It all starts with marketing automation (MA)to help you streamline email communication, lead management including; segmentation, lead nurturing, lead scoring and marketing ROI measurement. Core benefits are: more aligned and efficient Sales and Marketing teams, more pipeline and more impact on revenue.

Automate digital advertising from paying for your advert, seeing where it will be placed to tracking where an advert has served, and the cost of serving it. Every touchpoint across that journey down the funnel, retargeting prospects that already expressed interest in your brand, can be automated as well.

As technology advances across channels, we see that other formats respond well to automation including social, mobile and video.

Use automation capabilities and options available to automate your social media. Automation and social media might sound like an odd combination. But if done correctly; it will save time and effort, enable you to maintain constant content, automate content curation and publishing as well as measure performance with social analytics. Things to automate are: a ‘thanks for the follow’ type comment, content curation, tagging and sharing it with your audience by simply dragging and dropping the content into the calendar. Listen to conversation and get update via email when you receive a mention across websites, blog and social media channels.
Managing paid media campaigns can be a full time job and take away your valuable marketing resources. Not to mention the need to optimise based on rules ROI/CPA or to run multivariate tests including time of day and test new creative and copy for various audiences. Automating the paid media campaigns on social networks; from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram is an effective alternative.

Automate your mobile marketing – Depending on your business model you should first determine triggers like geo-location and targeting prospects (who are in a certain geographic areas), behaviour or action (what prospects do when interacting with your offers) or stage in sales process they are at. You can use an SMS-based add-on  with your CRM or a stand-alone SMS messaging  tool to create and execute intelligent messaging campaigns to drive engagement.

Video marketing is a rock star in content marketing. Facebook announced that more than 8 billion videos are viewed every day on their social network. And the 2015-video-marketing-benchmark-report by Vidyard states that 74% of B2B marketers now say video content produces conversions better than other forms of content. We can automate video marketing and tasks like sending out friend requests, messages, an autoresponder series and comments. We can use automatic video uploading and sharing tools and track the performance of your clips once uploaded, check immediately how many views, comments and ratings your videos get, as well as the one of monitoring how well and where your clips rank on major search engines.

What are your thoughts on automation across marketing? Share your thoughts in comments.