Marketers face a constant challenge: driving conversions while keeping every campaign on brand, consistent and sharp.
With marketing budgets tightening, there’s also mounting pressure to do more with less. That often means automating as much of your strategy as possible.
But marketing automation introduces a new set of concerns. Could it impact the quality of your campaigns? Will it add more complications than it solves?
To get expert input on this topic, we interviewed Rafał Tromczyński, CEO of Digital First AI (and the AI Marketing Strategy App).
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the process of using software to streamline tasks your marketing team typically handles. This encompasses a broad range of tools, both standalone products and all-in-one platforms.
As a quick example, MailChimp offers email marketing automation software that allows marketers to build and automate more personalized email campaigns at scale.
Through automation, you can scale your marketing activities without increasing your workload or stretching your resources.
Automation helps you stay in touch with customers at every step of their journey, without having to manually track each interaction. [It] can monitor customer behaviors and trigger responses—like follow-up emails, exclusive offers, or product recommendations based on previous purchases.
So, how come only 12% of marketing teams say they’re fully automated?
Advances in marketing automation may offer new possibilities but they also create extra complexity. Almost half of businesses say they’ve struggled to develop an overall strategy that uses these tools effectively.
Examples of Marketing Automation
Even though they can add a layer of complexity, using a marketing automation tool effectively will bring value to your business.
For example:
- Automated email marketing: Streamlines the process of sending emails at scale by letting you schedule messages and use customer data to complete fields
- Automated social media management: Helps manage multiple channels, schedule posts, and track your engagement
- Automated lead management: Organizes and scores all your prospective customers
- Automated ad targeting: Uses algorithms to deliver your ads to the right audiences on the right channels
- AI content creation: Generates text and visuals based on a vast database
- Automated analytics and reporting: Collects and visualizes data from all your marketing activities
Recent surveys show email marketing remains the most popular type of marketing automation. However, social media management and targeted ads aren’t far behind.
With the recent boom of AI-powered content generators, it’s never been easier to test out automating part of your marketing workflow.
For example, AI Social Content Generator provides templates and generates content to match your unique brand. As you edit the content, it adapts its suggestions in real time.
What is a Marketing Automation Strategy?
A marketing automation strategy is a brand’s plan for how to use their automation tools to support their goals. It involves reviewing all your automated workflows and how they slot together.
Before creating your strategy, first ask yourself questions like:
- What is the goal of automation?
- Which customer touchpoints should we automate?
- Who is the target audience for each automation tactic?
- What specific actions can we automate?
- How can we measure success?
By answering these questions, you can take a more intentional and structured approach to marketing automation. You’re less likely to have gaps in your workflows or miss opportunities to automate actions.
What Are the Benefits of a Marketing Automation Strategy?
A recent study looked at how leading brands were achieving marketing success. They discovered they had all invested in AI automation strategy to enhance the customer experience and improve their bottom line.
Other research backs this up. Another study found that companies with a mature marketing strategy invested four times more in automation than others. They were also more likely to have tested, implemented, and scaled the technology.
How does a marketing automation strategy give them such a significant lead? Here are the main benefits:
- Improved customer experience
- Better segmentation and outreach
- Greater alignment with overall business goals
- Better resource allocation
- Increased ROI from tech investments
- Enhanced data management and analysis
- Consistency across marketing campaigns
- More scope for new projects
With the right marketing automation strategy, research suggests you could see ten times better overall ROI from your campaigns.
One reason? With automation done right, it can lead to more personalized, better customer relationships.
Automation doesn’t have to feel robotic. In fact, it can help you deliver a more personalized experience at scale. By using AI-driven insights, we are able to tailor our messaging and outreach based on individual customer preferences, behaviors, and needs. Whether it’s recommending a product or offering a special deal, automation lets us stay relevant and connect with customers in a way that still feels personal—without all the manual effort.
How to Develop an Effective Marketing Automation Strategy
Feeling ready to start your own marketing automation strategy?
While you may need to adapt specifics to your context, you can follow the same general approach each time.
Step 1. Analyze Your Current Setup
Collect data about your target audience, business performance, and current marketing practices. You can consider:
- Customer behavior and preferences
- Segmentation
- Campaign ROI
- Content and channel performance
- Customer lifetime value (LTV)
- Conversion rates
- Resource allocation
- Workflow efficiency
This analysis helps you build a clear picture of your marketing workflow’s current strengths, weaknesses, and gaps. You can use these insights to see where automation could have the biggest impact.
For example, research may reveal that your team frequently exceeds the budget and time allocated for blog content management. Could there be opportunities to automate scheduling, categorization, or reposts here?
