What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the practice of using software and tools to help automate your digital marketing efforts with varying degrees of complexity. It can offload repetitive, mechanical tasks such as email, social media posting, chatting, lead scoring/segmentation etc.

This video will help explain everything more clearly:

How to approach Marketing Automation

Today more than ever we know the importance of maintaining 100% personalized and direct relationships with our users. In the beginning it is very easy to have those 1-to-1 conversations with our users. However, when we begin to grow, it is impossible to continue to have these conversations without losing quality or response time. And here time plays a very important role since the user wants answers immediately, and if you don't give them, your competitor will.

That's where Marketing Automation comes in. It's about generating automated processes that allow us to scale up our marketing operations. This way, we can, for example:

• Generate automatic responses to new registrations
• Classify users based on behavior and send ad-hoc content when they meet certain criteria
• Report new content created
• Send a content after a few days of having downloaded another
• Etc.

Marketing Automation is a software that automates, measures and makes more efficient marketing tasks so that companies can increase their operations and improve their profits.

However, one must be careful. Marketing automation is not just software. It is clear that software is an essential part, after all, without software we cannot do automation. But let's not fool ourselves, the key to Marketing Automation is people: process design, strategy and linking the human side to the whole process is essential for an automation strategy to work. That balance between tool and strategy is the key.

Which Marketing Automation software to use?

According to G2Crowd, one of the great tool comparators in the market, Hubspot would be the ideal choice followed by Pardot, Marketo, Act-on and Eloqua. It should be noted that here the user factor plays a role and Hubspot has considerably more opinions than the rest, so it has a considerable advantage.

Top 4 automation tools

We compared functionalities, ease of use, price and value for money ratio we got the following tools: Active Campaign, HubSpot, Wishpond and Mautic.