Marketing Automation
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is related to several historical examples of automation. Since the arrival of the industrial era, businesses have undergone automation:
The textile industry has looms instead of manually weaving fabric.
Consumers use automated teller machines (ATMs) to get cash instead of going inside the bank to speak with a person.
Warehouse facilities have systems to track current inventory levels.
Call center representatives place notes in a system to track the history of each call.
Automation often refers to the management processes, equipment, and technology that aid companies in increasing their output (efficiency), reducing errors, increasing effectiveness, managing costs, and monitoring the overall process for producing goods and services.
Marketing Automation achieves these outcomes for the goods and services "manufactured by" the marketing department.
Marketing "goods" include direct mail designs, lists of target market contact addresses, market research, budgets and plans, television and radio advertisements (recordings), web pages, email templates, annual reports, photography, product designs, service offerings, training DVDs, retail signage, and much more.
Marketing "services" include research, planning, designing, writing, campaign management, event management, data management, analysis, and other types of work.
The outcomes of Marketing Automation create a direct impact on typical marketing objectives such as creating new customers, generating leads, cross-selling existing customers, entering new markets, launching new products, increasing revenues and profit, improving loyalty, and extending market share.
A Definition for "Marketing Automation"
Marketing Automation includes the processes and technology which help to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing work.
Even though marketing work varies across industries, regions, and work-groups, marketing departments can divide their processes into a few high-level steps such as 1. planning and budgeting, 2. campaign and project management, and 3. measuring results. Marketing Automation can take various forms in each of these steps. For example:
In planning and budgeting, marketing automation could include placing the budgets and plans into a shared database instead of emailing files back and forth OR using marketing performance dashboards to look at overall expense and revenue metrics.
For campaign management, marketing automation tools and technologies exist to help identify customer names and divide those names into segments OR automate how five people review, improve, and sign-off on a direct mail piece.
To measure results, a reporting system may track how people click on a web page, navigate a site, and fill out a form.
Today, most marketing departments use different tools and technology to automate their processes, and each of these tools provide an aspect of marketing automation. The entire set of marketing systems which connect all processes and groups is often referred to as "Enterprise Marketing Management" and can also be referred to as marketing operations, marketing resource management, marketing performance management, and, of course, marketing automation.
MarketingCentral - Robust Marketing Automation at an Affordable Price
MarketingCentral's marketing automation tools have helped over 300 companies improve how they manage budgets, plans, projects, communications, people, and marketing assets (e.g. printed materials and web pages).
MarketingCentral customers have been able to:
Become better managers of marketing departments and show their contribution to results.
Help monitor the status of reviews and identify bottlenecks such as approvers who are delinquent in their approval.
Improve organizational effectiveness and efficiency (claims of productivity improvements range from 10-30%).
Reduce errors and save on rush charges.
Keep projects on-time and on-budget.
Reduce inbox clutter by reducing the amount of emails needed to manage each project.
Streamline communications and track work.
More about MarketingCentral's Marketing Automation Software:
Delivered as a 100% on-demand and fully web-based application with an affordable price point and solid return on investment.
Used by small companies, mid-sized firms, and Fortune 500 companies.
Accessible to employees, partners, contractors, and agencies via the internet from any computer with an internet-browser - the application is secure, fast, and available 24/7.
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