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Automation marketing promises great things; more leads, conversion, and sales, all with less effort. Automation-based businesses recorded a 14% growth in leads and revenue and a 12% decrease in overhead marketing.
Automation is an exciting opportunity for marketing professionals to improve productivity , reduce costs and maximize customer experience. Getting into your company on an automation journey could seem daunting, but it is simpler than you think with the right advice!
In this post, we clarify all the details about automation in marketing and everything marketing team needs to know.
How Does Automation Fit Into A Marketing Strategy?
New research reveals that 44% of marketing leaders agree that automation is more relevant in 2020, something that was noted in 2019, when workers are reskilled and new employees recruited.
Here are a few other ways to incorporate your marketing campaign seamlessly:
Redirect Focus To Strategy
The purpose of any form of automation is to improve productivity. Marketing campaigns will put huge requirements on the resources of your company. Automation invests time better on activities that involve the team members’ specific skills, such as strategy and customer engagement.
Automated systems can take care of consumer interactions, lead nurturing, content preparation, social media management, market analysis, analytics; basically all activities that do not require active human intervention. Implementation of automation can also lead to increased productivity and improved efficiency for your company.
Reallocate Budget
Efficiency is the key mechanism here; when team members have the time to focus on their core tasks, it makes them more productive. In turn, projects are delivered faster and without the need for investment in extra staff.
Automation removes the drain of repetitive tasks, allowing you to get the most out of specialists. With this saving, your business can reallocate the budget directly back into campaigns to see more returns.
Customer Support Interactions
Good communication is essential for cultivating leads or a new client partnership. But this doesn’t cause employees to spend the entire day dealing with emails. Email automation is one of the best places to start, for example, when a website user makes a conversion, a series of well-timed and written automatic emails can be sent to a new address to keep them warm.
There are two obvious advantages of this. Firstly, it offers confidence that this vital correspondence has been submitted in a timely manner, and secondly, it does not need any additional feedback from you. Set up the rule once, and that’s it!
Emails give you a sense of the automation potential. From there, you can switch to other formats such as instant customer service chatbots on your website, time-limited text message offerings, and automated phone reminders. Customers will automatically obtain the assistance they need during their journey.
Gather Insightful Analysis
Automation software collects and analyzes data on leads, customers, sales, campaign success, and so on. This helps advertisers evaluate the success of past and current campaigns and foresee which tactics will perform well in the future.
Reporting from these auto-analytics helps you to learn and develop each stage of your marketing process. Brands may also benefit from automated A / B testing, which helps them to refine content for optimal effect in real-time.
4 Main Steps To Automation
It is essential to set up a workflow before implementing automated marketing processes. This helps the team to prepare for new processes and ensure that automation produces the best outcomes for the brand. There are four main steps to be completed:
1. Identify The Right Tasks:
Look for your teams’ most repetitive marketing tasks. This is where you’ll find the biggest gains from automation. As we mentioned above, simply automating response emails, for example, can substantially reduce the administrative burden on your team. Plot out all of your current marketing tasks, and pick out those which are both time-consuming and compatible with automation.
2. Choose Acceptable Automation Software:
There are countless options when it comes to automation software. Filtering the best ones can be a challenge – particularly when starting out. We will introduce you to the cream of the crop later in this post, but it is also worth noting that there might be software that is specifically tailored to your industry. Expand your study to verify this before you commit to the long term. Most of the platforms offer a free trial, which offers you the chance to test the app in your particular environment and determine which one suits best.
3. Train Your Team:
While automation instantly makes marketing more effective, the implementation of new technologies and processes requires investment in training for the relevant staff. It is crucial for team members to understand how automation fits into their working day, and how their function can be refocused. Emphasize the advantages and give workers the ability to fully evaluate new technologies, while respecting any questions they might have. Marketing automation is expected to become one of the most relevant marketing skills, and companies are reacting accordingly, with increased investment both now and in the future.
4. Evaluate Automation Efficiency:
The introduction of automation is not the end of the story. We suggest a periodic analysis of what is going well, what could be changed, and the effect of automation on key metrics. This helps you to make the right changes at the right time.
5 Main Platforms For Automation
There are countless automation systems out there, and sifting through them can take a lot of time. Here are five of the best marketing professional platforms:
Wedesign Automation Tool
Wedesign Automation is a tried and tested tool loved by thousands of marketing professionals. It provides campaign management, automated email, lead generation, budgeting tools, visitor monitoring, and personalized messaging.
