22 Exciting Marketing Automation Examples for Innovative Marketers
There’s no shortage of marketing advice online, but finding advanced marketing automation examples can feel like looking for a needle in a haystack for experienced marketers.
From overly generic tips (“Send welcome emails!”) to superficial strategies (“Automate everything!”), marketers are often left to their own devices when it comes to finding actionable automation content.
That’s why we decided to put together a list of 22 marketing automation tips you can implement today.
These will take you through the entire funnel - from awareness to reporting - and will hopefully help you improve your workload so you can focus on value-generating tasks instead.
Content marketing automation examples
1. Squeeze the most out of a single piece of content
When it comes to content marketing, writing a blog post is merely the first part of the job.
You still have to push the content to different platforms, promote it on social media, and repurpose it into different formats.
Not all of this can be automated, as content repurposing requires creativity and should be done tastefully. Other tasks, however, such as cross-posting across platforms, are fairly straightforward.
Using Make, you can set up a scenario to push your content from one platform to another automatically.
2. Capture user attention with videos
With a format that’s easier to consume, it has been that video content can increase website traffic by 87%.
The hardest part of coming up with a compelling video marketing strategy is related to creation. Automation cannot plan, script, or film videos for you, but it can help you distribute them.
Pairing a folder in your cloud storage solution with your favorite video platform - such as Vimeo or Youtube - is an easy way to automate uploads and spend more time on non-automatable tasks.
Online advertising automation examples
3. Save time by running ads on autopilot
Running online ads is time-consuming. Although ads run on their own, they require a lot of work before, after, and during campaigns, including:
Creating ad copy
Deciding on what to A/B test
Picking an audience
Planning on a flow
Monitoring performance
Analyzing success
Automation can streamline what happens with leads after they fill out a lead form ad.
For example, prospects can be added automatically to your CRM as leads, or be enrolled in an email or SMS drip campaign.
4. Supercharge your retargeting game
It is commonly believed that it takes around eight different points of contact to convert a total stranger into a paying customer.
Retargeting is great for that purpose, generating touchpoints with minimal involvement on your part. However, it can be tricky to implement depending on the content leads have been exposed to in the past.
Using Make, you can leverage the “Create a Lookalike Audience” module for Facebook. This module will help you build audiences automatically from mailing lists or other campaigns such as Google Lead form ads.
In other words, this is an automated solution to retarget Google Lead Form Ads into Facebook Ads easily.
Lead Generation marketing automation examples
5. Keep sales happy with a full, steady pipeline
A critical part of working in marketing is the relationship you have with the sales team. In B2B companies, marketers tend to work closely with salespeople and are often responsible for generating leads for them.
Having a steady flow of leads coming through can relieve a lot of the stress associated with that relationship. Planning out new campaigns is easier when you know your marketing qualified lead (MQL) quota is filled automatically every month.
Automation can help with this by connecting a lead generation tool like Dux-
Soup with your CRM. Using the template below, you will be able to constantly add new leads and keep your sales friends busy, and on route to success.
6. Turn cold leads into warm prospects
Think about all the leads that never converted, and are just lying there as CRM rows, languishing.
These cold contacts can be organized into lists and used in specific campaigns. Think of some profiles you could use:
Leads that haven’t been contacted in more than six months
Prospects that have mentioned a missing feature which has since been added
Cold email recipients that have never replied before
These lists can be automatically generated either natively if your CRM allows for it, or using an automation platform.
In Make, you can configure scenarios by adding various filters, from “if/or” statements to text and numerical operators, time, dates, or even arrays.
7. Let satisfied users do the heavy lifting for you
Another creative way to leverage existing data is to incentivize your current customers to promote your product.
Referrals are effective, and tools such as ReferralHero or TapMango can help you set up a clearly defined program for them online.
Make will help you automate some of the referral processes by forwarding users to these referral platforms - using forms, for example. To achieve this, you can use the template below.
8. Spend more time producing your webinar instead of organizing it
Webinars have proven to be great marketing channels to attract customers. But they come at a price, with a lot of related tasks involved:
Collecting email addresses
Inviting attendees on the day of
Reminding and following up
Webinar platforms such as Zoom and WebinarJam are facilitating it all and can be seamlessly integrated with the rest of your software stack using automation.
One example could be to automatically add registrants to your webinar tool directly from your CRM, thus avoiding the trouble of manipulating CSV files and other email lists.
9. Take leads from a landing page into a cadence
Landing pages are a great way to target specific customer personas, AB test your messaging, and reach new customer segments. But the data landing pages generate can grow messy as well.
Keeping track of landing pages takes time, and so does figuring out where subscribers end up.
One way to solve this is by cutting the middleman (that’s you) some slack. With automation, you’ll be able to send landing page subscribers straight to your email marketing platform, enroll them into an email cadence as soon as they sign up, and carry about your business.
Email marketing automation examples
10. Introduce yourself with a series of emails
With the highest return on investment for small businesses, you can’t afford to neglect email marketing.
While this might sound like basic advice, sending an email cadence to new subscribers is a simple but great way to onboard your audience and familiarize them with your product. Coincidentally, this is a perfect automation scenario.
Use your favorite email platform to design and send these emails while Make takes care of automatically enrolling subscribers from the sources of your choice.
