8 Tips to Make Your Marketing Automation Effective
The term marketing automation has become very popular in recent years. It’s an umbrella term that covers all of the various ways businesses use technology to automate their marketing. This can include lead generation and nurturing, social media marketing, email marketing, and e-commerce. All of these are important and effective tools that can help you reach your goals and grow your business. The problem is, there are too many different approaches to marketing automation, which makes it difficult for companies to figure out which works best for them. This article will give you some ideas about how to market your business using automation. I’ll also give you my tips on how to choose a good tool, which is often the hardest part.
Marketing automation is taking the world by storms. As an expert to the subject, we see many marketers using it as a strategy, some of them are still experimenting with their automation efforts. And of course, we’ve all seen plenty of marketing automation that is clearly designed to fail, either through bad design and implementation, or poor execution. Here are eight tips for making your marketing automation more effective.
1. Understand the business need
The first step is to understand what’s driving the decision-makers in your business. Your organization probably has a defined strategic plan and an organizational chart, so start there. Once you’ve identified the strategy, your next task is to figure out who the people driving it are and how to get their attention.
2.Understand your stakeholders
The key to success with marketing automation is aligning your efforts with your stakeholders’ needs and expectations. If you are already using a customer relationship management (CRM) system for your marketing efforts, then use marketing automation to augment or improve what you are already doing. If you aren’t, then begin by mapping your current efforts to the stages of the marketing process. You’ll be much more successful if you get the buy-in from all those that will be affected by the new technology – including IT, marketing, finance and sales.
3. Don’t just build technology
Many companies start their marketing automation projects by building a simple email marketing program that’s integrated with their CRM software.
The thought is that you can get started quickly with minimal effort. And as you scale your business down the road, you have an already-functioning channel to draw on. It’s time to shift from generic traffic tactics that aren’t working for you to more personalized ones that speak directly to your site visitors.
But this is like saying you only need to write an article because you built a website. You want to start with something you can build an audience with, not just something that you can blast into the world.
4. Start with the simplest form of automation possible
If you have limited resources, it might make sense to start small and build out over time. You could use a simple lead-scoring engine or landing page, or build a simple drip-feed e-mail program that you can test in a few hours. If you’re working for a large company, this may be too much work to do all at once.
Start with the basics. Marketing automation can make your life easier in lots of ways, but it doesn’t mean you should throw everything at it. In the beginning, focus on the fundamentals — getting the most basic parts working and adding features later.
Do some testing. There are free tools like Buzzsumo to help you test content ideas. You can also use tools like Crowdfire to monitor mentions of your brand online. Once you have a list of positive mentions, you can then build content that will drive traffic to your site. The goal of marketing automation is to automate tasks and make them easier, while still providing the same level of personalization as a human marketer. Marketing automation allows a business owner to spend less time managing campaigns and more time growing the business.
5. Choose the right tool for marketing automation
Your business may already have a marketing automation platform in place. If so, that’s great! If you’re going to add another tool, consider what its capabilities are and how they fit with your existing marketing strategy. If it is meant to help sales, don’t put it in front of leads, or if it’s meant to create sales opportunities, don’t use it to blast people into your system.
Be strategic about the tools you use. Many marketing automation platforms have more features than you might need, and some can get expensive quickly. Be selective when you’re choosing your marketing automation platform.
Get in touch with other brands. It helps to have friends in the industry. Reach out to other brands and ask how they use automation. You may be surprised at what they have to say.
You can also use the content as your main marketing tool. They can be used to inform people about the brand and service you are providing, and it will help them understand what is good and bad about you. It can be used for customer reviews, too.
6. Consider a hosted platform
Some companies offer a hosted marketing automation solution for an additional cost. If you’re considering this option, start with a trial before committing to a long-term subscription. Be sure the service you select has enough capacity to support your business requirements and that the company is able to scale up and down as needed. A hosted solution also gives you the flexibility to customize the user interface and features. We could start with email marketing. One of the easiest ways to get started with marketing automation is to use email. Many marketing automation systems let you import contacts from CRM platforms like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics.
Know what you’re buying. If you have a marketing budget, then the first question is how much you’re spending on marketing. The next question is whether you need to buy a product that includes marketing automation, or if that functionality is free in the cloud.
Be pragmatic about budgeting. There are many ways to get started with marketing automation, including using existing software, building something yourself, or renting time on an outsourced team. But as with all new projects, you need to start small and build out to a reasonable size. If you need a big return, you need to spend a lot of time and effort upfront, or you’ll be frustrated when it takes a long time to get traction.
7. Manually input your contacts into an email list and set up automated emails to deliver your messages to specific audiences
Learn about the technology you need. The most popular platforms are Google Apps Script (for JavaScript-based coding), Google Sheets (for spreadsheets), and Google Slides (for presentation). It may not be possible for you to code in these tools, but you can work with an agency that has the expertise. Or you can get a third-party tool that integrates with these services, such as Marketing Dashboard from Marketo.
This helps to ensure that your business messages reach the right customers at the right time. When we talk about high-quality content, we’re talking about something much more detailed and structured. This is text-heavy content that takes a bit of thought and effort to create, but ultimately determines one’s success over time with organic SEO.
Choose a content management system. Some marketing automation tools include a content management component. For example, if you have content stored in a database, you can use a marketing automation tool to pull the information into your system. This way, you can make changes in your content library directly in your marketing automation tool. And then use the marketing automation tool to schedule or automate the process of delivering your messages. Learn about features that help you build relationships. You can set up campaigns to send messages based on when someone buys something or when a lead completes a particular task, but the more powerful tool is a relationship manager. A relationship manager lets you monitor leads and prospects so you can follow them over time. A relationship manager can also automatically schedule emails that keep the momentum going with a prospect. Use a tool to manage tasks for your team. Your marketing team will have many tasks to do every day: setting up campaigns for new prospects, sending reminders to customers about events, and scheduling calls to make sales presentations.
Use a CRM to store your leads, and let automation run the rest of the job. Add social media to your marketing mix. The days of sending bulk email campaigns are gone. Marketing automation platforms can help you create automated, personalized social media campaigns that increase engagement. And you can even use the technology to track and manage customer conversations via social channels.
Take advantage of automation tools for your email marketing. You can use a tool like Mailchimp to create email templates for different segments of your audience or use the built-in features to send out an email blast on a set date. You can also automate follow-up messages based on activities in the CRM.
8. Use an API to connect your systems together
There are many different APIs available that can be used to automate workflows. For example, you can use the Zapier API to send emails based on an event in a CRM, or you can use the Marketing Cloud API to trigger campaigns based on social media interactions.
Use a CRM to store your leads, and let automation run the rest of the job. Add social media to your marketing mix. The days of sending bulk email campaigns are gone. Marketing automation platforms can help you create automated, personalized social media campaigns that increase engagement. And you can even use the technology to track and manage customer conversations via social channels.
Take advantage of automation tools for your email marketing. You can use a tool like Mailchimp to create email templates for different segments of your audience, or use the built-in features to send out an email blast on a set date. You can also automate follow-up messages based on activities in the CRM.
Work With Us
There are so many ways on making your marketing automation effective and efficient. Let us know what you think, and if we missed anything. You can also let us know if you found any value in the list so far, or if you have suggestions for additional topics that you would like me to cover. Thank you for reading our blog and sharing your ideas. If you want additional knowledge and support about marketing automation, Ubique Digital Solutions is the best agency that you can trust. UDS offers marketing automation and any HubSpot-related services that gives the solutions to your business problems. Contact us now!
