A scattershot approach to marketing won’t bring the best results, says Adam Higgins, martech consultant at High Road Solution. He explains how marketing automation saves time, makes money, and reaches people with your message in a way that resonates with them.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing consists of three parts: the message, the people, and the results. If you’re matching the right message—and the message is contextually relevant to the people—that usually generates good results.

Marketing automation tools automate the process of delivering the marketing message to the right people. Automation tools include everything from retargeting ads on LinkedIn to triggered emails.

What are two or three benefits to using it?

Marketing automation helps deliver a concierge-like experience to your members. They’ll love you for that—and spend with you because of that.

It also helps with analytics. You can actually attribute a dollar value to a blog article, for example. You can see the conversion rate of your ad spend. You can see the conversion rate of emails, and you can see what user activity happens after the click. Marketers can report on their efforts and unequivocally show how they contribute actual dollars to the bottom line.

What’s the biggest pitfall to avoid?

Many associations think that marketing automation is just about automating emails. Email is super-powerful when used contextually to nurture leads, and it’s awesome for awareness and brand exposure. Emails also keep members informed and engaged with newsletters. However, marketing automation is much more than email: There’s social media, blogs, landing pages, websites, and retargeting ads too. You need to match your problem with the right technology solution.

[This article was originally published in the Associations Now print edition, titled “Hitting the Bull’s-eye.”]