How to implement effective strategies for marketing automation.
Listed below are the three fundamentals of marketing automation to help businesses strategize their digital marketing efforts.
If you are a marketer, you may have heard about implementing marketing automation tactics as part of your company’s overall marketing automation strategy. Businesses are aware of the importance of marketing automation, but many businesses haven’t leveraged this concept. According to a survey conducted by Smart Insights, 20% of companies don’t use marketing automation at all. If you are among the 20%, then it’s time for you to take the next step. PPC and SEO are new methods that will allow you to reach your audience more effectively. Relying on email marketing alone to get your message across is becoming a thing of yesterday.
3 Effective Strategies for Marketing Automation
As a company, you need some prerequisites to get started in the automation process: an email platform, a fully functional CRM system, and a channel that routes inbound leads to the appropriate person. Once these are in place, taking some basic steps will ensure a more robust marketing automation campaign is in place. Here are few basic methods to help any business get started.
Have Dynamic Content
It has been observed that many companies have a wide range of client data either in their CRM system or email database. The best way to reach out to your audience is by engaging them with unique, relevant, and authentic content, either through email or other channels like PPC, ad campaigns, or social media. As a marketer, you can categorize customers manually through a spreadsheet. But modern tools have all these functionalities built into the system to do this for you.
Marketers can begin something as simple as sending out a whitepaper and changing the call-to-action each time one is sent. Call-to-action is typically depended on who the target audience is.
One example of an immediate result from this kind of segmentation is a rise in click rates (62% according to Smart Insights). This is just by utilizing information that is already available in the email database. Imagine if you combined your email marketing platform with a web analytics platform. The outcome would be exponential. It makes the job of a marketer easier and allows for in-depth analysis and reports on campaigns.
Define Focus Campaigns
If you are conducting email campaigns, be sure to schedule it properly. Emails must be specific to the identified target segment and should ensure its own unique call-to-action buttons. These campaigns are also known as “drip” campaigns, which are often used by companies with lengthy sales cycle. Hence the need to keep engaging with the target audience through various forms of messaging.
The best thing about such campaigns is that they are very simple to develop, but when it comes to sustained management, it can be a challenge if you are not constantly monitoring results. Thus, it is necessary to monitor the progress and performance of the campaign in real-time. It also presents the opportunity to keep audiences engaged in multiple ways, adding value so they have less a reason to unsubscribe.
Effective Lead Nurturing
Marketing automation helps organizations generate leads more effectively. It gives insight about the target market segment and empowers sales teams in their discussions. The right marketing automation tool combined with a well-defined marketing strategy can help businesses generate more leads at a lower cost.
It is a good idea to use campaigns to generate leads, but automation should also encompass lead nurturing. Keep leads engaged to ensure your company doesn’t fall off the target audience’s radar.
Marketing leadership across industries has begun to advocate for such a strategy. The following industry statistics indicate why marketing automation has played such a pivotal role:
- According a report published by Gleanster in 2013, CMOs have increased revenue by 79%, with a 76% increase in high quality leads. The primary factor behind this uptick is marketing automation.
- B2B marketers who have successfully implemented marketing automation have seen a 10% surge in their sales pipeline.
- A report published by the Aberdeen Group indicated that companies using marketing automation have seen growth in annual revenue by 3.1%. This is because they witnessed a sharp rise in marketing qualified lead conversion, around 53%.
What we are witnessing today is an explosion of information and a heightened awareness of the needs of potential customers. Audiences are well-informed about products they want to buy, so it becomes challenging for marketers to stay ahead of the game. Marketing automation becomes more critical to leverage output and manage results, hence making the best use of it for reaching out to the target market segment.
