Marketing automation sounds like the all-in-one tool to solve your time management problems. But, the automation process, though effective, has many components to consider.
A marketing automation specialist can create a marketing automation system suiting your company’s needs. If you’re considering hiring one, this guide will give you everything you need to know.
Quick Links:
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the process of using software to automate competitive marketing tasks. Marketing automation technology uses simple set-up steps with various marketing channels such as social media, landing pages, chat, and email to create a personal connection with leads, preventing them from slipping through the cracks.
By automating marketing messages, content, and nurturing sales leads, not only does it save time and energy, but you can fine-tune the way you communicate with your audience.
Through this process, marketing automation specialists learn your audience’s behavior, track audience interactions, score engagement and adapt this information to your marketing strategy.
What Do Marketing Automation Specialists Do?
When hiring a specialist, you need to know what the marketing automation specialist job description entails.
A marketing automation specialist is responsible for the day-to-day marketing needs of a company’s online advertising and campaigns. It is most focused around email marketing. Setting up automation to put leads into a funnel to then convert them. It is the automation of those emails that defines marketing automation.
With marketing comes goals. A marketing automation specialist has specific goals to meet and is responsible for developing effective marketing strategies and campaigns to increase customer engagement and revenue. AB testing is key to the success of knowing what works and what doesn’t.
But the position requires more than just technical knowledge. A good marketing automation specialist is someone who’s self-motivated and can work independently without much oversight. They also need to have strong organizational skills and both written and verbal communication skills to deliver regular progress reports.
What is the Marketing Automation Process
Hiring a marketing automation specialist is one thing. But you also need to understand the process of marketing automation to ensure you choose someone who has experience in the industry. This is the general process of marketing automation:
1. Understand the needs and problems that automation will help you solve
2. Build a marketing automation blueprint
- What your marketing strategy has been up until now
- What’s been produced up until now
- Where you’ve been successful
- Where you can receive “quick wins”
3. Build a marketing automation engine
- Decide how the marketing process is going to run
- Create content to push people through the buyer’s journey
4. A/B test to optimize your marketing process
5. Report and fine-tune
- Identify areas of your marketing process that need to be altered or changed
6. Repeat
Of course, this is a general outline for the marketing automation process. Remember, depending on your company’s needs, the process can vary.
What Are Marketing Automation Specialists Salaries?
The salary of a marketing automation consultant largely depends on their level of experience. Naturally, a marketing automation manager salary will be higher than an entry-level marketing automation specialist. But let’s go into the specifics.
An entry-level specialist with less than 1 year of experience can earn an average annual salary of $48,145. An early career specialist with 1-4 years of experience can earn an average annual salary of $59,588. A mid-level specialist with 5-9 years of experience can earn an average annual salary of $67,634. And an experienced specialist with 10-19 years of experience can earn an average annual salary of $69,022.
Having an in-house marketing specialist isn’t cheap; however, there are alternative options. A marketing network provides you with the same if not better quality as an in-house marketing specialist, and at a fraction of the cost.
Marketing networks work with high-quality freelancers bringing with them a wealth of experience and best practice knowledge. They provide marketing solutions for companies looking for quality service without the need for hiring an individual full-time.
What are Marketing Automation Specialist Career Paths?
There are a couple of career paths a marketing automation specialist can go down.
They can go into marketing automation management, marketing management, or demand generation management. Generally, most specialists go into marketing management or marketing automation management as they’re currently the most relevant and desired positions.
Common Inbound Marketing Tools and Terms
When hiring a marketing automation specialist, you want to have a general idea of their capabilities. Knowing some commonly used inbound marketing tools and terms can help you during the hiring process.
1. Lead Generations
The marketing process of gathering interest in a product or service that will help solve the customer’s problem.
- Common marketing channels: email, social media, landing pages, chat, blogs, keywords, etc.
- Why is lead generation important?: By sharing knowledge, you form trust with potential customers and become an authority in your industry. It helps bring traffic into the funnel, so that you can nurture them into sales.
2. Content Marketing
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach. It focuses on creating valuable and engaging content that will attract and hold a defined audience while guiding them through the buyer’s journey.
