WeightWatchers had a problem with its marketing strategy. Simply put, they were doing too much copying and pasting.

According to a HubSpot case study, WeightWatchers relied on lead-generating outreach from sales reps across North America. It was a personalized approach. Sales reps would reach out to businesses one at a time, trying to establish employee wellness partnerships. 

The problem? The marketing process was almost entirely manual. To email potential prospects, sales reps would copy and paste messages from a Word document. It was like throwing too many darts at a board. The only way to reach more businesses at scale was to copy and paste even more. That meant either recreating each email for every single prospect.

Not ideal.

The solution was marketing automation. Using HubSpot, Weight Watchers set up a “deal pipeline” to identify leads and connect with them. Now, instead of copying and pasting, new emails could achieve distributions at scale. The marketing automation tools they used helped them spot the leads who were clearly looking for WeightWatchers’ programs. Previously, their reps had no idea until someone responded. Now, WW could route leads from tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to Meeting Scheduler.

Not only was outreach easier for the reps, but it was more effective. WW’s conversion rates skyrocketed from around 1 in 50 to 1 in 7. 

That’s the power of marketing automation. And if you can learn how to use marketing automation to your advantage, you can do more than make life easier. You can expect similar boosts in results.

What is marketing automation, and how does it benefit marketing teams?

Marketing automation is using software to streamline, measure, or even replace manual inputs for your basic marketing workflows. 

Although you can automate all sorts of digital work these days, marketing automation has a specific purpose. Marketing automation makes your outreach and lead intake much simpler. Think of channels like email, social media, websites, and lead nurturing. With marketing automation, software can handle the most repetitive tasks. You’ll be free to focus on big-picture ideas, like how to increase conversions. And there are more than a few benefits to automation:

• Efficiency. You don’t have to outsource everything. Simply automating the most repetitive marketing tasks will make you more effective. Marketing automation software can boost sales productivity by 14.5%, according to Oracle.
• Cost savings. If you spend less labor to accomplish the same tasks, you’ll reduce your overhead. According to Oracle, marketing automation can reduce marketing overhead by 12.2% on average.
• Omnichannel presence. Marketing automation spreads out your outreach, including across media channels. Rather than solely relying on one, like email outreach, automation helps you repeat content across multiple channels. This can create a 90% higher customer retention rate over the single-channel approach.
• Better lead management. Part of Weight Watchers' problem was the dart-board strategy. They were copying and pasting marketing emails without any reference to who the cold or warm leads were. But as Martech notes, automation can help you with a process known as “lead scoring.” Lead scoring culls your marketing data into insights: you discover who the warm leads really are. The result is better lead management and less time wasted on leads who were never going to purchase.

Opportunities to explore marketing automation for your business

The benefits make sense. But what if you’ve never used marketing automation tools before? It can be difficult to imagine which manual processes you can hand over to a digital platform.

The first step is to learn which tools are available. Jasper, for example, can handle everything from content ideation to social media posts. And other tools—like Zapier—can connect these tools to others. Suddenly a saved message in Slack can set off Jasper to write a social media post. Let’s dive into the specifics of marketing automation using today’s tools:

Generating content

Generative AI can handle a lot. It can write the first draft of a blog post, coloring between the lines of the brand voice you establish. But the beauty of marketing automation isn’t just that Generative AI exists. It can also connect to other touchpoints in your internal processes. 

Let’s imagine you’re using a CMS, a content management system. Maybe you use that CMS to type up a new content outline. Set a trigger with Zapier to send that outline to Jasper, and you won’t even have to write the first draft. Jasper will simply take your brand style guidelines, your outline, and return with a fresh piece of content.

While marketers might bristle at handing content generation to AI, it works. According to SEMRush, 65% of businesses generate better SEO results thanks to AI’s help. And 67% report an improvement in content quality when using AI. Since marketers have to spend less time writing, they’re free to think about other strategies. Where should they distribute the content? What pain points should they hit on? Those are the questions they start asking—not whether to use the word “affect” or “effect” in paragraph seven.

Combining Jasper and Zapier is your key to automation here. It might look something like this:

• You start within your CMS or anywhere you keep your content briefs: Asana, Monday, Airtable, or even Google Sheets. Using Zapier, you link these apps to the Generative AI. Any time you add a new row in Google Sheets, for example, Zapier can feed the details to Jasper. 
• Jasper can generate the outline from the brief—which Zapier then relays to your team via Slack or Gmail. Or maybe it generates a new doc in your team’s shared Google Docs folder.