HubSpot
You have already heard of HubSpot, and with good reason. It’s well-integrated and user-friendly, providing content management, email marketing, performance reporting, lead tracking, and real-time analytical data.
Customer.io
This platform is all about collaboration! Customer.io utilizes customer engagement data to build bespoke email messages, trigger customer reactions, behaviors and your own preset laws. The data collected by Customer.io also lets you create a rich profile for each lead.
ActiveCampaign
There’s a lot to love about ActiveCampaign. It allows you to fully customize the automations you require while providing insightful analytic data, sales support, and customer relationship management.
Pardot
If your marketing team is focused solely on improving sales, Pardot is a great choice. It is designed to accelerate pipelines using lead generation, ranking, and nurturing, as well as personalized email marketing, sales updates, and social media integration.
Read Also: How To Build Social Media Marketing Funnel
Focus on Content Creation
Automation can take care of the marketing mechanics, but the experience is still key to delivering a message to current and prospective customers. Keep these points in mind as you create content for your automated marketing campaigns:
1. Understand Your Audience
We understand that you have heard this a million times before, but it doesn’t overstate the value of understanding your audience inside and out. Establish their average demographic profile, location, interests, and habits. What the heck do they want to see? Creating a consumer identity will really help you target your audience in a meaningful way and produce content that really has an impact.
2. Set your tone (and stick to it!)
Your narrative voice is an integral part of your company ‘s relationship with its audience. Depending on the demographic target, you can opt for a tight corporate tone or something more warm and conversational. Until your brand has found its identity, stick with it — otherwise, the audience will find the switches jarring and off-putting.
3. Remain Human
Even though robots are sending your emails, the content requires the flair of a human developer. Plan communications in such a way that the recipient assumes it has been created for them only.
4. Mix It Up
Don’t get stuck in a rut of content! If the leaders see the same thing week after week, they’ll lose confidence in your brand. Switch formats, refresh your images, be bold and special, and most importantly – give your audience a reason to continue to connect with you.
5. Stay Relevant
Trends are fleeting, but if you accept them at the right moment, you will be noticed by prospective customers. Be tactful in your approach; you don’t have to recycle every trend, only those that are important to your brand!
The ‘black and blue dress / white and gold dress’ phenomenon, for instance, was a field day for clothing retailers – especially those selling garments – but talking about it in an email campaign months after the event would have been counter-productive. So, as the trend train moves on, make sure the content is updated quickly.
5 Ways To Optimize Marketing Automation
If you are looking to introduce automation in your company right now, here are some advanced techniques to help:
1. Get to know your message
When you launch a marketing campaign, you need to know exactly what you want to get out of it. Otherwise, the effort is rugged and unlikely to achieve much of a meaningful gain. If you want to draw more traffic to your website, generate new leads, increase sales or grow market share, automation will help.
Read Also: How Small Businesses Can Improve Their Customer Experience
2. Customize your content
Generic emails are not going to cut it down. Customers want to be appreciative of the brands they buy from. Ensure that the content can be customized by automation software, and that it is created with the illusion that it is entirely bespoke.
3. Make use of the A / B test
Your company may still be conducting A / B testing as part of your marketing strategy assessment, but automating the process is extremely beneficial. As well as time savings, automated A / B testing provides real-time data on the effect of your marketing material – enabling you to make fast changes where appropriate.
4. Get your team on board
Training and open communication are important for the efficient implementation of automated processes. Your team may feel challenged by the ‘a-word,’ associated with robots replacing humans – an unfounded expectation in the marketing world! Instead of something to fear, frame automation as a process to embrace, with tools that allow your team to concentrate less on the superfluous, and more on the talents you hired.
5. Emphasis on the experience of the customer
In the end, the effectiveness of automation depends on how the customers respond to it. Collect meaningful data during the process, using customer experience mapping, to provide input at key points of communication. This helps you to make changes to your strategy and to incorporate new automations where they would be beneficial. It’s important to remember that automation is only effective as long as you see the end user and bottom line results. If you don’t see the analytics you’d like, mix it up a little bit.
Wrap Up
There’s a lot to learn from automation. Greater efficiency, cost savings, increased output, more informative analytical data and better customer support; all of these advantages are irresistible for marketing professionals.
With good preparation, specific objectives, advanced training and optimized content, every organization can introduce and make a great success from marketing automation. And these processes have so much more to go; with the AI market expected to be worth $16 billion by 2022, now is a particularly exciting time to add automation to your brand.