5 Marketing Automation Tips Every Business Should Know
It is not really an overstatement to say that automation has completely reshaped the marketing industry. With automation tools and integrations, small well-organized teams can almost be on even footing with major companies. So they can win over customers that would have once been far beyond their reach. That said, marketing automation is a relatively new field, and the best uses of its technology aren’t always obvious. Some may scramble to figure out best practices for marketing automation tips and tricks.
In this post, we’re going to take a look at five essential marketing automation tips that every marketer should know about:
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Build your campaign automation strategy around your marketing goals.
Every effective marketing strategy needs to be designed with specific, trackable goals in mind. This practice is even more important in an automated email marketing campaign. Every stage needs to be designed to nudge prospects forward toward a completed sale.
Each stage of the pipeline should have unique goals, such as open rates, email CTRs, and download metrics. These goals will help identify and qualify eventual customers. And you can use the data generated by these email campaigns to create stage-by-stage reports in your CRM. Then you can refine your goals and methods as you go.
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Automation is ideal for stage-based marketing.
As a marketer, you’ve probably heard dozens of variations on the concept of creating a Customer Journey for prospects as they enter the marketing funnel. This concept creates a useful mental model, as it depicts the marketer as a kind of tour guide. But it’s not always clear how this model translates into the not-exactly whimsical reality of CRM-based marketing automation software.
As you design your marketing strategy, it’s important to start simple. Most early-stage prospects are looking for easily digestible content, such as brief blogs articles, picture-heavy brochures, and infographics. These pieces will provide a broad overview of your product or service. In these early stages, long-form marketing content (such as whitepapers and case studies) can be overwhelming.
Craft your email marketing to match your prospects’ levels of interest. As they learn more, your marketing content can become more sophisticated and informative.
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Keep your content varied.
Most companies don’t have a huge backlog of content marketing resources to use in their automated email marketing campaigns. Even relatively large companies may have a limited number of relevant blog posts, case studies, and whitepapers to send out. In other words, marketers may only have a few months’ worth of content, even if they limit themselves to weekly emails.
However, most marketers do not realize that the definition of marketing content is extremely flexible. Have great product reviews on a third-party site? Create an email that links to the best ones. See an interesting, relevant article or discussion about your industry on LinkedIn or Quora? Turn it into an email.
The goal here is to keep the people on your email list as engaged as possible. Then you can build a sense of trust with your brand and marketing.
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Automate as much of the process as possible.
There are a lot of tedious, day-to-day tasks involved in managing any marketing software. It can be hard to see the benefits of marketing automation when your staff is spending hours every day doing countless tasks that are small and repetitive, such as:
- Updating lead lists
- Manually entering changes into the CRM
- Writing follow-up emails
Wherever possible, let your marketing automation solution do the boring stuff. Be on the lookout for any routine, predictable processes that can be efficiently handled by this software. In addition, integrate as many other systems as possible. And regularly update your automation workflows, in order to take full advantage of the automation platform.
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Measure results and adjust as needed.
No automation process is perfect. Even the ones that are most effectively designed need to be updated as circumstances change. Over time, customer segments that once delivered consistent results can become less effective. Within a few months, content that was once innovative and compelling can start feeling stale. Both marketing trends and customer expectations change.
By paying attention to major marketing trends and keeping a close eye on your marketing automation reports, you can quickly adjust your strategy as the situation changes. Automation tools allow you to make agile, responsive moves across every segment of your audience.
Want to learn more about the ways marketing automation can help your business reach new customers while it reduces costs? Looking for some more marketing automation tips? Contact Faye for a free consultation.
