It's time we starting hearing new terms in marketing many years after popular terms coined by Philip Kotler and peers. One of such and most loudly and frequently heard is Marketing Automation.
Marketing automation can be defined as simple as automating marketing process. But it's impossible to automate all the processes involved in marketing. Because it demands a lot of human skills and intelligence to create and implement marketing strategies. So marketing automation attempts to automate as many marketing activities as possible by using technology. It is simply reducing human efforts by using technology.
Marketing automation is widely used for repetitive tasks. As we all know, marketing function broadly has two type of functions viz., internal marketing management and external customer / prospect engagement activities. We can use marketing automation in both of these to functions to an extent. In internal marketing management, marketing automation helps in reducing the time consumed to plan, communicate and track the progress of marketing strategies. For example, if you need a new print advertisement copy has to be created, you can write a description and send work order to the designing team and also can track the work status by using a software. It is more similar to the CRM system.
In the external marketing function, i.e., customer engagement activites, you can automate certain communication strategies to your customers or prospects. For example, if your marketing strategy requires to send emails to prospects at a specific time, you can automate the process of sending out the emails. You can even send the email to multiple recipients with different content. All of this can be scheduled for an automatic sending at the scheduled time. Here we can automate the process of sending the emails but we cannot automate the process of deciding which content to include in email.
Hope I have tried to give some level of definition for Marketing Automation.
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