Step 2. Define Marketing Goals & Objectives
Establish clear goals that align with the business opportunities and challenges you identified before. These should be overarching, long-term goals like:
- Capturing a specific market
- Increasing your qualified leads by a set amount
- Improving brand awareness
Define around three objectives for each goal that give them more structure and guide your marketing automation strategy.
Say you want to automate a re-engagement campaign. Your objectives might be:
- Identify all your inactive customers
- Segment and analyze the groups
- Send targeted emails to encourage action
All your marketing activities should relate to these goals and their objectives. Use it as an anchor as you build out your marketing automation strategy.
For example, have you heard that some competitors are adopting a new marketing automation tool? If you can’t see how it contributes to your goals, consider whether it’s truly worth the investment.
Step 3. Choose Automation Benchmarks & Metrics
Decide how best to measure the success of your marketing automation strategy. You need both benchmarks and metrics.
Benchmarks give you a point of comparison against industry standards or historical performance. They indicate what success looks like.
Let’s suppose you’re in the software industry. Research shows the average email open rate is around 28% globally. You’re looking to aim higher to outperform your competitors.
Metrics show you the outcome and effectiveness of your marketing automation strategy.
When we asked Tromczyński which metrics to track, he said it varies based on your goals. However, based on his experience, he recommended looking at the following metrics:
- Time saved on manual tasks
- The impact on conversion rates
- The impact on customer engagement rates
- Costs savings on labor or outsourcing
- Overall revenue growth
Many marketing automation tools include data and analytics to spare you the extra work. Just make sure they’re measuring the right metrics at the right frequency. You might track an ongoing marketing initiative once a month but you’d probably need to adjust that to weekly for a month-long campaign.
Step 4. Map Out Your Customer Journey with the Funnel
Next, outline the stages of the customer journey from their first contact with your business to becoming a brand advocate.
Start by listing all the possible touchpoints customers may have with your business. That might be seeing your product advertised on Facebook or hearing about you from a friend.
Categorize these touchpoints according to their stage in the marketing funnel: awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty.
For instance, reposting your customer’s content would belong to ‘loyalty’. They’ve already converted and you want to build a sense of community with them.
Now ask yourself which tactics you use to make sure those customer touchpoints drive conversions. Specifically, which automation tools do you use?
You can repeat these steps as you launch new campaigns. Consider what stages the customer passes through, how they interact with your brand, and what you can automate.
Let’s use the example of a live webinar campaign:
Awareness
You advertise the webinar online and invite people from your email list. As the event approaches, you send reminders to everyone who signed up.
Here, you might consider whether you use AI automation to generate the ads or reformat them for different channels. You can use filters to segment your email list and send them personalized messages about the webinar.
Consideration
You host the live webinar where you can position your team as industry experts. During the discussion, you weave in product mentions.
As it’s a live webinar, you should be wary of overusing automation. You must be spontaneous to answer audience questions and keep the discussion flowing naturally.
However, it’s possible to automatically track audience participation in activities like surveys, polls, and Q&As.
Conversion
As soon as the event is over, you send a message thanking everyone for attending. You might include an exclusive offer or discount for your products.
Most e-commerce platforms let you create or generate discount codes. You can decide the amount and the expiration date. If you link the code to your email automation, you can automatically send these offers to attendees just after the event.
Loyalty
You discuss what you talked about in the webinar on social media. In your posts, you shout out specific people for contributing to the discussion.
As webinars can be an hour long, you might cover a lot of topics. You can automatically record the transcript and ask AI to condense it for the highlights.
Step 5. Select the Right Marketing Automation Tools
By this stage, you know what marketing activities you want to automate and which ones to keep manual. Decide whether your current automation tools are fit for the task or if you need to update your software.
Here’s what to consider:
- Ease of use: Can your team easily onboard themselves and start using the features? If it’s overly complex, you may not save time or labor costs.
- Affordability: Does it fit into your budget? Although cost isn’t the key consideration, the price shouldn’t strain your resources. Often, there’s a choice of different tools and plans for businesses of different sizes.
- Customization: Can you adapt the features to your processes? Ideally, you should configure all the filters and rules to suit you rather than adjusting your workflows to the software.
- Scalability: Will the tool grow with your business? Check whether it can handle high volumes of data, maintain speed and performance, and allow you to keep adding users.
- Integrations: Can you connect to all your other software? You need to share data between the platforms for the automated workflows to be effective.
Step 6. Launch Your Strategy
Now you’re ready to start implementing your marketing automation strategy.
Start by making sure everyone on your marketing team has access to your processes. You should store all your tactics, activities, and marketing assets in one place.
