive into more aspects of digital marketing that can be automated in the next section, but first, a quick clarifier. The digital marketing automation meaning should not be conflated with the mere automation of repetitive tasks like list management and data collection. While automation is used for these tasks, they are just the tip of the iceberg. Recent technological advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have provided teams with far more innovative features and capabilities than previously available. For example, AI has enabled sellers and marketers with insights on when and how to support leads and existing customers—leading to increased revenue and retention.  

Digital marketing automation services

Given the excellent results shared above, you might wonder what a marketing automation platform can provide. It depends on the software, of course, but you can generally expect digital automation tools to help with the following activities:

CRM integrations

Digital marketing is only as good as its data. Fortunately, contact management can easily be handled by marketing automation. Streamline and automate the data capture process from an existing customer relationship management (CRM) system to better track the touchpoints and activities conducted by sellers. Then, use that information to target prospects and customers at just the right time.

Audience segmentation

With digital marketing automation, you can create data-informed customer profiles to target various buyers with the right information at the right time. Strategically filter and segment your audience based on your data around buyer intent, attributes, behavior, geography, and more.

Lead scoring

Prospects move through a relatively predictable but non-linear sales journey. Marketing automation can help teams score a lead to determine where in the sales funnel the prospect is—and then program specific marketing actions to move that prospect further along the funnel.

Campaign management

Build and manage campaigns in real time. Design multi-channel, trigger-based campaigns to target prospects where they are. Run A/B tests to find the perfect messaging for your target audience. Pivot in real time with automated insights. Users have access to an easy-to-use drag-and-drop graphical interface to visually design lead flows through multi-channel, multi-stage, trigger-based campaigns.

Asset management

Create visually appealing and responsive email templates, landing pages, and contact forms. Build in dynamic content that can automate personalization based on website visitor history—all without having to know HTML and CSS. With asset management, you can build, customize, and track existing and new assets to save time and maximize their value.

Email marketing

Perhaps the most well-known digital marketing channel, email marketing, has become synonymous with automation. Marketing automation allows you to create highly personalized emails for lead nurturing. It can also provide insights into when and how often to send those emails to boost open rates and increase conversions.

Data measurement and dashboarding

Marketing automation can simplify and streamline the campaign measurement process with high-level and detailed real-time insights. See a detailed overview of how current campaigns perform, create closed-loop reporting to analyze marketing return on investment (ROI), and track comprehensive overviews of email campaigns to compare results. With a marketing automation tool like Oracle Eloqua Insight, this information can be built into real-time interactive reports to share with stakeholders.

What are the benefits of automation in digital marketing?

Marketing automation benefits are numerous. From creating hyper-personalized messaging campaigns to scalability, better real-time tracking, revenue growth, and more, companies that adopt marketing automation tools see more leads, better leads, and higher engagement rates. Let’s dive deeper into why marketing automation is important in digital marketing.

• Better leads: For marketers, generating more, high-quality marketing qualified leads (MQLs) is a top priority. With marketing automation, teams can build multi-channel, full-funnel campaigns that nurture leads at every stage of their journey—resulting in better leads and higher conversion rates.
• Hyper personalization: Customers are perhaps more demanding than ever. The standard marketing approach to send the same message to everyone just doesn’t work. Digital marketing automation lets teams unify their customer data, segment their contacts into unique categories, and target them in a way that speaks to their pain points.
• Scalability: With automation in digital marketing, teams can truly do more with less. Automation tools allow you to reach more leads—and better leads—by following the data. What’s more, as automation tools cut down on the amount of repetitive or routine tasks, marketers become more efficient in their work.
• Real-time tracking: With digital marketing automation, teams can pull data from their CRM about each campaign to gain visibility into what’s working (and what’s not) across every channel. The days of marketing based on intuition are gone. Track campaigns, use A/B testing to find what works, and pivot in the event of an under-performing campaign to ensure your marketing spend provides the highest return on investment.
• Revenue growth: At the end of the day, it’s all about revenue and business growth. Digital marketing automation allows teams to better respond to their prospects and current customers through innovative, advanced digital campaigns that work.

What are automation tools for digital marketing?

There are a number of digital marketing automation companies on the market that can provide the myriad benefits described above. However, how do you find the right digital marketing automation tools for your business? If your current solution forces you to develop complicated workarounds and hacks, can’t scale, or can’t adapt in real-time, it may be a sign that you need something new.

When looking for automation solutions, seek the following capabilities.

Build precise segmentation in a single system

Your automated solution should allow you to define segments and target your audiences within the same system. It’s inefficient to spend time copying over data or jumping between systems, so your solution should seamlessly merge with your CRM data. Look for the ability to automate segmentation and targeting, access and analyze contact and lead data, and automate retargeting actions based on set triggers.

Deploy customized cross-channel campaigns

A lot goes into a cross-channel campaign, and your solution should allow your marketing team to handle it all—without the need for IT, coding, or a separate tool. Look for a solution that will enable you to build mobile-responsive campaigns with dynamic, personalized content, reuse the content easily, and launch multi-channel campaigns quickly.

Adapt in real-time

Managing and maintaining your campaigns in real-time, including pivoting when needed, is a must-have for marketers. And that means having access to good data. Find a marketing automation solution that allows you to connect your data, maintain and clean it, and track buyer behavior in real-time.

Generate leads faster

Your sales team needs better leads, faster. Your digital marketing automation solution should help. The right option will align your sales and marketing efforts to ensure each team has everything they need. Specific tools and functions might include analyzing and developing lead scoring models, developing marketing-approved content, and identifying the best candidates for account-based marketing (ABM).

Prove your marketing ROI

How do you measure success? The best way is to let your marketing automation platform help. The right solution should provide you with easy-to-understand reports and data, real-time campaign response data, the ability to measure marketing ROI, and target it for various stakeholders.

Use AI to improve productivity

Teams are constantly being asked to do more in less time. AI can help augment marketing teams with data-driven decisions, automated actions in response to triggers, and quantifying lead scores. The right solution will deliver best-in-class AI-driven solutions to take the guesswork out of marketing.

Will digital marketing be fully automated?

Digital marketing automation has become more and more prevalent. 75% of SocialMediaToday's (SMT) research respondents said they already use at least one automation tool. It’s natural to wonder how far automation will go—and if it will take things over completely someday.

The good news for digital marketers is that it’s unlikely to take over entirely—at least not anytime soon. As discussed above, a powerful digital marketing automation platform can take over a lot of the repetitive tasks or data-heavy tasks: campaign scheduling and delivery, data capture, and workflow automations.

At the same time, though, there are fundamental, human elements of digital marketing that even the most advanced AI simply can’t replicate. Creative content writing. Art and design. Both high-level and day-to-day strategizing. Community management and engagement. These important tasks require talent, creativity, and critical thinking that computers simply can’t automate or replicate. Automation gives the team more time and energy to focus on that human work.