Most months, we love to share helpful content for our readers with our Fresh Look Fridays. Those posts provide space to feature three clients’ stories, work + missions, and their websites. And while we have a lot of projects underway, we are still working on their big reveal. So this month, we’re going to talk about fundamentals- specifically, marketing automation. 

When the word, “automation” gets thrown around, it can feel a bit… cold. But nothing could be further from the truth. Marketing in the 21st Century practically requires automation if a company is in search of outperforming its competitors.

So what is marketing automation? Typically, it’s defined as a software platform that allows a marketing team to streamline, automate, measure tasks related to marketing campaigns and their workflows. 

What are some of those tasks? Well, to name a few: 

1. Personalizing your website. 
2. Generating leads. 
3. Nurturing and converting leads. 
4. Creating landing pages and managing content. 
5. Client and Customer retention. 
6. Marketing campaigns that cross different channels. 
7. Email Marketing. 
8. Measuring ROI. 

… and so much more. 

You see, a typical marketing plan with multiple software programs would involve individual contracts and fees, the need to learn multiple apps, siloed databases that don’t integrate across applications, piecemeal analytics that make it difficult to track ROI, and difficulty keeping compliance. Not to mention, who do you call when things break? Your approach will begin to look a bit like the picture below: