What is it?

Marketing automation is utilizing software that will alleviate manual marketing activity to have deployment of collateral automated for increasing lead generation for your company. Some items that marketing teams automate are: emails, social media postings, and digital ads. Not only can these tactics be scheduled to preferred dates and times, but marketing automation comes with automating specific messages that are triggered after certain consumer activity – such as; thank you, birthday, anniversary, and shopping cart messages.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

With the fear of artificial intelligence lingering around every worker in the world that their job will become obsolete, marketing automation will not take away jobs – it will empower and allow jobs to become more efficient on your marketing team and within your company. Automation allows your team to free up their time from monotonous tasks and focus on how to drive business and sales for your company.

Targeting. With the ability to have unique hyperlinks created for each type of digital marketing piece (social, ads, blogs, video, etc.), you are able to fully understand behaviors of specific groups. This data can be collected and then your team can strategically develop content geared towards specific audience(s) that feels tailored and personalized, while also creating content that is used for certain behavior patterns.

The above actions are part of the reason why marketing automation was developed, to ensure the nurturing and cultivation of your consumers through individuality. As the consumer becomes more aware and educated about products and wanting to purchase from a company they can trust, creating the sense of personal attention in a world of so much digital “noise” is crucial. It allows your company to strategize a whole user experience on how automation can be useful within your campaigns and lead generations. This will also tailor the experience to every single individual that visits your website, views a social post, or clicks on an ad. You are able to track their path and understand their behavior, from which you are able to have triggered messages ready for those specific behaviors. Being mindful not to overlook current customers cultivation and is part of the user experience strategy will be beneficial in repeat sales and ambassadors to your company.

Proof? According to the DemandGen Report, “Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.” Also Nucleaus Research, “Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead.”

Best Practices

Define goals. What is the benefit to your company by implementing or ramping up you automation efforts? What are the goals to meet in terms of new leads, sales generated, etc. from using automation?

Map it out. By collaborating with other teams (sales, data analytics, etc.), you will be able to understand the current lead generation and cultivation process and how to improve with marketing automation. What information will each team need in order to serve the prospect and current customers in the best way? What data needs to be collected to ensure a smooth process with automation? How will this information feed in to your CRM? Review your current lead generation process and user pathway and see where automation will be best work within that process or how it can elevate to increase lead generation.

Targeted segmentation. Using your current database, how would you like to engage specific groups to not only steward current customers, but engage future consumers? Using data can help your company determine the different buyer/user personas within different products & aspects of your company that consumers engage with.

Content development. Create easy and short forms that allows new leads to fill out and subscribe. Use the determined segments to develop specific messages geared towards those groups and behaviors.

Personalization. Within your content development, leave room that allows for variable data and (or) copy to be inserted. Personalizing messages (although triggered) enable the consumer to feel that they are part of a special group and valued from the company they are purchasing from.

Validation of consumer behavior. Monitoring social posts and replies from emails will indicate valid leads that cannot be tracked and responded to by automation. This can also be used by personal follow-ups from inquires and digital behavior to determine the prospect is a solid lead.

Analyze. Continuously review data to let the results determine new strategies, segments, and behaviors. Removing bad email addresses and non-solicits from your database are key to not having skewed data. Allowing your data to lead the way in adjustments will aid in generating increased results in the future.

After your company has completed developing the strategy of how marketing automation will best fit within your marketing and lead generation process, partnering with Colleen Eakins Design to develop the content and design for triggered emails and more, will help bring your strategy to life.