Social media

If someone sends you a message on Slack and it strikes you as an excellent idea for a LinkedIn post, what do you do? You may jot it down somewhere. Maybe you’ll save it to a note-taking app. Connect Zapier automation to Jasper, however, and a simple click can turn that idea into fodder for your next post.

One of the most robust uses of Jasper’s Generative AI is writing something different for each social medium. Jasper features a TikTok Video Captions template, for example. It writes YouTube video scripts. It has a “tweet machine” tool. Using Jasper, you can enter the topic, choose the ideal tone of voice (witty? informative?), then click Generate and edit as you like. Jasper’s AI Image Suite helps supplement your post with visual aids—again, just a click. You can copy-and-paste it—or even post it directly to Twitter with the Jasper chrome extension.

Project Management

A Wellingtone survey found that 29% of organizations are “mostly” or “always” completing their projects on time. In other words, 71% of organizations are off-schedule. It’s not because project management tools aren’t available. Asana, Monday, Trello—they’re all over the place. It’s that project management tools without automation sometimes feel like an extraneous step:

• In email campaigns, you have to handle crafting, scheduling, writing copy, and managing subscriber lists. Each new “card” within your project management system might help you stay organized, true. But it’s another element of work on top of what you’re already planning.
• In lead nurturing, you have to use project management to track when to follow up with leads or move them through the funnel. And if you aren’t automating this work, forgetting to update a project management card can leave you behind as an organization.
• In event planning, your to-do list can get overwhelming if you can’t focus on one at a time. It’s all too easy to let project management get away from you—to the point where you’re still doing all the organizing in your head.
• In coordinating tasks and communication for a team, you can forget that your project management dashboard doesn’t look like your team’s. You have to automate and synchronize these boards to keep every team member in the loop.

And we haven’t even touched on one of the most important project management roles. According to the Project Management Institute, project managers spend 75-90% of their time communicating. The more you can automate that, the more any marketing team leader can focus on big-picture wins—and less on what feels like herding cats.

With Jasper project management, project managers can streamline their workflows. If a potential lead in your CRM moves to a new stage, you can have that trigger new content like follow-up emails. Or you can set it to alert a specific team member so they reach out to the lead. Let Jasper handle the everyday tasks like summarizing content (interviews, podcast transcripts, etc.) or generating outlines and plans you can send out to your marketing team.

Campaign management

Start with a campaign brief, and Jasper can turn it into a fully fleshed out campaign plan. If you’re planning on using different distribution channels—like social media and email—you can set Jasper to write from a unified brand voice. Tweak it as you like. Or set it to publish automatically.

But what’s really important here is how easily Jasper moves from brainstorming a campaign brief to building a fully-fledged content marketing plan. With the campaign brief in Jasper’s hands, the generative can generate:

• Article ideas
• TikTok scripts
• Case studies
• Blog posts
• FB ad copy / Google Ad copy
• Landing pages

Website management 

Think of your website as a top-of-funnel lead intake machine. AI and marketing automation are particularly helpful here if you’re not great at creating landing pages. Take Jasper’s Webflow automation features. Within Webflow, you can create landing pages and add new pages easily, using Jasper AI to fill in the content and help capture incoming leads. You can also use it to translate successful pages into new languages for an international audience.

Personalizing content

One of the top benefits of marketing automation is that every part of your marketing will feel more personalized and customer-specific—without you doing any extra work. Not only can AI fill in the appropriate lead’s names, but it can also write to unique customer segments. With Weight Watchers, for example, their sales representatives could stop copying and pasting from the same Word doc. Automation could do the same work—and often did a better job than copying and pasting.

Personalized content doesn’t just save you time; it resonates with readers. Think of Grammarly’s unique “your week in writing” reports. Grammarly automatically generates those emails based on user-specific stats, yet they’re more relevant to each user because they get to browse their own app history.

The same logic applied to Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign, which saw 1.25 million more teens trying a Coke in one summer. The idea: personalization. By automating the process of putting customer names on photographs of Coke bottles, the company made every potential customer feel more invested in the brand.

Where marketing automation may be headed in the age of AI

It’s amazing what you can accomplish with just a Google spreadsheet. You can churn out brand-consistent product descriptions. You can personalize ads and social media copy. But most powerfully, you can use any app to make every interaction and touchpoint feel personal.

AI isn’t replacing marketers. It’s making marketers more effective, giving them leverage to scale themselves.

But if you want to automate your marketing team, you may need specific use cases. Check out Jasper’s integrations library to explore how you can automate AI and automate your marketing efforts at scale.