Digitalization and Automation of Digital Marketing processes.

Marketing digitalization consists of automating all marketing processes that can be mechanized through the use of technology.

This digitization can be done in two ways:

1. By automating each of the marketing processes (sending emails, ads, monitoring, content...).
2. Or by integrating the different processes, thanks to the use of API's or open applications.

What are the advantages of digitizing marketing processes?

The main advantages of companies that implement automation or digitization systems for their marketing processes are the following:

• Avoid the loss of important business opportunities due to lack of information or organization.
• Eliminate dependence on development teams or systems in the launching of marketing actions. Providing your marketing and sales team with a tool to create their campaigns and commercial actions. 
• Reduce the Average Time to Sale by optimizing processes.
• Implement an ROI-oriented marketing system, based on the knowledge and tracking of metrics and conversion ratios.
• Create a visual map of your processes that will allow you to identify them and then optimize them continuously and plan your marketing campaigns in advance. 
• Improve conversion rates and sales volume.
• Provide the Marketing and Sales team with the tools that will help them do their job better, implementing a customer-centric approach that will in turn reduce incidents and internal tensions.
• Scalability and business growth, increasing revenues without the need to increase costs proportionally.

Which marketing processes can be automated?

In this article we will see which marketing processes can be automated in an Inbound Marketing Strategy. Specifically, the most important ones are the following: 

automatic identification and classification of contacts or leads

Clearly, the main advantage of a website is having a user monitoring tool, which allows us to better understand who is visiting our website and accessing our different digital assets. This is a competitive advantage that not only allows us to have more information that we would not otherwise have, but as we will see below, it is the basis for the digitization and automation of marketing and sales processes.

An example of automation of this process is the automatic identification of the type of contact or buyer persona and their area of interest, and the creation of dynamic lists to create different segments or groups of contacts. This process is vital to the success of automation as it is the beginning of the consumer journey and we must identify exactly who they are, what they want and when they want it. 

LEAD QUALIFICATIONs

In Digital Marketing there is a fundamental process such as the qualification of contacts or leads. A new contact enters the CRM of which we know little information and we need to have more information to know more accurately if we can help them with any of our products or services and at what time. 

The automation of this marketing process can be done by implementing a Lead Scoring system or through a lead nurturing system, maintaining conversations and requesting data from users.

The automatic Lead Scoring system assigns points based on the criteria that define our ideal customer (age, income, professional position, billing....) and according to their activity with the website and interaction with our content and campaigns. This post explains in detail how you should create a rating and lead scoring system.

Automatic e-mailing

It is common to implement an automation of a sales process such as a sequence of emails to Sales Leads, in a semi-automatic but at the same time personalized way. This process is performed by the sales team.

We can also plan a sequence of marketing emails, a technique known as Lead Nurturing, because its objective is to keep the contact active to identify their interests and to be able to segment them correctly.

Technically, Lead Nurturing is done by identifying the different conversion paths that the buyer persona has in order to apply different workflows or sequences of emails with personalized and targeted content at each stage of their journey.

A clear example is to apply a welcome workflow with several automated emails, according to the profile of the potential customer or buyer persona and according to their area of interest to people who convert from an external web page or an advertisement.

Otros ejemplos de automatización de envío de emails:

customized content on web pages and landing pages

Smart or personalized content can be applied either in mass email marketing or even design a personalized web page, showing each group of contacts or lists, which meet different criteria (for example that come from an ad campaign or referral) a unique and personalized content for them.

Within the personalized or intelligent content we highlight the Smart CTA's that allows to publish different CTA's to visitors according to criteria such as their lifecycle stage, country and their list or audience membership, among other triggers.

Digitization through integration of INTERNAL SYSTEMS OR THIRD PARTY APPLICATIONS

As soon as the use of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications hosted in the cloud became popular, new versions of open applications arrived, which communicate and complement each other, thanks to integrations that allow the connection of administrative, management, marketing, commercial and customer service processes. In this way, the entire customer value chain is automated. 

These are some examples of automation or digitization of marketing processes with external applications:

• Trigger cross-application actions when an event such as a page view or form submission is logged.
• Create, delete or update CRM records when an action occurs in your external applications.
• Integrate an SMS system and trigger push notifications based on specific triggers.
• Send chat alerts from an external system to notify employees that something important is happening.

Without any doubts, the automation of marketing processes and their integration with different applications that automate processes is a big step towards the complete digitization of the operational processes of companies and allows us to spend all our time on other tasks that provide greater value.