What is marketing automation?

The definition of marketing automation is the streamlining of any manual marketing process using software. Organizations and companies can use marketing automation to increase their speed of work, reduce repetitive tasks, and introduce efficiencies to their sales and marketing operations.

Although similar to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), marketing automation is geared toward marketing functions while CRM is geared toward sales teams.

A study from BlueVenn found that marketers spend 80% of their time analyzing and interpreting data. This means that there is a lot of value to be found in marketing automation services that save marketers time and resources.

With evolving and advancing software comes the increased use of tools like artificial intelligence, shaking up the traditional marketing landscape. We can expect that technology, and the level of value that it can add to marketing automation services, to continue to advance to such an extent that using automation software will be a basic requirement to compete in the digital marketing space. In fact, in many instances, this is already the case. In other words, marketing automation is a necessary tool to stay competitive in the current digital marketing environment.

There are many tasks that computers are undeniably better at completing than their human counterparts. One example is computers’ ability to procedurally work through repetitive tasks. The main purpose of marketing automation is to remove repetition for humans and increase accuracy.

Since a computer never tires, and can carry out millions of calculations per second, it massively increases efficiency and reduces the chance of error that inherently comes with the human execution of tasks. Computers are also able to act in a fraction of a second, much faster than a human ever could, so can rapidly react to changing circumstances and take actionquickly.

With this help from software systems, marketers are able to use a robust marketing automation strategy to:

• Spend more time on developing a strong marketing strategy
• Improve return on investment (ROI) of marketing campaigns
• Predict future performance of metrics such as lifetime value more accurately
• Thoroughly understand the behavior of potential users

In the mobile marketing space, there are two key uses of marketing automation.

Spend aggregation allows marketers to see their omnichannel ad spend across apps, partners, and networks in one aggregated report. Some services also allow deliverable, cohort, and cost views within these reports. In the case of Adjust’s Datascape, marketers can also access reports detailing overall costs, cost per event, and return on ad spend (ROAS). Plus, advanced filters facilitate multi-value and exclusion-based data selection.

However, the area that is most benefiting from technological advances is campaign optimization. As the battle over ad inventory becomes more intense, programmatic advertising software makes decisions over the placement of ads in fractions of a second. Maintaining multiple campaigns across multiple networks requires a high level of attention and constant fine-tuning, which can create headaches for marketing managers.

With the advent of rule-based campaign optimization solutions, the allocation of ad budgets can be automated based on different variables and updated in real-time by computers. As artificial intelligence continues to grow in its ability to manage budgets across campaigns, AI budget management will likely become the norm, giving marketers even more time to focus on creatives and strategy.

Ready to begin automating your marketing processes? Adjust’s Control Center lets marketers view and manage all bids and budgets across different networks in one place. Meanwhile, Rule Engine helps marketers set custom rules based on metrics of their choice. Mobile marketers no longer need to spend more than half their day optimizing campaigns. Learn more about the best marketing automation practices for driving growth and how to set your own marketing automation rules.