Marketing automation can be a game-changing solution to any go-to-market strategy. It can speed up your nurture programs across multiple channels and elevate your marketing performance to new heights when implemented correctly. But not all programs are equal. To develop the best program for you, you must first answer one simple question: what’s the goal of this program? 

This may seem obvious, but until you come up with a concrete answer, your program will be built on a loose foundation. Too often, marketers jump to implement the next promising MarTech tool without considering how it will affect their overall business goals; however, marketing automation is only as powerful as the team behind it. 

Marketing automation campaigns that improve your marketing performance 

The goal of your program must be the foundation for everything you do. It will help craft your message, your content, your audience lists, and your cadence. Marketing automation can’t just be a faster way to send out broadcast messaging to your entire list; it should be both a faster and a smarter way to market to your audience.  

For example, if your goal is to promote brand awareness, you could set up a nurture campaign that focuses on offering brand information, thought leadership pieces, and webinars with topics that will resonate with an introductory audience. You’ll want to send this to new contacts in your database and begin their nurture soon after you add them.  This type of content will be high-level and introduce your brand and your voice to new leads. It wouldn’t make sense for those familiar with your brand already, though. 

Another campaign could be focused on onboarding new customers. The content that fills that campaign would consist of how-to blogs and videos, useful tips and tricks, and helpful resources for them to learn more at their own pace. The emails can be sent “from” their account representative for a more personalized feel even if it’s an automated email. These can be sent to new customers, customers who recently achieved an upsell, or even existing customers who’ve purchased a new product or add-on. 

If you want to set up a campaign to focus on nurturing leads further down the funnel to increase conversions (whether that’s a sale, a loyalty membership subscription, a demo, or a free trial), the content should be catered to an audience already familiar with your product. The content can comprise of highlighted product features, differentiators, use cases, or other MOFU and BOFU content that convinces shoppers to convert.  

Bringing humanity into marketing automation 

Too often, marketers will set up marketing programs that fail because the focus was on the back-end logic of the program, rather than the content that comprises it. Marketing automation is a tool that enhances a marketing program; it doesn’t create one. If you focus entirely on the automation side of it, you’ll lose the human touch of a marketing program that enables it to succeed. Similarly, if you only focus on the human side of marketing, you’ll build great programs at a snail’s pace. Real success is combining these two sides of marketing — human and machine — to create a scalable, automated, and personalized program with the human touch that consumers love.