What Is Marketing Automation? Definition, Examples & Techniques

All marketing managers or CMOs ( Chief Marketing Officers ) are constantly looking for the best strategic and operational marketing tools to improve the performance of their website and convert prospects into customers. Are you looking for the best tools for your marketing? Inbound marketing, SEO, emailing, marketing automation or even brand image management… Please dig into our marketing toolbox to discover some essential solutions!

Your Team’s Marketing Toolkit In 2023

This panorama of marketing tools will delight your web marketing team and give it the means to increase its performance and productivity, whether for:

1. traffic acquisition,
2. visitor behavior analysis,
3. conversion on your website,
4. user retention,
5. reputation management,
6. Management of the marketing strategy.

SEO Software (Search Engine Optimization)

Do you want:

1. Carry out a technical audit of a website to identify the blocking points that hinder the positioning of your site (technology used, site map, mesh, page loading speed, etc.);
2. Analyze and optimize the positioning of pages by studying the semantics of the content;
3. study incoming and outgoing links;
4. Review competing sites and do some keyword research.

 Examples Of SEO Tools

1. Screaming Frog to crawl the pages of your site and extract SEO data,
2. Ranxplorer to identify positioning by page or by keyword,
3. SEObserver to study the competition of a keyword and follow the backlinks.
4. Ahrefs  for keyword research and tracking
5. See more SEO software.

SEA (Search Engine Advertising) Software

Do you want:

1. position your brand quickly in search engine results;
2. be visible to the targets that interest you;
3. create Google Ads ads;
4. maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your AdWords campaigns.

Examples Of SEATools 

1. Google keyword planner to create and manage your SEA campaigns,
2. Keyword Suggest identifying the keywords on which to base your campaign,
3. WordStream advisor to monitor the performance of your Google Ads campaigns.
4. Semrush to do a market audit and study the actions of your competitors.

SMO Software (Social Media Optimization)

Do you want:

1. centralize social networks in a single platform (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.);
2. automate and schedule the publication of content on different networks at the same time;
3. analyze the statistics of your posts.

Examples Of SMO Tools

1. Buffer to schedule posts and publish them on several networks at the same time,
2. HootSuite for broadcasting posts and easy management of video sharing.
3. SocialPilot for online data mining. 

UX/UI Design Software

Do you want:

1. identify the areas of your pages where visitors linger or, conversely, those they avoid;
2. detect the navigation taken by users of your site and therefore understand the user journey;
3. have keys to review your UX/UI to facilitate this journey and improve conversions on your pages;
4. create personalized pages with relevant URLs;
5. analyze the results and understand which scenario among those tested is the most convincing regarding conversions.

Examples Of UX/UI Tools

1. Hotjar, heatmap software  to analyze the behavior and journey of visitors to your site via heatmaps;
2. A/B Tasty, A/B testing software to simplify the implementation of technical and ergonomic tests on web pages;
3. graphic design tools to lay out models or do photo editing.

Emailing Software

Do you want:

1. send mass emails at low cost, white papers, webinars, landing pages,
2. segment contact databases to send the right message to the right target and thus increase lead-customer conversions,
3. create scenarios for automatically sending emails;
4. retain your audience through the sharing of relevant and regular content (content marketing),
5. drive traffic back to your website from visitors already familiar with your brand.

Example Of An Emailing Tool

1. Sendinblue to easily create drag-and-drop emails and segment your audience using CRM features.

Marketing Intelligence Software

Do you want:

1. receive alerts on your brand and understand how it is perceived (e-reputation);
2. analyze the market and its workings, and study the competition;
3. collect data on specific keywords, then process them to check their relevance and reuse them in your marketing strategy.

Examples Of Marketing Monitoring Tools

1. Meltwater  to identify trends and innovations in your industry and analyze your competitors and their progress;
2. Mention for carrying out a marketing watch on social networks.

Reviews And Feedback Management Software

Do you want:

1. Carry out satisfaction surveys to collect customer opinions;
2. Centralize customer opinions and impressions of your product or service;
3. Reuse the data to improve your product or for marketing purposes (reviews published on your site and on comparison sites, sharing of thoughts on social networks or in an emailing campaign, etc.);
4. Help convince prospects of the advantages of your offer thanks to convincing feedback.

Example Of A Review Management Tool

1. I give my opinion to create and distribute personalized surveys with forms and survey templates and collect thoughts.

Analytical Software

Do you want:

1. monitor the progress of your marketing actions and compliance with the roadmap using KPIs;
2. draw up a personalized dashboard to analyze these indicators quickly;
3. anticipate and prevent risks;
4. Share progress with your team collaboratively and transparently;
5. review your marketing strategy and reassess objectives and priorities;
6. make relevant decisions based on numbers.

Examples Of Analytical Marketing Tools

1. Google Analytics for analytical tracking, the benchmark analysis tool for all marketers! Track your overall site traffic and page by page, as well as conversions, time spent on each page or even the bounce rate; 
2. Rowshare to create personalized and collaborative dashboards.

Marketing Automation Software

Do you want:

1. Automate tasks to avoid manual charges and save time;
2. Reach a broader spectrum of prospects that would have been complicated to run manually;
3. centralize many functions in a single tool to avoid the multiplication of interfaces and make better use of data without losing it;
4. Improve the profitability of marketing actions: little manual intervention for reasonable conversion rates.

Examples Of Marketing Automation Tools

MailChimp for:

1. Simplify your emailing and retargeting campaigns.
2. Email-based lead scoring
3. A/B Testing up to 2 versions of an email.
4. Create your campaign scenarios and automate actions related to them.

Mapp Cloud  (Mapp Intelligence, Mapp Acquire and Mapp Engage) for:

1. Simplify marketing automation, customer experience and marketing data in a single interface;
2. Extract and analyze data from several channels to anticipate user behavior;
3. Create event scenarios and automate multi-channel marketing actions (email, web, SMS, mobile push, social).

Webmecanik for:

1. Exploit and enrich your prospect and customer data, thanks to the tracking of your sites and applications and declarative and behavioral segmentation;
2. Communicate in a personalized way, thanks to a campaign editor, with multi-channel automation (sms, pop-in, white papers, emailing);
3. Benefit from the strength of a community and its evolving open-source technology.
4. Knowing how to choose your marketing tools 

Here are the last tips to help you make your choice:

1. Test, test, test! The free trials are there for that: try, get an idea of ​​the tool and adopt it (or not!).
2. Check the connections between the software: you may only be looking for one in particular, so make sure it is compatible with your existing tools to use your data best.
3. Ask the opinion of your peers: what have they and they already tested and approved?

Read Also: The Dashboard: A Tool Dedicated To Business Strategy