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What Is Marketing Automation? (And Why You Can’t Scale Without It)

Growing your business without automation? That’s like climbing a mountain with a backpack full of rocks - and no map. Every lead, every follow-up, every email is manual. You’re moving, but slowly. And eventually, you’ll burn out or break down. You want to scale your growth, generate more leads, get more clients but without the system in place to facilitate that growth, you’ll be achieving more disjointed processes and causing more chaos.

What is Marketing Automation?

So, what does marketing automation actually mean? Well it’s not just email marketing. Marketing automation allows you to streamline your operations by automating repetitive tasks that would otherwise be extremely time consuming, or putting barriers in place to streamline certain processes that could potentially be overlooked if performed daily by a user. In HubSpot, you have the beauty of using workflows that can automate almost anything in the portal (we did say almost!). Sequences can be triggered by user actions, specific user behaviours can initiate workflows, values can be assigned to leads based on their interactions (lead scoring), contact record information can be set when actions are performed, ad interactions can trigger workflows…and the list goes on. The myth that automation is solely for email campaigns is exactly that, a myth!

Benefits of Marketing Automation

Let’s dive into why automation matters and what it enables:

🕒 Get Hours Back in Your Day - It’s a no brainer - automating repetitive low impact tasks - like follow-ups, data entry, and tagging, your team can focus on strategy and creative work.

⚡Respond to Leads While They're Still Hot - The faster you respond to a lead, the higher your chance of closing the deal. Automation ensures no lead sits untouched. With automation you could set up auto-response messaging, follow-up sequence enrolment, and alerts to sales (email notification, task creation, Slack message - there’s a whole host of options!).

🔄Stay Visible Without Lifting a Finger - You need multiple touchpoints to convert a lead - but creating all that content manually? Not scalable. Automatically send a sequence of helpful resources over time, based on lifecycle stage or ad interaction, without writing each email manually.

🧠 Nurture Smarter, Not Harder - Targeted nurturing wins. Automation lets you trigger the right message at the right time, based on what someone does or downloads. Someone downloads your pricing guide? Enrol them in a follow-up series focused on ROI, testimonials, and decision-stage content.

🤝 Align Your Teams Without Extra Meetings - Marketing generates leads. Sales closes them. Automation bridges the gap with handoff alerts, deal creation, and context sharing. When a lead hits a certain lead score or submits a demo form, kick off sales handoff with automation.

Common Myths

Marketing automation may seem daunting but it’s essential to creating sustainable growth. Here are some common myths around marketing automation and the truth behind them!

❌ Myth: “It’s cold and robotic.”

✅ Truth: Would you believe us if we told you that automation can actually increase personalisation but on a larger scale? With automation in HubSpot, you can use personalisation tokens that allow you to use contact or company specific information in the copy of your email, automatically updating depending on the contact it’s sent to. Use any contact specific information like first name or reference past behaviours (the world's your oyster!), it just depends on the data available in your CRM. Quite often consistency feels more thoughtful to customers - it’s a great quick and easy way to boost your reputation.

❌ Myth: “It’s too expensive.”

✅ Truth: Take a step back and calculate the cost of automation tools with time spent on manual takes. Taken into account, it’s a no-brainer that you could generate a significant amount of ROI and potential savings by utilising marketing automation. With fewer lost leads, you'll generate more revenue!

❌ Myth: “It’s just for big businesses.”

✅ Truth: Start with affordable starter tools. With Marketing Hub Starter you can automate simple form submission follow-up emails, use personalisation tokens in emails, automatically add contacts to lists for better segmentation, and manually trigger property updates for basic contact management. The key is to start small and build your way up, gradual scalability = long term sustainability.

❌ Myth: “It’s too complicated to set up.”

✅ Truth: Marketing automation is a lot simpler to set up than you may think. There’s templates and drag and drop builders available to help you. You only need to automate one thing to start seeing the value, start with something simple like incorporating personalisation tokens in your emails. Reach out to a HubSpot partner (like Unmatched!), if you run into any hiccups.

Typical Automation Flows

Let’s look at some 4 real world examples of marketing automation and show you how to scale your marketing!

Lead Nurturing Flows

These are super easy to set-up. Building a lead nurture flow can help you build trust and educate your audience without pressing a button. Let your lead execute a specific behaviour, such as downloading an e-book, then be enrolled in a nurture that sends them a series of helpful emails over 2 weeks.

Sales Handoff Alerts

Many businesses struggle with alignment between Marketing and Sales - automation is the key to this! Automations can be set-up to streamline processes and ensure no leads slip through the cracks. Try using the threshold feature of HubSpot’s Lead Scoring tool, once a contact hits a high scoring threshold, create a lead and send an instant notification to a sales rep to follow-up - you’ll be preventing hot leads from dropping off.

Re-engagement Campaigns

When leads go cold (it happens, and it sucks!), you can create a workflow to trigger based on certain criteria, such as ‘no engagement for 30 days’, and automate a “Let’s pick things up where we left off” email send.

Internal Tasks & Notifications

The struggle of a lot of businesses is simple, they spend more time searching for what to do, rather than the actual doing of the task. In HubSpot, you can automate pretty much anything (most things, we promise!). Setting up internal task or notifications is easy and has a huge impact. Whether it’s to alert sales to a follow-up call, email or form submission, notify support they need to follow up on feedback, you can create an internal task or notification to ensure the task gets completed.

Automation Is the Foundation of Scalable Growth

Manual processes alone will not help you scale. Marketing automation is what frees you up to focus on strategy, growth and planning - it’s the hidden pillar of successfully scaling not just your marketing but your entire business. Start small and scale up your automations as you get more comfortable. Begin by automating your lead follow-up or your welcome email, it’s as simple as that to get started. If you’re not confident on where to begin, that’s ok! Give us a quick call, and we’ll help you get started.

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