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Integrating digital technology into your marketing strategies can have great results for your business. Consider the advantages of better lead management, improved customer engagement, and bottom line revenue generation. These are only some of the many benefits of marketing automation.
It’s worth noting that marketing automation is not just about using a software, but a multi-faceted strategy. Apart from the platform itself, you will need to ensure that you have the right people and processes to make your marketing automation campaign is a success.
That said, some of the best practices for implementing and optimizing marketing automation technology include the following:
1. Lead Nurturing & Management
Actively nurtured leads are generally more likely to convert into sales compared to non-nurtured leads. It’s all about purposefully engaging the leads by providing relevant information throughout their buying journey and keeping them engaged during the sales cycle.
To get your lead nurturing tactics right, you must first establish where your lead is in their buying journey. Analyzing how your leads respond to your lead nurturing methods is crucial to have a successful, well-oiled system. Utilizing targeted and personalized content, doing timely follow-ups, and engaging with prospects across different channels are all apart of the lead nurturing process. Many companies install tracking cookies on their site so they can do even further remarketing to their leads after they fill out a form so your brand stays in front of mind during the initial contact.
2. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
After identifying promising high-value prospects, market directly to these prospects through account-based marketing. Create, or otherwise curate personalized content and decide on the best channels through which to pass along the content to your target audience. Whether it’s display ads on Facebook and Google Ads or if it’s timely email follow ups, having specific marketing materials for those avenues is important.
ABM is highly targeted, and you should be careful not to bombard and overwhelm your prospects. Always ensure that you have the right balance across the different channels so as not to turn off these prospects. Too much of a good thing… you know the rest.
3. Personalized Customer Experience with Engaging Content
Personalizing your customer experience is a strategy that works, and your conversion rates will tell you as much. Identify your audience segments and implement different strategies to speak directly to these segments.
Understand what each segment needs and create and/or curate content for that segment. You can identify these needs by analyzing demographics, interests, and past engagements. Combine your creativity as a marketer with collected user information to create this content.
Ensure that the content on every channel is engaging and adds real value. As you create your content, ensure that you optimize it back to your goals. If your content doesn’t hold an informational purpose or answers a direct need, it will be more than likely disregarded.
4. Sales and Marketing Alignment
Aligning the efforts of both your marketing and sales teams will see your business achieve more in lead generation and conversion. Get both teams on the same page and create a service level agreement (SLA) that will outline not only the goals of this collaboration but also the specific responsibilities of each team.
The first step of sales and marketing alignment is identifying and setting the common goals. Hold a meeting together and let each team have a say in what these common goals will be going forward. Define standard terms such as what characterizes a qualified lead. What role will each team play in lead nurturing? How and when, along the sales funnel, will the prospects transition between the two teams?
5. Measuring Marketing Effort
A lot of work goes into preparing a marketing automation campaign. A lot more work and resources go into launching and implementing the campaign. As a business, you will no doubt be interested in knowing whether your efforts have paid off and what your ROI is.
There are several metrics for measuring the success of your marketing automation strategies. It all depends on your goals going in, and what your business defines as success. Is it increased brand awareness? Increased lead conversion and revenue generation?
There is always room to do better if the results are not as great as you may have expected. Identify areas where you can improve and where you need to evolve as a business. It is important to A/B test different content types throughout the process so you better understand how your target audience responds and interacts with your efforts.
AI For Marketing
Artificial intelligence marketing is data-driven and a powerful tool in marketing automation. AI is incredible technology for the present and the future, and there’s no better time as the present to adopt the technology and explore all that it has to offer so you can reap those rewards in the (hopefully near) future.
At the heart of Artificial intelligence marketing (AIM) is the potential to tap into and collect consumer data. An analysis of this data will give your marketing team better insights about your prospects, which in turn will help in personalizing your marketing efforts. These insights will also help create better user experiences out of every interaction clients and prospects have with your business.
If you aren’t tracking your online traffic, I highly encourage that you start. Not only does Google Analytics enlighten you and your marketing team to what channels generate your traffic but also you are able to analyze which aspects of your automation marketing are succeeding or failing. The power lies within your hands, it’s time to start using it.
Bottom Line
There are several marketing automation platforms in the market to choose from, including Marketo Engage, Hub Spot, and SendinBlue. These platforms are feature-rich and deliver on different functional categories such as marketing across multiple channels and analytics.
No doubt about it, marketing automation works. As pointed out before, the success of your marketing automation campaign lies in more than just the platform itself. The work still has to be done by you and your team; the automation helps speed up the process once you are ready to launch your campaign. Implement the outlined guidelines, among other best practices for implementing and optimizing marketing automation technology, and you can look forward to a high return on investment.
Automation isn’t for everyone or every industry. If your marketing budget is tight and you can’t afford an advertising company to keep their hands and eyes on your campaigns, this may be an avenue of interest for your company. You must put the work in, you’ll definitely want to do further research into automation for your industry to better understand the success or failure rates you may be facing.
If your marketing budget allows the acquirement of a professional company, then this is the recommended route. Automation, with all it’s wonderful points and qualities, can drain a company if left unmanaged or spottily checked. Having a marketing consultant on your side, keeping a close watch on it all for you is a safer bet. Interested in pursuing the consultant route or need assistance with your automation campaign? Let’s chat: 1-800-255-0396
Authorship: L’ren B.