- Common tools: marketing automation tools such as Hubspot or Marketo, social media tools such as Hootsuite, web analytic tools such as Google Analytics, and email marketing tools such as Mailchimp.
- Why is content marketing important?: Content marketing gets your message out there to potential customers by using personalized content, matching their needs. It focuses on their pain points and makes them aware of your solution.
3. Personas / Buyer Personas
A representation of your ideal customer based on analytics and market research from your existing customers.
- Common tools: Google Analytics, Google Search Console, CRMs, Facebook Audience Insights, etc.
- Why is personas important?: Creating a persona helps your company define your audience and the type of content needed to engage with them. It defines all their challenges, and where they currently go for their information and solution. This helps to target them more effectively.
There are many components to consider when implementing a marketing automation system. If you’re worried about hiring the right candidate, who understands marketing automation, consider hiring a freelancer through a marketing network.
Marketing networks provide you with high-quality and knowledgeable freelancers at a fraction of the price of an in-house marketing team. So, you’ll save money on your marketing budget and have expert freelance digital marketers with deep knowledge of best practice and implementation.
What Marketing Automation Skills to Look for?
When hiring a marketing automation specialist, you want to look for a couple of key skills that will help you choose the right person for the job.
The right marketing automation specialist is someone who’s constantly evolving and growing into their role. They’re primarily responsible for 3 mains areas:
1. Marketing automation tools: using the provided tools to create successful campaigns.
2. Data: understanding and integrating the data generated from campaigns into the central data set.
3. Analytics: tracking performance metrics, streamlining the marketing and sales processes to develop more effective campaigns.
Though there are 3 general areas that specialists need to understand, there are some not-so-obvious skills for a marketing automation consultant.
1. Understand the industry: Specialists need to be confident in their position, delivering the right experience to prospective customers. For this, they need to understand the industry the company is working in to understand their marketing goals.
2. Firm understanding of the marketing automation process and workflow: marketing automation is about workflows. Specialists need to define and document the technical and functional needs for an automated campaign. They also need to be confident in the workflows for processes, including lead scoring, lead assignment, lead qualifications, and trigger-based workflows.
3. Project management: A marketing manager has a lot on their hands. Meaning, they need to be extremely organized in their day-to-day tasks and have efficient project management practices.
4. Analytics and insight: tracking the automation process and discovering data-driven optimization possibilities for companies to improve their project. Specialists need to know how to read, interpret, and use the data.
5. Emerging skills: a specialist should always develop their skills and stay relevant with the current technology. Data integration knowledge can give the specialist a strategic advantage. Tracking and measuring attribution from various points helps optimize ROI. Lastly, adhering to the data integrity rules and being able to identify a possible data breach.
What’s in a Marketing Automation Job Description?
When creating a marketing automation specialist job description, you want to focus on what matters. Your specialist doesn’t need to be an engineer or a developer. But, your specialist should have these key elements:
- Proficiency on how marketing automation systems function.
- Proficiency of the used database.
- Understanding the importance and impact of marketing automation for the company.
However, let’s dig a little deeper and look into the skills you should include in the job description.
A specialist should understand how to:
- Send sequence emails
- Send trigger-based campaigns
- Create/modify targets and goals
- Send time-specific emails
- Understand the database used
- Create/modify lead scoring rules, grading them between hot, warm, and cold leads
- Understand why certain tasks aren’t performing optimally
- Create/modify a marketing automation strategy
Why Become a Marketing Automation Specialist?
There are a couple of reasons why you may consider becoming a marketing automation specialist. Firstly, specialists earn around 35% more than a traditional marketer. Their specialized knowledge is unique in the marketing industry and is highly desired due to their inbound marketing capabilities.
Though specialists need to work independently, there’s a lot of team effort that goes into marketing automation. Not only do specialists develop their marketing skills, but they also gain sales knowledge. And lastly, specialists work on long-term projects, which demand time and effort. So, specialists can rest knowing they’ll have steady and long-term work.
Wrap Up
When hiring a marketing automation specialist, there’s a lot of small things to consider. A great option would be to use a marketing network to take the load off your shoulders and provide you with an experienced and knowledgeable specialist who will understand your company’s needs and carry them out through their marketing automation strategy.
