Does Marketing Automation Really Work? Here's How to Tell
by Heather Timmerman Moller
“Does marketing automation really work?”
It sounds like an easy question, but the answer is complicated.
If you don’t have a handle on how your team is automating aspects of your marketing processes, you may find yourself hard-pressed to prove the ROI of those investments.
It’s a position marketing leaders should avoid in order to get buy-in on future campaigns. Luckily, by breaking the big question down into smaller, more focused inquiries you can measure, you’ll be able to prove your automation works beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Start by answering questions like these:
Are you keeping track of how you're using automation?
What to track:
Emails or messages sent, number of behavioral triggers implemented.
If it’s working:
You know exactly what you’re using your automation tools for, and how often and frequently you’re using them.
If it’s not:
You use automation inconsistently or irregularly, and you don’t know exactly how much content you are automating. For example, you don’t have an exact count of how many emails you are automatically sending to targets.
How it works:
If you don’t know exactly what you’re using your marketing automation tools for or how often you’re using them, it’s very difficult to determine whether or not they’re actually producing an ROI that’s worthwhile.
As soon as you start using any marketing tool, create a reporting system that can keep track of every time you use it, what you use it for, and the result of that usage. Consulting this report on an ongoing basis will give you a way to monitor activity versus result.
How LinkedIn can help:
LinkedIn partners with a wide variety of service providers who can integrate marketing campaigns from across multiple sources into a single, combined report.
Adverity, for example, provides a modular one-stop shop for data integration across all marketing channels, including LinkedIn and other social media, email marketing, paid media, and more.
Customize your report to separate automated and partially-automated campaigns from the rest to see whenever your team uses automation and what they use it for.
Are you using automation to respond to audience behavior?
What to track:
Behavioral trigger activations, audience response to triggered content.
If it’s working:
Your team is programming robust behavioral triggers to send emails and other marketing material to audience members based on how they interact with your content, allowing them to reliably put highly-targeted marketing information in front of the audience most likely to respond to it in a scalable way.
If it’s not:
Your team isn’t using behavioral triggers, and therefore aren’t using your automation processes to more effectively target audiences that have expressed specific interests.
How it works:
Just like any other marketing, in order to be truly effective, automated campaigns need to be built around audience behavior and response. Behavioral triggers activate when an audience member interacts with a piece of marketing content in a specific way.
For instance, if a prospective customer receives an email, opens it, clicks on an ad for a product, then reads about that product on your site, then a behavior trigger could automatically send them a follow-up email about that product in a few days or deliver Sponsored Content about that product on LinkedIn.
Behavioral triggers are what actually make marketing automation processes worth using. They allow you to target more granular personas, while creating fully customized, guided experiences for your ideal customers based on their unique needs – all without sacrificing flexibility of messaging or scale.
How LinkedIn can help:
LinkedIn Marketing Partners provide solutions for both refining audience personas and better designing and tracking campaign triggers, allowing for continuous automation optimization and ROI improvement.
6sense uses AI to examine intent, engagement, and other account data across platforms to identify your most qualified leads and arm you with insights on how to more effectively catch their attention.
Additionally, you can use lead automation tools to seamlessly track and manage your opportunities on LinkedIn.
Are the engagements leading to results?
If it’s working:
Your team is assessing whether the behavioral triggers are activating reliably and predictably, those triggers are activating reliably and predictably, and the content associated with the triggers is having its intended effect.
If it’s not:
You might be automating areas of your marketing process, but you have no way of measuring KPIs and understanding effectiveness.
Why it matters:
Increasing efficiency is the ultimate goal of all marketing automation. You’re trying to find a way to get more marketing content in front of more qualified leads more frequently and at the right times, without the need for manually managing everything.
Luckily, if you’ve set up everything properly to this point, you have everything you need to start measuring results. Attach a tracker to all content associated with a behavioral trigger. Add these trackers to your campaign reports and label them appropriately to see when they activate and what they lead to.
Repeat this process for every KPI you want to associate with the automated aspects of your campaign, and you will be able to measure and observe the performance of your automation in real time within your reports.
How LinkedIn can help:
Marketing partner solutions and integrations provide several ways to make tracking and optimizing automation campaigns as simple and efficient as possible.
Metadata.io uses AI to identify ideal customer profiles based on existing data, build iterative look-alike campaigns, and automatically deploy them at scale.
Does automation work? If you’re approaching it the right way, absolutely. But you can’t leave it on autopilot. Turn to experienced partners and proven tools that can bring new levels of measurable efficiency to your LinkedIn marketing strategy.
