This article covers the ins and outs of marketing automation as a service. Discover the top marketing automation trends, a step-by-step scenario of how it works, and the role it can play in your business. Uncover the top three misconceptions of marketing automation as a service. In this blog, you will gain deep insight into how marketing automation can seamlessly move your leads through the sales funnel.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is the approach of streamlining, managing and automating a range of different marketing workflows. This may include SEO initiatives, content management, social media engagement, and email marketing. As a result, this is a great way to help you drive leads through the sales funnel.

What role can marketing automation do for your business?

Marketing automation as a service can save you time and help make your marketing campaigns more personalised. As a result, automation is an efficient way to drive customer engagement, lead nurturing, lead scoring and much more. 

The 3 misconceptions of marketing automation as a service

 

1. Spam Email Marketing

 

A misconception is that marketing automation will make you send continuous spam emails to your email list and a wider audience. Marketing automation does the opposite. It can optimise your email marketing campaigns by helping you send personalised and relevant content. Therefore, make sure it meets your reader’s needs and pain points!

2. Single Function

 

Several marketing automation platforms can specialise in different workflows for your marketing initiatives. For example, this could be email marketing, social media engagement, SEO content or content management to help you capture and drive leads, at scale. 

3. Not adaptable

 

Another big misconception of marketing automation is when you set it up, you no longer have to work with it. However, once you have implemented a marketing automation platform within your marketing initiatives, you need to continually adapt it to your marketing objectives, goals, and strategies.

Marketing Automation trends

Marketing automation as a service is becoming a popular trend among many B2B companies, with many adopting it into their marketing initiatives. It is a central focus for many marketing teams because it can help them with a range of marketing tasks, such as email management, social media management, content creation and much more. 

Marketing automation and customer satisfaction go hand-in-hand with innovative technology such as 24/7 chatbots, automatic follow-up emails and much more. 

As a result, these are two of the biggest marketing automation trends! These can help give you and your sales team more time to focus on reaching your overall marketing goals. 

How Does Marketing Automation as a service work?

Manually completing all your marketing tasks, whether that is for scheduling content, producing sales reports or drafting emails, can be time-consuming and impact your overall marketing objectives.

Marketing automation as a service can help you send relevant and personalised content to leads, based on buyer behaviour demographics such as purchasing behaviour, age, hobbies, pain points and more. 

Below is an excellent scenario of how marketing automation as a service works and how it can help you seamlessly move your leads through the sales funnel. For example:

1. Create an email campaign that sends out event invitation emails to your leads.
2. Those that click on your event invitation emails will be sent directly to the next stage of the funnel. Alternatively, those that have not clicked, will receive a follow-up email. 
3. The leads that were not in attendance at your event will be automatically dropped from your email campaign
4. In the second stage of the sales funnel, your leads will start automatically receiving a welcome email. This can include information about the event. 
5. A ‘thank you’ email will then send to the recipients who attended your event.
6. A few days after the event (1-2 days), your campaign would automatically invite those who attended to a special offer. This could be a landing page or a specific topic of the event. 
7. Those leads that reach your landing page are then automatically placed into the next stage of the sales funnel.