Take 5 Steps to Implement Marketing Automation in Your Business
Like most people working in the digital marketing business, you probably spend a lot of time repeating the same tasks over and over. It is time to use software that automates your marketing work so you can run more efficiently.
Make better decisions for your business and do it all for less money and less effort.
Know the specific arguments
Marketing automation will help you focus on your clients – attracting new ones and building stronger relationships with existing ones. In addition, you will understand which implemented campaigns are working and which are not and be able to increase the number of buyers in the sales funnel.
- In 80% of companies that use marketing automation the number of leads has increased and conversions have increased by 77% (according to the report “Marketing Automation, how to make the right buying decision” 2015).
- Marketing automation helps to increase the number of hot leads – customers ready to purchase in a shorter time period – by 50% over companies that don’t use marketing automation.
At the same time the expense per client is 33% less (according to the report by Forrester Research 2014). - 67% users of marketing automation technology found marketing automation to be very effective (according to the report “State of Marketing” 2015).
This is just a small part of a list of very encouraging statistics. If you want to join the fast growing group of companies that benefit from marketing automation, here are some tips on how to get started.
1. Define your business goals
Marketing automation is a much deeper process than just sending an email. At the beginning you have to look at your business, define what your business strategy is – clearly state objectives that will give it shape. Do you want to have more clients? Or you want speed up and optimize the sales process? Defined objectives will help to prepare the indicators which might be useful to measure the effectiveness of the strategy.
2. Create an action plan
To implement the strategy you need to create a clear plan, a map that guides you to set goals. In marketing automation, prediction is a very important aspect. Think about what contact between your brand and your customers will look like, what kind of questions they will ask, what problems they may encounter. Thanks to that you will be able to define triggers (pulses designed to cause action) and specify actions that have come after them. Example of such a trigger can be visiting the e-store website of the specific product or action – sending an email with a discount on this product.
3. Define performance indicators
How will you measure your success? Here we can use such indicators as conversion, customer value, CPL – lead cost, ROI, ROMI. You need to determine which criteria are really important to you and what changes you expect after the implementation of marketing automation.
4. Analyze the data
By creating a database of your clients you accumulate vast amounts of information: you know what they are interested in, how they behave, what are their demographics, etc. Analysis of this material is an essential element to conducting effective marketing automation. It will allow you to create client segments and each of them defines a different message. There is nothing worse than sending the same messages to consumers with different needs.
5. Integrate marketing automation with the content marketing strategy – “If content is the king, context is a God!”
We live in a time that is flooded with information. More and more demanding consumers want to receive content that is actually interesting and relevant, and an advertising message included in it cannot be intrusive. Therefore, you must find a way to communicate with them to attract their attention through the creation of valuable content – that is to act according to the idea of content marketing. Show them how they can save time and money, present interesting statistics, use charts, etc. If you combine this with marketing automation you will effectively strengthen communication. Because thanks to proper content you will provide your customers with such content that they expect, and with marketing automation you will do it exactly when they need it.
The key to success
These tips will help you to implement marketing automation in your business, but the key here is to choose the right platform for DMP (Data Management Platform) in order to collect data from different sources, process it, calculate by the use of appropriate indicators and support for automated marketing campaigns. Synerise is just such a platform.