Understanding the Different Types of Marketing Automation



November 9, 2023


The list of marketing responsibilities can seem never-ending, and digital marketing is difficult and time-consuming. As a result, marketing automation has developed into a trustworthy ally for all advertisers. 

Marketing professionals can develop more individualized and focused programs with the use of digital marketing automation. It should come as no surprise that broad use led to a $25 billion market for marketing automation in 2023. 

Marketing automation comes in a variety of forms, and each has benefits. In order to help you streamline every part of your marketing, we’ve outlined 11 different types of marketing automation in this post.

Automation of Marketing for Different Business Models

The cost and features of marketing automation software vary depending on the type of business. Numerous highly regarded software solutions provide a free trial version so that businesses can choose the ideal program that best suits their needs. 

We have outlined the many kinds of marketing automation for three business models—business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C), and small business—in order to take advantage of these varied uses. 

Automation of B2B Marketing

Successful business-to-business (B2B) marketing depends largely on cultivating relationships, hence product expertise and awareness-raising are essential.

Businesses rarely make impulsive purchases; instead, even small businesses and startups make thoughtful, well-considered expenditures that are frequently settled upon over a lengthy period of time by a large number of people. Because of this, cultivating B2B leads requires more time than nurturing B2C leads. 

Thus, the types of marketing automation processes that focus on the following are the primary areas of concern for B2B marketing automation:

  • Reaching a wider audience with content and education.
  • Guiding prospects during the sales process.
  • According to forrester, b2b marketing automation increases sales by 10%.

Automation of B2C Marketing

Contrary to business-to-business (B2B) marketing, business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing emphasizes making decisions quickly in order to win over customers. The primary difference is the duration of campaigns, even if prospect activity monitoring is used by both companies’ marketing to guide messaging decisions. 

In business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, consumer campaigns should grab consumers’ attention right away and keep the buying process simple, straightforward, and appealing. As a result, B2C marketing automation encompasses systems that prioritize providing pertinent, tailored communications to specific customers.

Automation of Small Company Marketing

Smaller companies occasionally lack the manpower to carry out intricate tasks or find insightful information for effective marketing. For sixty percent of small and medium-sized firms, acquiring new customers is the largest problem. Thirty-nine percent say that marketing to their target market is another important barrier.

Marketing automation might easily bridge the gap and assist companies in overcoming these obstacles. Numerous free and reasonably priced marketing automation tools are made especially for small organizations. For this reason, the majority of SMEs (74%), who made this decision in the first half of this year, are considering utilizing AI or automation technologies.

11 Revolutionary Forms of Marketing Automation

It’s critical to ascertain which automation solutions would benefit your business the most before implementing any new technology. To help you organize every part of your marketing, we’ve put together a list of 11 different kinds of marketing automation:

  • Marketing automation via email
  • Automation of social media
  • CRM and automation for CDP
  • Automation of reporting and data analysis
  • Marketing automation
  • Marketing automation for mobile
  • Automation across channels
  • Automation of chatbots
  • Robotic lead management
  • Automation of sales and marketing alignment
  • Automating web personalization

1. Marketing Automation via Email

Email automation involves automatically sending a prospect or client an email in response to certain activities, like:

  • Adding yourself to your mailing list
  • Making a profile on your webpage
  • Buying anything
  • Giving up on their cart

One of the best ways to connect with your target audience and establish a personal connection is via email. According to Campaign Monitor, email campaigns that are automated bring in 320% more money than those that aren’t. 

The Advantages of Automated Email Marketing

  • Personalized content delivery
  • Saving time by avoiding the need to create contact lists and send emails
  • Retaining clients by maintaining constant communication
  • Adapting to your expanding email list
  • Using a/b testing to boost open rates

2. Automation of Social Media

The practice of automating social media marketing involves social media automation, which involves automating labor-intensive operations like:

  • Releasing material
  • Organizing and arranging for new posts
  • Reprinting widely read books
  • Keeping an eye on popular stuff
  • Monitoring engagement with published material

In 2023, 4.89 billion individuals worldwide are expected to be active on social media, according to experts. More than ever, users spend 151 minutes a day on social media on average. Social media is therefore an excellent medium for marketers to reach a wider audience with their messages. 

