Marketing is an integral part of all business organizations. If you are offering products or services, you need marketing. It is neither restricted to small businesses nor B2B businesses.
Source: Pixabay
Even those in arts and entertainment need to market themselves and their brands. Without marketing, your business can not reach a wide audience, nor can it make sales or drive profits.
Although marketing is beneficial to every business, the whole process can be time-consuming. From generating leads to sending emails, creating social media content, follow-up messages, etc.
There is so much activity involved with marketing. Spending so much time on these tasks may be limiting. And you will not have enough time for other tasks. This brings us to marketing automation.
What is Marketing Automation?
As stated earlier, targeting and keeping up with marketing tasks can be exhausting and time-consuming. But what if there’s an easier way to perform all these tasks? What if there is software that can automatically perform those functions? What if I told you that you could save time and focus on other things?
Marketing automation involves using technology and software to ease your digital marketing tasks. Here, repetitive tasks like sending emails are automated by the software. Leveraging software for task completion gives you time to generate and convert more leads.
Facts show that businesses that use marketing automation to improve prospect experience have a 451% increase in lead conversion. By 2023, the global expectation for the market size of marketing automation will be $25 billion.
Marketing automation has made digital marketing easy. With automation tools, you can personalize messages that’ll be sent to clients and prospects. Research shows that 80% of customers prefer to buy from businesses that provide personalized and relevant experiences. Also, you can schedule messages and send automated replies.
If your business has a broad customer base, then this software can help your sales and marketing team become more productive. For small start-up businesses, navigating through the software may be difficult. In this case, outsourcing to a digital marketing firm will be best. And finding the right agency is no big deal.
There are digital marketing firms with a location-based niche. They will offer the best results because their focus is narrowed down to a certain geographical location. Even as far as Milwaukee, you can find a Milwaukee marketing firm that can provide for your needs.
With the right Milwaukee marketing agency, your small or medium-sized business will get the marketing services it needs. Also, if you choose your Milwaukee marketing firm correctly, your business sales will take a new turn.
They can provide you with the right marketing automation tools and train you on how to use them. You can decide to do it yourself or with their assistance. And if you don’t have the time to learn, they can do it all for you.
Also, since the Milwaukee digital agency has a location-based niche, they will offer the model that will best fit your location. This is because they have gained mastery and understanding of how the location works. Also, they have the right team of experienced digital marketing strategists.
There may be various businesses in the location, but a Milwaukee digital agency will work with you and create a customized marketing strategy tailor-made for your business needs. Let the Milwaukee digital agency do the job while you and your team pay more attention to tasks that need more human attention.
15 Best Practices For Marketing Automation
For your marketing automation to be seamless, some professional procedures can help you. These procedures have been proven to be effective, and they will guide you in your marketing automation strategies.
#1. Understand Your Audience
Knowing and understanding your audience is one best practice needed for successful marketing. You must have your audience in mind when creating campaigns. Have a clear description of your audience. Know their location, age range, preference, etc. Create the persona you want for your buyers by carrying out in-depth research.
A Milwaukee marketing firm, for instance, will target residents of Milwaukee. It’ll be best for such Milwaukee digital agencies to use tactics like surveys, interviews, and social media analytics to find their audience. Also, they can get opinions from their sales team, and contact form data. Once you have defined those you are targeting, you can align your automated content to suit their needs.
#2. Tailor Your Content to Have a Personalized Tone
Every user should have a customized message and content sent to them. With marketing automation, you can set this in place without having to do it all over again. Personalizing content is beyond inserting the customer’s name in your messages.
You should tailor your content based on the user’s recent purchases, website activities, and browsing data. By establishing your content on customer behaviour, you increase your chance of boosting conversion and sales. Customized messages can be emails, newsletter offers, etc.
#3. Study Your Customers Journey
Since change is constant, your customers’ expectations too will change. With time, people tend to develop new interests or decide to try out new things. For your automation to be effective, you must know where your customers’ interest is per time.
To understand your customer journey, you need to create a customer journey map for every interaction your audience has with your brand. This will help you know how to set your automated campaigns.
If the process seems tedious, you can hire professional services. And if you are in Milwaukee, you can choose a Milwaukee marketing firm.
