Marketing automation is a category of technology that allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows, so they can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. It is used in many modern marketing processes, for businesses of all types including B2B and B2C organizations.

Marketing automation helps marketers streamline their lead generation, segmentation, lead nurturing and lead scoring, customer lifecycle marketing, cross-sell and up-sell, customer retention, and marketing ROI measurement.

Some of these practices are possible at small volumes without software, but technology becomes essential with any scale and with the increasing number of channels marketers are required to manage.

In particular, these processes all require:

A central marketing database. A place for all your marketing data, including detailed prospect and customer interactions and behaviors, so you can segment and target the right message to each customer.

An engagement marketing engine. An environment for the creation, management and automation of marketing processes and conversations across online and offline channels.

An analytics engine. A way to test, measure, and optimize marketing ROI and impact on revenue.

Features include email marketing, landing pages and forms, campaign management, engagement marketing, prediction and scoring, customer lifecycle management, CRM integration, social marketing capabilities, mobile marketing capabilities and marketing analytics.

By investing in these areas, you can achieve solid ROI from marketing automation. The key is to “think big, start small, and move quickly”. In other words, the best results usually come from getting started with what you have today, and then incrementally investing over time to move up the curve.