Social Media Automation Advantages

Together, social media and marketing automation technologies free up marketers from the time-consuming chores involved in keeping up a social media presence. The main benefits of social media automation are as follows:

  • Permits steady brand exposure and client interaction
  • Offers improved and precise marketing automation analytics, reporting, and data collection.
  • Updates advertisers on hashtags, trends, and events on social media
  • Divides up the target market for focused advertising
  • Facilitates the distribution of data through a range of marketing channels

Every day, millions of people sip coffee; it’s the basis for memes and Instagram-worthy lines, and the majority of people claim they can’t get through the morning without it. Starbucks used user-generated content (UGC) to spread their content because they identified an opportunity to capitalize on the topic that people were actively discussing. To make it even more thrilling, they also designed a time-limited deal with free content props. 

3. CRM and Automation for CDP

Businesses can manage customer and lead data and adopt a unified sales and marketing strategy with the use of customer relationship management, or CRM, software and customer data platforms, or CDPs. Consequently, businesses can integrate a variety of marketing automation tasks with CRM automation, including: 

  • Assembling a contact list
  • Sending follow-up emails
  • Distributing leads to the proper members of the sales team
  • Dividing up the client base using different criteria
  • Data exchange between the marketing and sales departments
  • Examining data and trends to improve customer journeys

Automation of CRM/DFP Has Advantages

Studies reveal that CRM systems can increase lead conversion rates by 300% and transaction values by 40%. Therefore, by automating CRM operations, firms may maximize the potential of these data management platforms and benefit from things like:

  • Streamlined client relationship management
  • Time and money saved through automation of the data collection method
  • An integrated and optimized perspective of the marketing and sales funnels
  • Improved cooperation and information exchange between the marketing and sales teams
  • Data-driven segmentation enables increased personalization through targeted campaigns.
  • Automatic lead assignment results in better lead management.
  • Increased sales as a result of stronger relationships with your clients

Spotify runs its “Spotify Wrapped” social media campaign every year in December. Spotify provides personalized reports that showcase the most well-liked musical genres, songs, and performers based on user preferences. These details are provided by Spotify in eye-catching infographics that users can post to their social media pages.

4. Automation of Reporting and Data Analysis

Automated reporting and data analysis make it easier to obtain uniform data from your campaigns across several channels. This automation is programmed to evaluate performance and offer insightful visuals. 

Advantages of Automated Reporting and Data Analysis

  • Monitor critical metrics.
  • Keep an eye on each campaign’s effectiveness.
  • Monitor the functionality of your website.
  • Simplify and streamline the display of data.
  • Recognize what is and is not working.
  • To demonstrate the effectiveness of automated data analytics, let’s look at a case study.

The distribution of insights was delayed by two days due to the irregular and repetitive nature of 7-Eleven’s data collection and analytics methods. The insights didn’t lead to decisions that were consistent, even with the wait. 

After that, 7-Eleven employed automation and had the following advantages: 

  • Weekly data processing consistency through hundreds of iterations
  • Time was saved significantly since insights were obtained in an hour instead of two days.
  • assurance in judgment due to the machine learning algorithms’ capacity for prediction
  • See also: Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Automation 101 

5. Marketing Automation

Tasks associated with ad campaigns on various platforms, including social media, mobile devices, search engines, and display networks, can be automated with the help of advertising automation. Using a powerful platform for marketing automation, you can automate:

  • Establishing campaigns
  • Taking them out
  • Examining them
  • Controlling them

The Advantages of Automating Advertisements

Data is the key to digital advertising’s success, as it may increase brand recognition by 80%. Using automation, marketers can profit from precise, data-rich campaigns and can: 

In a short amount of time, create highly targeted audiences that include lookalikes.

