Marketing automation workflow: how to build & benefits
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Marketing automation software leverages technologies and tools to streamline, automate, track, and optimize a range of repetitive marketing tasks. As such, begin by analyzing your overall content marketing strategy. A couple of marketing tools can be extremely valuable here on the road to marketing automation workflow maturity: a digital asset management (DAM) solution, and a content hub. A digital relevancy map identifies and establishes the most effective, relevant content for your major segments at each stage in their customer journey, so that you can nurture them towards a purchase and inspire long-term brand loyalty. Launch a guided demo of Sitecore Content Hub DAM, and discover how to unlock the full potential of your brand and marketing automation by unifying all digital assets in one intuitive interface, while distributing across various touchpoints and multiple channels and ensuring brand consistency — click here.
Marketing automation software leverages technologies and tools to streamline, automate, track, and optimize a range of repetitive marketing tasks. Ultimately, these tasks support the goal of delivering unforgettable customer personalization — which is more important now than ever before. Consider these statistics that prove the power of hyper-personalization on today’s B2C and B2B (a.k.a. “B2Me”) digital landscape:
And so, if marketing automation is the vehicle that enables brands to connect with existing and new customers, what is the route, direction, and speed that this vehicle must travel to reach its desired destination? That is where marketing automation workflows enters the discussion.
A marketing automation workflow uses logical (“if/then”) rules to achieve critical marketing functions and goals, such as:
There are several major benefits of using marketing automation platforms to replace repetitive marketing processes and tasks and processes. Various studies and surveys have found that:
It is also important to highlight that marketing automation workflows do not — we repeat: do not! — seek to replace marketing teams with technologies and tools. Rather, well-designed and deployed marketing automation workflows liberate marketing teams to spend far less (and ideally no) time on time-consuming, repetitive tasks, so they can focus on higher-value marketing activities and priorities.
There are many repetitive, yet important tasks and processes that can be standardized, automated, monitored, and optimized through marketing automation workflows. These can include (but are not limited to):
And there is more good news: Leading marketing automation solutions offer multiple out-of-the-box pre-defined marketing automation workflow (campaign) templates, which marketers can use to base and build their own unique workflows for functions such as:
Leading solutions also integrate with other systems in the environment to support marketing automation workflow processes and objectives. For example, marketers can capture customer behavior data from a website, automatically push that data to a cloud-based CRM, and leverage that customer data to deliver personalized email marketing campaigns to the right customers, with the right message, and at the right time.
There are five key elements of the marketing automation workflow puzzle:
Some marketing automation workflows are fairly short and straightforward, while others can be long and winding. However, all workflows are rooted in pairs of actions (things that customers do) and responses (what brands do based on those customer actions). Let us look at a couple of very simple examples:
Marketing workflow automations need to be populated with content, content, and yet more content. As such, begin by analyzing your overall content marketing strategy. Pay attention to how your content is (or should be) housed and organized, and focus on aspects such as:
A couple of marketing tools can be extremely valuable here on the road to marketing automation workflow maturity: a digital asset management (DAM) solution, and a content hub.
A DAM solution enables you to streamline asset management, so that your team can always find what they need, when they need it. The average creative professional searches for a media file 83 times a week, yet fails to find that asset 35% of the time. A DAM solution can reduce this failure rate dramatically to just 5%, or possibly even less.
During this analysis, you may determine that you want or need to enhance customer experience through personalization or omnichannel automation strategies. If so, then a standalone DAM solution will most likely not be enough. But do not worry, because there is another option: a content hub.
A content hub empowers you to take charge of your entire end-to-end content target audience lifecycle. This includes —but goes far beyond — organizing assets by unifying content planning, production, collaboration, management, and distribution. And it does all of this within a single, integrated solution.
In addition, during your planning process you will need to identify what the customer journey looks like — or should look like if some updates are required — for your various customer segments. Here is where digital relevancy map can be invaluable for turning confusion into clarity, and missed opportunities into more sales. A digital relevancy map identifies and establishes the most effective, relevant content for your major segments at each stage in their customer journey, so that you can nurture them towards a purchase and inspire long-term brand loyalty.
Next, you want to ensure that you have outstanding CX and UX design — because even great content can be undermined by poor design.
Effective marketing automation can help marketers scale their marketing efforts and strengthen customer relationships by nurturing unfamiliar prospects at the beginning of the journey, into impressed, informed, and inspired fans by the end.
Launch a guided demo of Sitecore Content Hub DAM, and discover how to unlock the full potential of your brand and marketing automation by unifying all digital assets in one intuitive interface, while distributing across various touchpoints and multiple channels and ensuring brand consistency — click here.