5 Best Practices of Marketing Automation

When it comes to sales, the competition is high in every industry, but in today’s digital world the competition is only getting tougher. Website visits to review product or service recommendations and a company’s reputation are all completed digitally before a customer decides to buy or visit your store if the purchase is not online. So you need to have the attention of those customers before they even start their buying process and then work out how to turn those visitors into leads, and leads into new customers.

Successfully delivering appropriate messages will help you to inform customers and then lead them step-by-step through their buying cycle; this is where marketing automation becomes extremely valuable. Marketing automation enables you to set up a workflow of highly personalised marketing messages designed to convert website visitors into leads, and then your new leads into paying customers.

Here are 5 best practice guidelines to get marketing automation working for your business.

1. Know Your Audience
Before you can start using marketing automation effective and creating your emails, autoresponders, workflow messages and landing pages, you need to know your audience. Creating buyer personas will help you understand the people who buy from you; their questions, challenges and needs. This, in turn allows you to create and produce content that addresses those specific needs.

2. Sales and Marketing Alignment
More than ever, sales and marketing teams and processes need to be closely aligned if you are to be successful. Marketing automation campaigns should be aligned to sales processes allowing your staff to recording every point of engagement to an online CRM. This will provide detailed customer profiles for your sales team to successfully nurture leads through their buying cycle.

3. Create Valuable, Helpful Content
Marketing automation allows you to be highly targeted and personalised with your contact. Delivering the right message at the right time that also appeals to your target audience, will not only drive an engaging marketing automation process but will also qualify your leads from the start. So be creative, be informative and be focussed.

4. Multi-Channel Lead Nurturing
Our digital age means that potential clients are viewing your business across a number of channels. Effective marketing automation campaigns will feature a multi-channel approach with many touch points including dynamic website content, email, social media, re-targeting, and interaction from your sales team.

5. Test, Tweak, Repeat
The beauty of digital marketing is that it provides a constant flow of data to assist you in optimising campaign results. A consistent program of monitoring and improving your workflows will increase your overall competitive advantage. Remember to allow any campaign sufficient time to collect enough data for it to be valid and consider outside factors that are beyond your control when reviewing the data.

In addition to increasing leads, marketing automation systems can help increase cross sales and upsells, and improve customer care processes, turning your customers into active fans who will be ready to recommend you.

If you would like help getting started with marketing automation, or improving your current campaigns, get in touch.