Next, do a test run using all the automation tools. Look to see whether all the triggers and rules work and deliver the expected outcome. You have a chance to make any necessary adjustments before you go live.
When you’re sure the system is running smoothly, you’re ready to kick off your next campaign.
Step 7. Monitor, Review & Refine
A marketing automation strategy works best if you continuously assess and refine your approach. “Automation isn’t a ‘set it and forget it’ solution,” says Tromczyński, “It needs ongoing fine-tuning to keep up with changes in the market, customer preferences, or even your own goals.”
He gives an example based on his own experience: “Once we had automated messages that didn’t align with new market trends, which made the communication seem irrelevant to customers. We learned it’s important to regularly review your automation workflows and update them with fresh data.”
What Are Some Marketing Automation Best Practices?
The steps above show you how to develop an effective marketing automation strategy. Here are some tips for keeping that strategy on course:
Start Small and Build
Don’t overhaul your entire system at once. Test your strategy with one core workflow that’s guaranteed to have immediate, measurable results. Welcome emails and abandoned cart reminders are good options.
After you’ve achieved some results, you can gradually build on your automated workflows. You can also see which new ones to add.
Prioritize Data
The success of your marketing automation strategy hinges on your data. As Tromczyński says, “If your systems have data silos, outdated information, or poor integration, the automation might give inaccurate results, especially in things like market research or customer targeting.”
The CEO of Digital First AI found that regular audits can overcome the issue. He says, “We found that making sure the data feeding into the automation is clean and updated is crucial, and it often requires regular monitoring and adjustments.”
Maintain a Human Touch
Automation tools can struggle with unique or nuanced situations due to their limited contextual understanding.
Often, it’s better to have team members handle high-stakes situations like negotiations or serious complaints. Personal attention indicates you value the customer and take the issue seriously.
Tromczyński says he categorizes activities. “We identify the tasks that automation can handle well—in our case, repetitive actions, data collection, campaign creation, market research, and competitive analysis—while keeping humans involved in more strategic, emotional, or complex interactions.”
He adds, “For example, you might automate your market research and the initial stages of a marketing strategy but leave final decision-making and creative adjustments to a human team member.”
Take Advantage of A/B testing
Sometimes it’s unclear which marketing tactic will deliver the best results. For example, you might not be sure how many fields to include in emails or when to schedule blog posts.
A/B testing lets you run two variations of the same tactic at the same time. You can track each one’s performance and choose the one that performs best. Depending on what you’re testing, you might measure click-through rates or conversions.
Alternatively, you can keep A/B testing to refine your automation strategy. These tests can keep your strategy flexible and adaptable to changing preferences.
How To Use AI Marketing Strategy to Support Your Initiatives
Developing a marketing automation strategy demands a lot of resources. Without the right support, you can spend hours gathering and analyzing data to refine your tactics.
Tools like AI Marketing Strategy simplify the research and planning process. They provide a structured framework and best practice templates for all your marketing automation strategies.
AI Marketing Strategy works by helping you gradually build a strategy using different components:
- Data Room: A hub for your business data to power AI-driven strategies
- Flows: Automated processes that create and execute your strategy
- Funnels: Visualize and manage your customer journey stages
- Assets: Automate the creation of marketing copy and visuals
Let’s explore how you can plan, execute, and manage your strategies with AI Marketing Strategy.
Step 1. Sign Up For AI Marketing Strategy
Visit the Semrush App Center to sign up for the AI Marketing Strategy tool.
You can access a 7-day free trial to explore all the features. After that time has passed, the subscription fee is $99 per month.
Step 2. Create a Marketing Funnel
AI Marketing Strategy has a default funnel ready and waiting for new users. Select it by clicking on the tab in the left-hand menu.
You can see all four stages of the marketing funnel laid out: awareness, consideration, conversion, and loyalty.
You can manage multiple funnels. Just click the arrow next to ‘Default funnel’ in the top menu bar and select ‘Add new funnel’ from the drop-down menu.
Step 3. Add a Personalized Marketing Strategy Statement
Whenever you create a new funnel, AI Marketing Strategy prompts you to write a personalized statement. This helps the tool gather information about your brand and tailor its recommendations.
All you need to do is select options from the drop-down menu in each space or type in the required details.
The final page has two sliding scales. Drag the blue icon to indicate your level of marketing expertise and how much effort you plan to make relative to your budget.
Click the blue ‘Finish’ button in the bottom right corner. AI Marketing Strategy should begin processing your data and generating recommendations.