  • Create material that will be successful.
  • Utilize user conduct to start predefined actions
  • Advise sensibly by examining data
  • Use data to find suitable keywords.
  • Create reports using metrics to track your progress.

One of the top home service marketplaces in India, Urban Company, needed to produce hundreds of banner ads and films every day to promote their brand across several platforms. Due to a labor shortage, design bottlenecks were created during seasonal and holiday marketing when the workload was much heavier.

Urban Company separated the managerial and creative processes in order to address this. It used automation to build and use a variety of ad templates, which facilitated the quick development of creatives by remote marketing teams and outside agencies. 

6. Marketing Automation for Mobile

You can send out promotional content via text, in-app messaging, or notifications using mobile marketing. It’s an effective method of reaching your target audience on a customized platform, and mobile marketing automation allows you to automate all of these procedures. 

The Advantages of Automated Mobile Marketing

Considering that people use their phones for more than three hours a day on average, mobile marketing automation is a really beneficial tool. This adds up to an astounding 71,000 hours of phone time annually! Marketers that use mobile marketing automation can:

  • Use their mobile devices to interact with their intended audience.
  • Produce trustworthy mobile marketing campaigns automatically with little to no human involvement.
  • Use data and triggers to stay in touch with customers more frequently by sending them timely, relevant messages that match their interests, preferences, and actions.
  • Increase recurring business, foster loyalty, and lower attrition
  • Conversion rates will rise if you use analytics and data to evaluate and adjust your mobile marketing campaigns.

With the use of mobile marketing automation, advertisers may set up alerts to be sent to users when certain activities are taken within the app, such a client unsubscribing or stopping their service. 

7. Automation Across Channels

Do you wish to advertise your company through a variety of media? It’s a brilliant idea since, even with the surge in popularity of e-commerce, 55% of consumers still prefer to feel the products in person at a brick and mortar store. Even if customers decide to make their purchases online, them in-store experiences still matter.

If you’re thinking about giving your customers more touchpoints and more channels to make purchases, use omnichannel marketing to create a cohesive customer experience. Eighty-nine percent of customers can be retained by organizations using an omnichannel strategy.

One of the most effective forms of marketing automation is omnichannel marketing automation, which links processes and provides a unified and consistent customer experience across physical stores, online storefronts, websites, and social media.

Omnichannel Automation Advantages

The process of creating a consistent consumer experience across all channels can be automated via omnichannel marketing solutions. Three main benefits of omnichannel automation for your organization are:

  • Simple coordination of marketing initiatives through all media,
  • Keep an eye on your clients’ actions whenever you deal with them.
  • Ensure that clients receive the same experience through all of the channels.

As an example, consider the UK fashion retailer Oasis. By linking its physical stores, mobile app, and internet retailers, it made shopping easier. 

8. Automation of Chatbots

Businesses may automatically respond to frequently asked customer queries with chatbot automation. Chatbots are trained to respond to common questions by using information from the website, help files, apps, and previous customer service interactions.

Additionally, they might recognize complex or sales-related inquiries that are better served by a real person. 

Advantages of Automated Chatbots

Experts estimate that 25% of companies will use conversational AI-powered chatbots by 2027. Chatbots, which were formerly limited to websites, are now interacting with clients via email, WeChat, and Messenger apps, as well as SMS marketing.

Using chatbot automation can benefit your company in a number of ways.

Faster ticket resolution is provided.

  • Let’s the success and support teams focus on important issues related to customer satisfaction
  • Expand your initiative to offer support by offering round-the-clock assistance.
  • Provide multilingual assistance
  • Include marketing and upselling techniques

Keep track of conversations across several channels to assist your support staff in offering a consistent experience.

Check out Babylon Health’s symptom checker. It is an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that uses natural language processing and machine learning techniques to have natural conversations with users.