#4. Find the Right Frequency
Monitor how your audience responds to communications. Don’t just blindly send promotional messages. With their response rate, you can know the most effective methods and stick to them. Find out the preferred timeline and send your message or content accordingly.
#5. Collect the Data You Need
Marketing automation is not about running random campaigns. You need to send the relevant messages to the right audience. Having the right information about the people that make up your audience is a way to go.
Also, the information you need depends on your company. If you are a Milwaukee marketing firm, for instance, you will want to know the location of your prospects. Prospects who don’t stay in the same location can be spotted and avoided.
#6. Categorize Your Lead Types
For targeted messaging, you need to categorize your lead types. This will improve the user experience and create a positive impact. You can segment leads into categories that you can recognize later. Consider the following categories for separating your leads;
- Anonymous – For random visitors just browsing your website. Those that have not provided any details yet.
- Known – Someone who has identified themselves.
- Engaged – For those who have interacted with your content but have not made a purchase.
- Marketing Qualified Lead – Those who have passed the lead scoring process and are being followed up.
- Sales Qualified Lead – Someone who your sales team has identified as being interested in your brand.
- Won – A lead turned customer.
- Lost – A lead who didn’t convert into a paying customer.
- Disqualified – Those who have very low tendencies to patronize your brand.
#7. Always Revisit Your Contact Database
Every now and then, check your contact database. Delete false data and merge duplicates. To make the work easier, use verification measures to reject non-existent emails and phone numbers in your forms.
#8. Engage in Social Listening
There are marketing automation tools you could use for social listening. They have monitoring and social listening capabilities. With such automation tools, you can identify your advocates.
Also, you can engage those who mention your brand on social media. This way, you can be updated on potential leads and customer complaints.
#9. Engage and Inform Your Users
With email newsletters, you can engage your users while also marketing to them. Design your emails with the right content and graphics or pictures.
#10. Make Your Forms Short
Short forms are more effective in lead capturing. Create easy-to-fill forms and provide channels to get your leads contacts. Also, use one call to action, and don’t get your lead confused.
#11. Evaluate Your Marketing Automation Performance
You can track almost all your marketing automation touchpoints. To assess the progress and efficiency of your marketing automation, here are some metrics to consider.
- Open rate – this is the number of your messages that were opened compared to the total number sent
- Click through rate – From the people who opened your message, how many of them clicked on your link?
- Unsubscribe rate – From the total number of recipients, what percentage unsubscribed from your communication?
Aside from these, there are other metrics you can track, like landing page visits and the rate of content download.
#12. Create Multi-Channel Experiences
For starters, most marketing campaigns are done via email, and email marketing is proving to be effective. But today’s audience anticipates more. And they want a multi-channel experience.
The best way to maximize your marketing automation is by identifying your favourite channels and tracking them there. You can merge social media marketing with SMS and email marketing. You will limit your potential if you focus on just one channel.
#13. Understand Email Reputation
With your award-winning email copy and amazing offers, your effort will be wasted if your emails end up in the spam box. Poor email reputation will ruin your marketing automation.
To prevent this, you need to analyze your domain name and choose your audience well. Also, offer compelling content that they can hardly refuse, and offer your leads clear subscription management functions.
#14. Label Everything
You must think ahead and label everything. This will help you prevent errors and avoid extra work. Also, it will make It easier for your team to search and find data.
#15. Build Dynamic Nurture Programs
Don’t limit your leads to just one or two tracks. Build your nurture program to be as flexible as possible. Allow every lead to having an independent adventure.
6 Key Takeaways
- Every business needs marketing to be profitable, and marketing automation makes this easy by using software to enhance your marketing.
- You can improve your prospects’ experience with marketing automation.
- Email is not the only channel for marketing automation. You should integrate other channels as well.
- Always segment your leads for easy identification and reference.
- Understanding your customer’s journey will make marketing automation better.
- You must not do marketing automation by yourself. You can hire a third-party company to assist your business.
Conclusion:
Marketing automation has made digital marketing a lot easier, and marketing teams can now focus on other demanding tasks. If the right audience is targeted, your marketing automation can produce so much results. Also, for your marketing automation strategy to be effective, you need to integrate some of these best practices into your marketing automation.
Hello,
Thank you so much for providing this really useful post. This will benefit both me and many others. Thank you very much.