Step 4. Consider Recommended Tactics
Within a few seconds, AI Marketing Strategy processes your data and generates recommended tactics.
Browse the recommendations and select the ones you want to add to your funnel. In this case, we’ve focussed on tactics related to automating blog content.
When you’re ready, click the ‘Add selected tactics’ button toward the top right corner.
AI Marketing Strategy automatically categorizes each tactic and adds them to the relevant stage in the funnel.
Edit or delete tactics by clicking on the three dots in the top right corner. You can select the action you want from the drop-down menu that appears.
Step 5. Find Tactics For Your Marketing Funnel
Suppose your funnel seems incomplete. It’s easy to search for more tactics in AI Marketing Strategy’s library.
Click on the ‘Tactics’ tab in the left menu bar to open the list.
Type keywords into the search bar and select categories to filter your research. Alternatively, you can just browse the options.
Click on the tactics you’re interested in to learn more about them.
Think an automation tactic will bring value to your strategy? Click on the blue ‘Add to funnel’ button in the top right corner.
Step 6. Create Tactics From Scratch
AI Marketing Strategy is comprehensive but it may not cover niche tactics or specialized approaches from your industry.
For example, a zero waste store might want to automate an eco pledge program. Their blog could prompt readers to sign up and schedule articles on how to live more sustainably.
To create a new tactic, click on ‘My Tactics’ in the left menu bar and then the ‘+’ icon in the bottom right corner.
Complete the fields and select the options from the drop-down menus to build a profile of your marketing tactic.
You must provide the following details:
- The target (or what you hope to achieve)
- The funnel stage
- How often you can use the tactic
- The level of expertise necessary
- Whether it requires a budget
- Details about the tactic
Click on the ‘Activities’ tab at the top of the box to add steps to your tactic.
Write a description and select a category from the dropdown menu under ‘Activity type’. You have the option to add details in the text box or upload templates for the activities.
When you’ve added all the stages of the marketing tactic, navigate to the ‘Metrics’ tab next to the ‘Activities’ one.
Add the metric you want to target and how long you’d like to track it for. You can also decide whether to measure every week, two weeks, month, or quarter.
We’ve chosen ‘week’ in our example as the eco-pledge only lasts a month.
All the tactics you create get stored in your account and live on the ‘My tactics’ dashboard. You can edit or delete them whenever you need.
Step 7. Implement Your Automation Tactics
Once you’ve added all the tactics to your funnel, you can begin to execute your strategy.
Double-click on a tactic to open it in the dashboard. You’ll see a list of all the activities involved in order.
Click on an activity to expand it. Follow the instructions and select the box on the far left side when you’ve finished. This helps you keep track of your progress.
There’s no need to keep opening tactics to view your progress. AI Marketing Strategy displays how many tasks you’ve completed on the dashboard. Just click on the arrow to expand the activities.
Step 8. Assess Your Overall Strategy
Want to see how your marketing automation strategy fits into the big picture? Or get a sense of whether it’s driving results?
AI Marketing Strategy has a Canvas feature that uses AI to visualize and analyze your business structure. You can use this to uncover issues with your automation strategy and plan your next steps.
Click on ‘Canvases’ in the top menu bar to open the feature.
Before you start strategizing, give the app access to your website, social media channels, and other marketing materials. The AI can use this data to tailor insights to your business.
Click on the white ‘Edit URL’ button in the top right corner to open the profile.
Select each tab in the menu to:
- Connect your website
- Describe your business value and goals
- Upload digital resources
- Share content from Dropbox
Once you’ve finished, click on the white ‘Generate with AI’ at the bottom of the dashboard. AI Marketing Strategy needs a few minutes to process all this information.
Navigate back to the main Canvases dashboard. You can see a list of AI-generated insights about your brand performance, key messages, and recommended campaigns.
Besides the features mentioned above, AI Marketing Strategy has a content generator, ChatGPT, and asset library. These allow you to create and store resources within the platform.
Although these features don’t help you develop a strategy, they can help you reinforce it. Consolidating all your tools and resources makes it easier for your team to follow the same tactics.
Say your business introduces a newsletter and you want to understand how much of the process you can automate. Looking at materials from past campaigns can help you see what’s possible. It can help you keep your newsletter confident in format, tone, and style.
Normally, you’d have to switch between platforms to get the information you need. AI Marketing Strategy means you just have to click on a tab.
Putting Strategy Ahead of Automation
A marketing automation strategy is all about making automation tools work for your brand. They should support your goals, not shape them.
By setting your goals first, you make sure automation aligns with what you want to achieve, like boosting engagement or driving more conversions. This way, each action supports a clear purpose within your overall plan.