9. Robotic Lead Management

The marketing process of acquiring, screening, and turning leads into paying customers through focused advertising tactics is known as lead management. Marketers can utilize lead management automation solutions to automate a range of lead management responsibilities, including:

  • Generating leads with data scraping from several sources
  • For more effective targeting, use lead segmentation to separate them into lists according to particular categories.
  • To find leads who are ready to buy, use lead scoring.
  • Lead assignment, lead outreach, and lead nurturing using automated emails
  • Lead conversion with automatic digital contracts or instantaneous invoice creation
  • By planning post-purchase communications, you can promote upselling.

Automation of Lead Management Has Advantages

According to data, automation improves a company’s lead acquisition quality by 80%. How come? Marketers can: with the automation of lead management

  • Identify the most successful points of contact for sales and marketing.
  • To nurture leads, automate communications with them at different phases of the client journey.
  • Notify the marketing division if a potential client performs a specific activity.

For instance, you might build up an internal marketing automation to notify you whenever a potential customer downloads a file or visits your price page more than twice. Your marketers will be able to build a rapport with the prospect as a result.

10. Automation of Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and marketing teams typically work independently, even if they have the same overall objective of generating cash flow.

One of the main reasons for lost time, passed up chances, and stagnant projects is the lack of communication and cooperation between these two groups. In fact, because of a misalignment between the sales and marketing teams, as much as 60–70% of B2B material is underutilized, and nearly 75 percent of marketing prospects never convert.

Automation that facilitates alignment between sales and marketing helps the two departments work together more effectively. What? Some forms of marketing automation are beneficial.

  • Exchanging data about clients, their dealings with the company, and their purchases
  • Sharing materials and content to enhance each client journey individually
  • Making connections between the marketing and sales departments
  • Establishing common goals in sales and marketing
  • Incorporating account and customer information into marketing and sales initiatives

The Advantages of Automating Sales and Marketing Alignment

  • Uniform messaging from all facets of your company
  • Reduce resource waste and increase income
  • Reduced the length of the sales cycle using a single strategy to move clients through the sales funnel
  • Higher rates of conversion

Let’s examine a case study of SuperOffice CRM, which used alignment between marketing and sales. Together, the two teams worked on content creation and campaign management to engage leads and expand the client base. They united the two teams and positioned “marketing as a shared responsibility.”

11. Automating Web Personalization

You may automate processes that contribute to making website visitors’ experiences more personalized with web personalization automation.

Your website can collect and analyze data in real-time using web personalization automation. After that, it uses automated decision-making to present tailored messages and alter the content on your website. 

Advantages of Automated Web Personalization

  • Increases user engagement on websites
  • Aids in converting more customers
  • Reduces the chances of cart abandonment and bounce
  • Enhances the user’s experience
  • Sends more specialized messages
  • Attends to each visitor’s requirements and preferences individually
  • Helps make purchasing decisions more quickly

Personalized marketing may increase a campaign’s effectiveness by 10% to 30%, which is why 89% of digital firms are investing in it. Use Sephora as an illustration. By comparing the things you’ve been examining with similar ones, the company goes above and beyond simple product recommendations.

Customers may decide on a final purchase with ease when they receive this individualized treatment.

Final Say

There’s more to marketing automation than just being the newest fad to keep up with the ever changing digital landscape.

It’s a long-term investment in the success of your business, and it may greatly benefit your marketing efforts if you use automation tools and the right marketing plan. Based on their specific business objectives, this guide intends to assist readers in navigating and implementing 11 distinct forms of marketing automation.  

This is the perfect time to start introducing marketing automation into your business if you haven’t already!

For small enterprises, SimpSocial offers an all-in-one marketing solution at an inexpensive price. Obtain leads, produce eye-catching pages, start multichannel campaigns, synchronize sales and marketing, provide insightful reports—the list is endless.

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