Marketing automation has been all the rage since P4P became mainstream and marketers have had to get accustomed to it. Here is how marketers can use marketing automation today to improve returns on marketing investment and generate revenues.

Marketing automation is about revenue. Although the purpose of marketing automation is mostly marketing, it drives revenue. Automation is more measurable and up-to-date than traditional marketing methods. Not to mention, it is a highly engaged environment that more closely aligns with marketers’ current needs and long-term goals. As the amount of marketing automation systems and platforms increases, it has become increasingly more useful in the digital marketing space.

There are certain things that every marketer must know before investing in marketing automation. Firstly, you must measure your results. If you believe that your marketing automation platform is doing a fantastic job, double-check your results. Make sure you understand that you need to isolate marketing automation from other non-marketing actions you engage in, as well as how that affects your overall results.

Secondly, marketing automation must fit within your overall marketing plan. This doesn’t mean that marketing automation is used as a marketing intervention, but rather it provides the right tools at the right time and in the right way to impact your bottom line. Implementing marketing automation only turns into an action that will help improve your bottom line during the campaign, but you also need to sell it to the team. That’s why it’s important to have a plan in place. Marketing automation, in its current form, is built into a wider plan. The marketing automation is deployed only after you have considered everything else that goes into marketing, such as all of the other platforms that you use. You can’t make this decision without your team’s input and their feedback.

Thirdly, it’s not just your team that benefits from marketing automation. Anybody who’s thinking about using it, and would like to have a visual of where the money’s going and what the return on investment is, should make sure the analytics are functioning properly. Analytics play a role in generating goals and working towards those goals. The more visibility that they have of the overall plan, the more confident they are about building the right marketing automation. Analytics play a big role in decision-making for companies as well as the success of their marketing efforts. The more functionality they have, the better they can tailor the campaign to the specific business objectives.

Finally, marketing automation must be truly customer-centric. Marketing automation is the only tool that brings together every marketing function and makes each person’s role appear more effective and strategic. That means that marketers must know what is important to their customers. What would they really need? What is valuable to them? Will marketing automation make them buy? If it does, what is the importance of marketing automation? What businesses would like to see marketing automation support? It is important to incorporate what others will be spending their time on, and vice versa. Marketing automation won’t build results if you’re focusing on your biggest competitors, where you shouldn’t be spending your time. It’s only going to build results when it focuses on your immediate audience.

The last two points are the most important ones. If you know that marketing automation is only going to give you so much insight and insight into your customer base, and only because you’re not focusing on your biggest competitors, it’s going to be a long campaign for you to maintain success. If you are building off a marketing plan that includes a specific metric, you’re relying heavily on customer analytics to ensure that you’re on target, but also to make sure that you are not over-reliant on data (of the campaign-specific kind).