Marketing is considered one of the basic and important processes for the success of businesses and the speed of their spread. It is noted that marketing techniques are evolving with the development of modern technology. Today, it has become possible to automate the marketing process and make it more effective and efficient by relying on programs dedicated to implementing recurring marketing tasks and activities, thus saving time and effort on Sellers and marketers, achieving more productivity in their work.
In this article, we will introduce you to the marketing automation process, its benefits, and its uses in general and on WordPress sites in particular. We will also mention to you the best marketing automation plugins that you can use in the WordPress system, which will help you grow your business and reach your customers easily and quickly.
Definition of marketing automation
Marketing automation is the process of using software and digital tools to perform permanent marketing activities and campaigns across various channels in an automated manner, through these platforms instead of doing them manually.
This process allows targeting a larger number of customers through social media, e-mail, websites, and even through advertising messages that rely mainly on sending automatic messages directed with thoughtful instructions that are sent after determining the workflow method.
Benefits of marketing automation
Marketing automation platforms offer many services and benefits to companies and businesses, the most important of which are:
1- Increasing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns
Marketing automation is a good option for delegating tasks that consume a lot of effort and time instead of doing them manually. This automatic system prepares marketing campaigns in an automated way that does not require the presence of a marketing team to work on them. This way, the team has more time and effort to focus on business strategies.
Identifying potential customers is one of the most important goals that business owners pursue. Because this helps them identify the target market, effectively use marketing resources, and raise the growth rate of their business. Marketing automation software helps them achieve this by saving data on potential customers with the data registered in the system and building targeted marketing campaigns for them, based on the reports provided by this software, which helps them achieve a better understanding of what needs to be modified and what needs to be worked on to achieve sales.
3- Manage and display data in an organized manner
Marketing automation platforms are distinguished by their ability to control the process of organizing data and data and displaying them within organized reports. Because it relies on artificial intelligence, its results are more accurate than the results of manual reports, which allows continuous tracking of this data and interacting with the marketing process correctly.
4- Providing accurate reports based on software analyses
Marketing automation platforms and tools provide accurate reports based on the analytics they record throughout the marketing process, and as a result, it becomes very easy to determine what needs to be modified throughout the entire process and avoid the duplication that manual marketing campaigns may fall into.
5- Providing the feature of scheduling marketing campaigns in advance
One of the important features offered by marketing automation tools is the pre-scheduling feature, whether for marketing campaigns in general or for marketing publications on social media platforms and advertising messages via email in particular. This gives the possibility of preparing the entire marketing campaign in advance, and scheduling it according to the times that the platform determines provide a high rate of interaction.
In short, marketing automation mainly aims to qualitatively and quantitatively improve the marketing process in terms of time and effort, target potential customers, as well as organize the content of marketing campaigns in general. This is why about 45% of marketing agencies rely on marketing automation platforms to highlight their returns on investment, while about 45% of marketing agencies use them. 42% of them to measure the performance rates of their marketing campaigns.
General uses of marketing automation
The marketing automation system is considered to have high capabilities and has several uses in business. It connects qualified customers to receive the marketing campaign and interact with it, which preserves the value of the campaign itself and saves time, as well as achieving the greatest possible interaction with the marketing process. This is why there has recently been increased focus on the use of marketing automation tools by marketing agencies in several areas, the most important of which are:
1- Remarketing activity via email
Many marketing automation platforms offer email remarketing . This feature enables marketers to restore and renew marketing activities that did not achieve the expected results at the beginning of the marketing campaign, by sending programmed emails to customers again. This keeps the campaign active while keeping customers informed of the latest changes that occur to it.
2- Social networking sites
Marketing automation can be used to send targeted messages and schedule posts targeting potential customers on social media sites. This is done by integrating automation software with data extracted from monitoring workflow on social media sites. Marketing automation platforms identify the audience most likely to interact with marketing campaigns, and determine the appropriate times to achieve interaction.
3- Managing and storing data
This process is important and fundamental, as it aims to determine the types of potential customers and the interaction required to be achieved. An example of this process is: Customer Relationship Management (CRM), which is software used to track customer interactions, whether via email, social networking sites, or websites.
The data collected through the CRM system is the main driver of targeted marketing campaigns, as it directly targets customers’ needs and desires, which ensures the creation of tailored and tailored marketing campaigns.
Uses of marketing automation in WordPress sites
There are many uses for marketing automation on WordPress, including:
Email marketing tools such as :
- MailChimp : It is a free tool that you can register for to help you reach the audience automatically through email campaigns, by writing emails in different ways. Read also: MailChimp’s explanation of launching a successful email marketing campaign
- Groundhogg : It is one of the marketing automation tools for the WordPress platform. It provides data management in customer relationship management ( CRM ) systems and issues documented reports to improve this process.
Live chat marketing tools:
- HelpCrunch : This tool is used to live chat with visitors from anywhere and at any time, giving you the possibility of making them potential customers.
Read also: Explanation of creating a live chat on your site to better communicate with customers
Social media marketing tools
- Buffer : This tool allows scheduling posts across various social media platforms such as (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn) via pre-prepared schedules or customized schedules.
- Revive Old Posts : This tool was designed with the aim of growing the number of followers on various social media platforms (Google My Business, Facebook, LinkedIn) while maintaining the interaction rate achieved by these platforms by sharing and publishing posts automatically and continuously.
