M is for…

M is for… Marketing Automation

Aka: how to free up your time to do some actual marketing.

Hands up who has an awful lot of day-to-day tasks on their plate at the moment, and not a lot of time to do them?

First up – your customers, who (quite rightly), are expecting timely, relevant and personal experiences across different channels.

Next – your work to-do list, which is starting to rival Tolstoy’s War and Peace in length.

Finally – your C-suite, who need accurate reports that prove that your department is delivering the goods.

We don’t subscribe to people running themselves ragged trying to tick all those boxes. Instead, we’d like to offer an alternative: marketing automation.

So what is marketing automation?

It’s nifty technology that manages repetitive marketing tasks across email, social media, lead nurturing and even paid ads. Instead of manually sending emails or tracking leads, an automation tool manages your marketing processes and campaigns across multiple channels from a single system. Which means a better, more consistent experience for your customers, time freed up from mundane tasks for you and an improved return on investment for your business.

How does it work?

Businesses can target customers with automated content that’s set to pre‑defined instructions called trigger-based workflows. When a customer follows a specific action – maybe they’ve downloaded a whitepaper or subscribed to get marketing emails – they trigger a series of automated responses.

You can build your workflows from templates or custom design them from scratch. Once they’re up and running, you can adjust them, based on how well they’re performing in your campaigns. With flexibility like this, your campaigns can evolve in real time. Prospects and customers get the right message at the right moment and you don’t have to do any of the heavy lifting.

Unsuprisingly, a lot of businesses are quite keen to adopt marketing automation, with the most common uses of marketing automation being:

• Email marketing (58%)

• Social media management (49%)

• Content management (33%)

THE AUTOMATION PROCESS

Trigger event
A customer submits a form, clicks a CTA button on an email, or downloads content.

Workflow activation
The system recognises the trigger you pre-defined, then activates an automated workflow.

Personalised actions
Based on the contact’s data – such as industry, role or behaviour – the system delivers content that’s relevant to them.

Continuously optimised workflows
Built-in analytics show what’s working and what isn’t, allowing workflows to be refined over time.

Does your business really need marketing automation?

It’s well worth joining the automation club, because it’s a good one – 75% of companies are already using a form of automation, according to a recent report by Adobe.

Even small businesses with 10-50 contacts can reap the rewards of simple workflows like automated welcome emails or follow-ups. And when the business beefs up, the rewards do as well – 37% of marketers say automation tools help them increase their personalisation capabilities. So no more sending out the same emails, losing track of leads, or spending hours on routine tasks. Hurray.

How’s it better than manual marketing?

How do we count the ways? Don’t worry, we’ll manage. Not only does automating your marketing help save you crucial admin hours, it can help cut down your costs too. With clearer insight into your performance, your teams have the chance to invest in the channels that are actually converting.

And while we’re on the subject of teams, marketing automation can help there too, by better aligning your Sales & Marketing teams. It ensures everyone is working from the same data, with shared visibility into lead activity. Your brand messaging stays consistent, because teams are aligned across every touchpoint. Finally, automation makes it possible to deliver tailored experiences to thousands of contacts, something a manual process just couldn’t compete with (ask anyone who’s ever tried to coordinate contacts from a spreadsheet).

The beauty of automation is that it removes friction, taking over repetitive work, and giving your teams the time and space to focus on strategising, creating and innovating.

Why choose HubSpot for your marketing automation needs?

As we’re a HubSpot Gold Partner, you can tell we really, really love HubSpot. It isn’t just a marketing automation tool, but a platform designed to make automation genuinely usable, scalable and effective for modern marketing people, not just super techy whizzes. Here’s why HubSpot makes a failsafe choice for you business’ automation needs:

1. Unlike many automation platforms that require technical setup or specialist knowledge, HubSpot is built around marketeers – their needs, preferences and capabilities. Its visual workflow builder makes it easy to see exactly how a journey works, from trigger to outcome, without writing a single line of code.

2. By combining behavioural data, CRM data and content in one system, you can achieve true personalisation in your communications. We don’t mean adding a first name to an email, we mean changing entire journeys based on who someone is and what they do.

3. With HubSpot, every workflow, email, task and trigger is powered by real customer data, so you’ll have a complete, up‑to‑date view of contacts, companies and deals. And with an intuitive automation system, you can respond quickly to changes in behaviour.

4. HubSpot also encourages better automation by prioritising data quality and measurement. Built‑in reporting, analytics and testing tools make it easier to understand what’s working – and what isn’t – without exporting data or relying on guesswork.

And to top it all off, your first HubSpot workflow can go live in under 30 minutes using its visual workflow builder.

What’s the biggest thing you need to consider about marketing automation?

As automation works off data, you need to exercise the same pickiness that would when it comes to assessing your Tinder or Bumble list of matches. Be really, really picky.

Quality beats quantity hands down in this world – that means regularly cleaning CRM data and defining consistent properties, maybe even creating a workflow that will manage your data. Because once that data becomes poor quality, that’s when the wheels start to fall off. You can’t get good personalisation, smarter automation and long‑term results with shoddy data.

Just make it meaningful

First-class marketing needs a human touch, so don’t waste your business’ talent on the day-to-day minutiae. Implement marketing automation thoughtfully, and it can help your teams work smarter, not harder. Your customers will be more engaged, and your campaigns will be able to deliver meaningful experiences at scale.