4 ways to automate your marketing operations

Marketing campaigns and strategies would have limited success without marketing operations processes happening behind the scenes. From running lead generation campaigns to communicating with customers to generating data reports, these processes—and the tools they require—help your marketing channels succeed.

With all these elements to manage, it’s no wonder marketers and marketing ops professionals (MOPs) tend to be automation power users. There isn’t enough time in the day to manage marketing efforts manually. 

With an automation tool like Zapier, you can connect the apps you use every day to cut down on manual work. Here are the top ways marketers use Zaps—what we call our automated workflows—to save time, improve data accuracy, and stay organized.

Automate your marketing operations

Lead management

Managing leads is a full-time job in itself. For starters, you’re managing multiple channels to attract prospects to your business. You also have to clean up lead information and store it in one place so you can nurture those leads to become paying customers. And then you need to track what they’re doing. 

It’s exhausting just reading that list. Automating those tasks with Zapier ensures that you’re preserving your finite energy for strategic problem-solving.   

Lead generation

Potential customers need to see the same marketing message multiple times in different channels before they bite. You’re likely managing a stack of tools to source those leads, such as various forms and social media ads.

You can organize leads from multiple sources into a centralized place with a few Zaps. Just click on one below to get started:

Lead tracking

Tracking your leads’ journey helps you make informed decisions on how your marketing campaigns are performing and how they’re resonating—or not—with potential customers. 

You can automatically track conversions with the following Zaps:

Lead nurture

When done appropriately, nurture campaigns can turn prospects into paying customers—or keep existing customers coming back—through well-timed messages that encourage them to take a particular action.

While we can’t write the campaigns for you, Zapier can make enrolling leads in a nurture campaign easier when they’ve taken a particular action. Try any of the Zaps below:

Automatically message new leads

Maybe you don’t have the bandwidth to send a custom message to a new lead, but you’d like some form of personalization. You can still benefit from automating responses to leads. These Zaps will send personalized messages to prospects using information they’ve submitted:

Internal communication and alerts

Marketing teams come in all shapes and sizes. Whether you’re a team of two or 200, you’re running all sorts of programs, from advertising to social to email. It’s hard enough to communicate within teams, but other teams rely on your work, too. 

You don’t have to stay glued to your email or team chat, though. You can automate important alerts for your team, so everyone wins: Your coworkers know what’s going on, and you can mute Slack and focus on more important work. Here are a few ways to get started.

Notify team about new leads

Timely follow-up is universal business etiquette, but especially so in marketing. You know there’s a limited amount of time to capitalize on a prospect’s interest. 

Your team needs to know when there’s a new lead so they can act fast. Use these automated workflows to automate lead notifications in your preferred communication channels:

Share data reports

Data helps everyone on the marketing team make decisions and strategy recommendations, so they’re likely to be interested in the latest report. Instead of begging your team to read your latest insights, set up a Zap that will automatically send alerts about the latest report. 

Data reporting and analytics

Marketing ops professionals are often the chief data wranglers, pulling all sorts of information from separate channels to create reports and make strategic recommendations. It’s a herculean task because it often requires streamlining and cleaning up data. And if you don’t have a designated MOPs lead, it can be even harder to get the job done. 

You can use automation to save time, improve reporting accuracy, and, most importantly, get a holistic view of campaign performance. (And everyone will think you’re a wizard.)

Streamline data between apps

Marketers deeply relate to the problem of having too many apps to keep track of, many of which don’t make it easy to sync data. That’s why spreadsheets are often the makeshift solution. 

Here are a few Zaps you can use to move the data from your super spreadsheets to your main source of truth.

Generate reports

Spreadsheets are incredibly powerful and flexible, but sometimes a specific data or analytics app will do the job better. 

You can use automated workflows to create measurements in Google Analytics for specific activities you want to measure outside of your website, such as calendar bookings.  

To create more advanced charts or dashboards, these Zaps will push your data to apps such as Databox or Hotjar. 

Clean up data

Marketing ops teams are perpetually on clean-up duty. They’re trying to keep data tidy so you can run marketing campaigns efficiently. 

While there’s a certain zen in tidying things up, constant data errors and formatting issues cause major headaches—and take you away from the problem-solving and strategy work that makes a big impact.

Automating alerts can help you catch data errors right away. Set up a few Zaps like the ones below so you can troubleshoot early. 

You can also automatically format data as it comes in. If you’re constantly reformatting dates, separating first names from last, or other types of information, these Zaps will take care of that work for you. 

Segmenting subscribers

Have you ever received an email from a company that seemed wildly out of touch with how you use their product? It’s likely because they didn’t segment their subscribers. 

Segmentation is a critical part of any marketing strategy because you want to speak to potential and existing customers at the right moment to influence a purchasing decision. (And you don’t want them to unsubscribe.)

If you need to clean up your segmentation workflow, try the Zaps below, which will tag leads when they take a particular action.  

Keep your marketing processes flowing with automation 

Running your marketing campaigns doesn’t have to be chaotic. Automation can be the sidekick that helps you manage your tools and processes more efficiently, so you can devote time to problem-solving and strategizing for your next big campaign. 

This article was published in March 2022, written by Krystina Martinez, and updated in August 2022.