Marketing Automation Plugins for WordPress
There are many marketing automation plugins that can be included in WordPress to help you accomplish different marketing tasks. The most important of these additions:
- Hubspot : This add-on allows the use of automation in the best ways, as it does not focus only on the marketing process alone, but rather works on serving customers and identifying their needs and requirements by collecting the necessary data and converting it into data that allows improving marketing activity.
- ActiveCampaign: This add-on specializes in email marketing automation, meaning that it works mainly through campaigns and marketing activities that take place via email, but it provides other services such as a live chat service.
- Freshworks CRM : This add-on enables the management of campaigns and marketing activities via email, and provides customer relationship management services, dynamicheatmaps,and accurate graphical analyses, in simplified ways that do not require in-depth experience to learn how to use it.
Explanation of the Hubspot add-on
The Hubspot Sales add-on is an add-on provided by the HubSpot platform , which is famous for building a customer service management system. WordPress allows it to be easily linked to your account on its platform. This add-on is used to monitor and control new visitors to your site, and organize them into lists from within your account based on the analytical data you record.
This add-on provides its services through powerful built-in tools as follows:
- (Dashboard): Enables you to monitor members and contacts.
- (Contacts): Provides an integrated database for visitors and customers based on CRM.
- (Lists): This feature allows lists to be created and divided as required.
- (Forms and Pop-ups): This feature enables the creation of easy-to-use interactive forms and windows to automate marketing campaigns, save time and effort, and ensure greater reach and interaction with customers.
- (Live Chat and Chatbots): This feature allows adding live chat to connect the site owner and visitors in a more interactive and credible way.
- (Email Marketing): Through this feature, you can prepare e-mail messages ready for use.
- (Built-in analytics): Here you can find all the analyzes provided by the add-on about the performance of the site and the marketing campaign.
- (Integrations): This feature allows adding many extensions to the add-on to improve it and increase the site’s performance.
To install the Hubspot plugin on WordPress, follow these steps:
Log in to your site’s control panel on the WordPress platform (you must log in as an administrator), then choose Plugins from the side toolbar of the control panel, and in the search box that appears, search for the Hubspot plugin , then click on the installation button that appears. Bottom left of the screen, then activate the extension. Or read the explanation of installing a WordPress plugin on your site .
After activating the add-on, a new tab called Hubspot will appear on the toolbar, and below it will appear a submenu of the services it provides that we mentioned previously, as shown in the following image:
This plugin helps you perform many tasks on your WordPress site, the most important of which are:
Exploit search engine optimization for your WordPress site
This special SEO tool allows you to constantly track the performance of your site in relation to regular (non-paid) search results. It also identifies problems that the site suffers from regarding SEO and provides solutions for them, which helps improve the site’s ranking in search engines.
This tool works according to the following steps:
- In your Hubspot account click Marketing > Select Site > SEO.
- Type in the site’s domain and examine it for recommendations. To do this, click on the Scan new URL button , then enter the link to your website address and click on the Scan button.
- When the scan is finished, click on the view recommendation button to see the recommendations that the tool gives you to fix and improve the SEO problems that your site suffers from.
Track interaction with your site
Through this feature, you can track the members and visitors of your site, as it sends internal notifications dedicated to everything that visitors browse within the site, and this helps you determine what attracts them.
Analyze recorded data and data
One of the most important tools provided by the add-on, which is considered an important part of understanding and knowing the reasons for the failure and success of marketing campaigns, is the custom reports tool. This tool allows obtaining periodic reports on the performance of the site’s marketing campaign. Where the analytical data collected from your WordPress site is used to work on making more effective marketing decisions.
In the end, we reach the conclusion that marketing automation is considered one of the most successful modern marketing methods that rely on technology to run marketing campaigns because it provides effective services, privileges, and characteristics that cannot be achieved through traditional manual marketing.
common questions
What might cause failure in the marketing automation process?
Lack of proper understanding of the database and graphical analyzes of potential customers, as well as the inability to control the use of marketing automation software, are the most prominent reasons that lead to the failure of the marketing process. Therefore, one should not start using this technology before fully understanding how to study the data and data provided by its reports. Learn its basics before using it as a marketing tool.
How do I choose the most appropriate marketing automation plugin for each business?
Contrary to what many people think, choosing the right marketing automation plugin depends not only on the individual characteristics of the plugin, but is mainly based on the rate of results that the marketing process ultimately achieves. When choosing an add-on, you should pay more attention to the degrees and success rates achieved by this add-on, and review the ratings you obtained from previous users, especially if they have goals and campaigns similar to the campaign you want. This way you ensure you get the most appropriate choice.
When should you switch to marketing automation?
Manual marketing campaigns usually start from the moment the work begins, but the use of marketing automation does not have to be from the beginning. On the contrary, its best use is after achieving relative stability in the process of publishing marketing and advertising content, and also after obtaining a balanced rate of potential customers. This ensures the creation of targeted strategies targeting potential customers to make them permanent customers and reduce the time and effort spent manually in the marketing process.
Thus, we have learned about the concept of Marketing Automation and how to benefit from it in developing your marketing efforts for your WordPress site through ready-made plugins and tools that transform your marketing processes into an automated form.