11. Show your sales team that cold email still work
Contrary to popular belief, cold email is still very much an effective way to generate leads.
Platforms such as Lemlist and Growbots help companies craft highly personalized cold emails, and can be automated even further using Make.
One way to do that is to create CRM records automatically when a cold lead engages with a campaign for example. And yes - there’s a Make template readily available to achieve that.
12. Make your customers feel unique with snail mail
Delighting customers is instrumental to your success as a marketer. When everyone is doing the same thing, personal ideas are bound to hit the mark.
Sending handwritten notes is an example of highly-personalized outreach you can try with your customers.
If you’re not excited at the prospect of manually writing and signing dozens of postcards, don't worry. Services like thanks.io are providing a service that takes care of it for you.
Paired with Make, leads can be pulled directly from the CRM and added to a list of recipients to be contacted automatically.
Just make sure the address is included in your CRM records!
Social media marketing automation examples
13. Publish everywhere at once
It sometimes feels like social media platforms are popping up every other year. Managing Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn on top of up-and-coming platforms can be a drag.
Automating social media is a great way to alleviate some of that workload by pushing social media statuses across different platforms.
To learn more, check out this post we published about creating your own social media distribution system.
14. Auto-post new products to social media without typing a word
Ecommerce marketers among us know that product listings constantly come and go.
For active stores, it potentially means sharing new products every week, or more. We see the same thing with affiliate marketers, who share product links on a daily basis.
This can be automated with Make, by syncing your online store, a spreadsheet, and a social media management tool like Buffer.
As soon as a product is added to your digital shelves, it will be queued to be shared on social media with no involvement needed on your part.
15. Listen in on what people say about you online
A lot of marketing is about keeping your ear to the ground to monitor competitors, industry trends, and campaign ideas. Of course, this takes a lot of time.
Tools like Mention or Mediatoolkit allow you to passively monitor mentions of your brand online on social media. But when it comes to more complex online communities like Reddit, which are great to gather organic conversations, things can get dicey if you don’t have time to regularly browse the website yourself.
If you don’t, fret not, as we put together a guide on how to track brand mentions on Reddit.
16. Enrich leads with information available online
Depending on your company’s internal processes, marketing might be responsible for everything prior to sales handoff.
If that’s the case, you might be in charge of filling out CRM data, which not only takes a lot of time but is also absolutely soul-crushing.
Thankfully, relevant data is available online, and if you’re not a fan of copying and pasting things from LinkedIn, you can have Make do it for you.
Marketing team management automation examples
17. Keep sales colleagues posted when a hot lead comes in
Selling is all about striking the iron while it’s hot, and unless you want to personally contact the team every time a lead signs up, automation is the answer here.
By automatically sending a nudge to your colleagues when leads are coming through the pipeline, you’ll help them close more, and more often.
And trust us, a happy sales team is better for everyone.
18. Quickly feed your to-do list with instant messages
Marketing teams have to juggle a lot of incoming tasks every day, to the point of getting overwhelmed and overworked.
While automation can’t make all your workload disappear, it can be used to remind you and your team of what needs to be done.
In this case, Make can help you sync your favorite communication tool and your to-do list.
You can set a “to-do” channel for your team on Slack for example, where every message posted is added as a task in ClickUp. Easy, simple, and frictionless.
Analytics and reporting automation examples
19. Get a daily recap with your morning coffee
If tracking web analytics is part of your responsibilities, you can’t afford to check it every other week - but that doesn’t mean you should spend valuable minutes checking every day by yourself.
If you’d rather receive a quick summary, Make can help you set up an automated message.
Every morning, you’ll get yesterday’s data sent to your Slack. This is a great way to receive a bite-sized recap without any effort on your part.
20. Keep your marketing data clean
Any modern marketer would agree that campaigns should be driven by data. This implies, of course, that the data in question is clean and in order.
Subscribers can easily change companies and email addresses, and you don’t want to be left behind when it happens.
Make can keep tabs on your subscribers for you by automatically updating records in your CRM when needed.
21. Who’s clicking what? Automated URL tracking is how we roll
We share URLs daily, whether it’s on social media, in blog posts, in ad campaigns, or in others.
These links are a great way to gather information on where traffic comes from, how many times links are clicked, and which channels perform best.
Tools like Rebrandly and Bitly help keep track of your URLs, and can easily be enhanced with Make by collecting valuable data into a central spreadsheet for example.
22. Create a data-centric culture with campaign-specific dashboards
We mentioned a lot of data throughout this list of marketing automation examples. In order to cultivate a data-centric culture internally, data should be accessible by your entire team.
Huge dashboards aren’t always the most effective, as they include too much information. Creating campaign-specific visualizations, on the other hand, is a great way to focus on granular data and get an idea of your team's performance at a glance.
Tools like Databox or Qilk can help create attractive dashboards for that purpose.
Coupled with Make, you are able to sync them with other tools from your tech stack to generate specific insights across your marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Congrats, you made it through the entire list! Now stop for a second and imagine if you had to do all of that manually.
Marketing is an incredibly diverse area of business, and you don’t have to do it all by yourself.
With so many opportunities throughout the funnel, automation can help you implement ideas you’d need dozens of employees to sustain, at a fraction of the cost.
Join us in our Make community for more ideas, and to share your own marketing automation examples with other marketers.
Happy automating!
