{"id":11594,"date":"2022-10-24T15:03:18","date_gmt":"2022-10-24T15:03:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.stoneshot.com\/learn\/?p=11594"},"modified":"2025-07-01T15:15:21","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T15:15:21","slug":"marketing-automation-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stoneshot.com\/learn\/marketing-automation\/marketing-automation-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Marketing Automation Strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Marketing automation is a name for a broad range of technologies, but ultimately we can think of it as a set of tools to solve business problems. The first step is a planning stage which involves identifying the specific marketing challenges, and then building a marketing automation programme around those.<\/p>\n

We can broadly define two categories of challenges, or automation opportunities.<\/p>\n

To learn about how to use our Marketing Automation tool, please look at the Workflows<\/a> article.<\/p>\n

Existing manual processes<\/h2>\n

The first is where you have existing processes that could be improved through automation. In a financial services environment we might be talking about processes like client reporting, event management, fund document delivery, or client services communications. They\u2019re often manual processes, involving a lot of time and resource, and with the element of risk attached. If you\u2019re manually sending clients holdings reports, it\u2019s easy to attach the wrong document. Automation can offer solutions here to reduce the pressure on resources, improve delivery times and reduce risk.<\/p>\n

New processes<\/h2>\n

The second category covers things that you\u2019d like to be able to do, but would be impossible without automation technology.<\/p>\n

Here we might be looking at lead nurturing programmes for example \u2013 you could actually just check on each client and prospect every day, look at what they\u2019ve engaged with and drive them to the next piece of content on their journey with our brand, but that\u2019s a practical impossibility. It would take far too much time and resource.<\/p>\n

Likewise, our problem might be revenue generation – we might actually want to feed the sales team with sales-ready leads. One way would again to be to check on all of our contacts every day, check on our email activities, social activities, who\u2019s registered for events, watched videos or been to our site, and we could take a call on whether to flag a contact to the sales team.<\/p>\n

Planning stage<\/h2>\n

To start off, we\u2019re going to need to identify what challenges we\u2019re going to solve with marketing automation. Typically clients will list out:<\/p>\n