Introduction

Does marketing automation make you anxious?

Feels like it is not beneficial and will eat up all the marketing jobs out there?

Remember that scene from Godzilla VS Kong where they built a robotic Godzilla with an intention to fight and win over the real living Godzilla. They thought they will control all the actions and movements of this robot Godzilla.

But it turned out to be a total disaster!

This robot started operating on its own and wreaked havoc! And was no good to anyone!

What’s the lesson here? 

Without human intervention, a robot cannot perform the intended actions for which it was built.

Same way for marketing automation tools, they are no good without an actual human controlling how they function. It cannot offer the desired personalization without a human marketing strategist.

Source: LinkedIn

Hence, marketing jobs are not gonna vanish, just gonna be more efficient with a proper marketing automation strategy!

Why on Earth are we speaking about Marketing Automation?

With the advent of big data and personalization for generating leads and increasing engagement with your target audience, marketing automation has become a critical aspect of the marketing strategy.

Having certain tools at your disposal that can automate your routine marketing activities helps increase your efficiency and directs your focus towards creative tasks, which in turn would enhance your outreach strategies.

It leaves you with ample time to spend interacting and engaging with your customers across multiple channels. And that’s the most important thing to do, interact with your customers!

Marketing automation also helps you achieve better targeting to deliver the right information to the right people at the right time.

As per EngageBay, 98% of marketers say that for a company to succeed, an effective marketing automation strategy is an important aspect.

That’s almost all marketers vouching for having a marketing automation strategy in place!

If you already have a marketing automation process in place, learn what is marketing automation audit and how frequently should you do it.

Before creating a strategy for your business, let’s understand what is marketing automation all about!

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation includes the use of software to automate marketing activities.

What part of the process you want to automate depends on your business decision; whether you want to automate right from the prospect identification stage to the nurture stage to the conversion stage. Or if you want to automate only certain segments of the process.

LeadSquared is a good tool for marketing automation.

What is LeadSquared? What are it’s features? Know by clicking on this link.

Marketing automation activities include posting and scheduling social media posts, managing email campaigns, ad campaigns, website content scheduling, and more. It helps you build a personalized communication network with your audience.

One thing to note: Do not bombard your prospect’s inbox with automated emails one after the other.

Source: Marketoonist

In a nutshell, your marketing’s focus will be entirely on buyer behavior tracking and working accordingly; and other routine tasks will be taken care of by these tools.

Examples of using automation include tracking website visitors, their activities; then sending targeted automated emails. For instance, you can send an automated email to your prospect asking them to purchase the abandoned items in their shopping cart, or you can send a welcome email to your new subscriber.

One thing to keep in mind: You need to avoid automating aggressively! According to Chris Davis - the director of education at ActiveCampaign - “By over-automating your marketing, you end up managing a customer journey instead of optimizing it.”

Read the resource linked below to know marketing automation can turn the tables for SaaS companies. 

Marketing Automation: A Game-Changer for SaaS Companies!

Moving on to the tips to develop a successful marketing automation strategy!

10 Tips to develop a rewarding marketing automation strategy

Build your list yourself

Create, don’t buy a list of contacts from third-party vendors!

Spend time building your own list of qualified leads and regularly modify it and add new contacts.

Start small, start now

For starters, consider experimenting with only a few buyer personas (1-2), and a handful of key sales funnel stages. Experiment with what’s working and what’s not. Only then consider adding more personas to your structure and more stages to your funnel.

Focus on understanding your buyers’ persona

One, take a deep dive into your ideal customer profile.

           - Who are they
           - Their demographics 
           - What terms do they search for and where ( Google Analytics can help you Here)

Two, conducting interviews with sales, customer service, and marketing teams can help define the persona, their pain points, and the search terms they use to find a solution to their problems.

Three, Facebook Business Suite and Twitter Analytics can help with understanding the topics and demographics suitable to your business. 

Source: EngageBay

Four, the customers and prospects themselves are good sources of understanding pain areas/challenges faced by your target audience.

Know the end goal - more leads and revenue

The ultimate goal of marketing automation is to get more quality leads incoming. Nurture relationships with prospects by delivering targeted and personalized content as per the buyers’ journey, sit with sales to understand the lead life stage and the conversion criteria.

Learn how to map your content to every stage of buyers’ journey in 2021.

Ensure syncing marketing and automation tools to build a feedback control system!

Build synergy between marketing and sales team

Ensure that the sales team is aligned with the marketing teams’ outreach efforts. This will avoid both marketing and sales reaching out to the same set of leads to be nurtured at the same time - leaving them with an inbox full of emails from the same company, different representatives, attracting them to take different actions ahead.

Analyze a suitable time to let marketing nurture leads and a time to let sales take over the nurturing process.

Take one step further than the inbox

Your prospects are everywhere, interacting with your business across channels. Develop a marketing automation strategy and adopt a system to deliver content across all of these channels. For instance - emails, websites, phone calls, social media, etc.

Human touch is what your audience craves for

Don’t let marketing automation tools be a robot serving information that’s been fed to them! Analyze the needs of your prospect and then serve information at the right time and place. 

To simplify, focus on a single journey at a time. Say, for instance, take prospects subscribing to your emails as a journey. Chalk out all possible actions one could take and then chalk out your response to each one of them. Once you do that, you will be able to give a personal touch to your audience and use the power of automation for amplifying that. Hence, you will be able to impact thousands and thousands of people.

Lead segmentation works like magic

What’s key is to be able to serve relevant content at the right time at the right place to the right audience. For that, map out the unique trajectories that the leads take to move down the funnel and build your marketing automation strategy around those paths.

Source: HubSpot

Continually recite “Content is King”

Ensure creating quality content regularly for attracting each segment of your target audience. Doing this would ensure that your marketing automation strategy automatically delivers intended results.

Let your content behave like a smart kid 

Serving targeted emails is not the end of the hustle!

Ensure you deliver personalized and targeted content to different people visiting your website. For example - having targeted landing pages.

Source: SEMRush

This way, you can help them take the intended actions to move them further down the funnel and finally convert into a paying customer. Make sure to choose a marketing automation tool that helps make your website deliver content in a targeted way.

Know the 10 best marketing automation tools for 2021.

Way Forward

Marketing automation is exactly like that hot selling skill, without which you are totally irrelevant for a job!

Not including marketing automation tools in your marketing efforts would end up making your business lag far behind in the cut-throat competition.

Adopting it has its own set of benefits like decreasing the time spent on routine marketing activities, getting more revenue, etc.

Around 30% of the marketers say that the major benefits of having marketing automation strategies in place are saving time, 22% of them say it helps in generating leads, 17% of them say it helps increase revenue, and 11% of them include customer retention as a key benefit.

That are some impressive numbers, right?

If you too want to gauge the effectiveness of marketing automation for your business, follow the 10 tips explained in this blog and watch your strategy fetch outstanding results for your business!

Looking for help in building a marketing automation strategy? 

We, at Fractional CMO, have a team of stellar marketing technologists, who can help you with harnessing the power of tools like HubSpot, Pardot, and more.

We have a 4-step marketing automation approach:

• We begin by understanding your business nature, needs, current practices; and strategize accordingly
• We move forward with designing a workflow and work with your team to implement it
• We monitor the process to identify issues at an early stage and make sure the project goes on smoothly
• We finally analyze the project performance and offer you a detailed report of the progress.

Interested? Get in touch with us, Today!