Marketing Automation Strategies: How to Use them Wisely
When you have built a stunning, optimized website for your business, both your marketing and sales teams are doing manual work.
Your marketing team devotes every day to driving visitors and turning them into leads. Your sales team spends its time gathering, qualifying, organizing, and following those leads. This process is not very efficient.
Marketing wants to get on with what they do best –building and executing creative campaigns. Sales want to focus on what they do best, which is selling the product. Developing an effective marketing automation strategy is the key to increase the productivity of both teams.
What is marketing automation?
Simply put, it’s the technology that makes marketing engaging. When we talk about real-time, personalized one-to-one marketing and lead nurturing, automation is the tactic that makes those possible. The ability to nurture a lead with the right message will turn cold prospects into warm leads. These warm leads will then turn into opportunities and then into customers. This makes automation a necessity in today’s congested marketplace.
Benefits of marketing automation
1. It’s a centralized marketing program
Using the right software allows you to manage all of your marketing activities and email delivery within one tool. This central marketing program greatly simplifies database management. It also allows you to achieve a single view of your audience. It automatically archives every campaign you’ll ever send. It allows you to execute your marketing plans across multiple channels without multiplying the work for your team.
2. Identify and capture leads
Your website may be the most valuable piece of marketing real estate you own. However, unless you learn the way to turn that traffic into sales-ready leads, it’s hardly doing you any good marketing. With the help of a suitable marketing automation strategy, this software allows you to capture and nurture those leads by enabling tracking on your website. With its help, you will be able to recognize unique visitors. It distinctly identifies them as individual leads with contact, demographic, behavioral, and contextual information. It also follows the activities of the leads on your website and allows you to engage them at individual account-based levels.
3. Real-time marketing
Automation allows you to simply execute complex marketing campaigns and engage your audience with highly relevant content. From recognizing the opportunity to respond to a triggering event to personalizing the message, and sending the email, marketing automation puts complex workflows on automatic triggers. This means your plans are executed flawlessly at the right time without waiting for manual execution.
4. Lead nurturing and lead scoring
Today’s buyers move through a complex lifestyle as they decide to make a purchase. It starts with researching general knowledge about the customers. It identifies the needs while choosing a vendor and finally making a purchase decision. It’s essential that marketing nurtures and qualifies those leads through that lifecycle before sending them into the sales pipeline. With the right strategy, you define your own customized lead lifecycle. As it tracks their behaviors, your automation system builds a running lead score that identifies what stage of the lifecycle each lead is in. It further takes appropriate action to help guide them to the next stage of the lead lifecycle.
5. Attribution and ROI
This software allows you to track the customer journey with precision and identify the marketing investments that deserve credit for actual sales. The back-end is extremely easy to use with an excel-like planning interface. Centralized budgets and roll-ups and visual dashboards allow you to see at a glance what is working and what is not. There is simply no better way to maximize the revenue generated for the amount being invested than with a productive strategy.
What are Marketing Automation strategies?
Marketing Automation platforms can help streamline your business. By automating all the repetitive processes, you enable your team to turn their attention to their work. You align marketing with sales and empower both teams to increase productivity instead of wasting time on manual drudgery. Across professional services, almost all firms have started to include this as part of their marketing strategy. There are various strategies.
a) Attracting more new leads
Be it SEO sharing in social media or guest publishing in outside publications, it helps you promote all of that thus attracting more new leads.
b) Better qualifying leads
The second strategy is better qualifying those leads. All leads are not the same and just having traffic coming to your website is not enough. But with the proper tools you can test, measure, and then rectify all kinds of techniques. This helps in bringing more qualified leads to the table in that way.
c) Segment your database for better targeting
This software helps you become smarter about what you’re sending and what you’re putting in front of the leads that the leads you have just acquired.
d) Nurture your leads to develop better opportunities
It helps you be so effective in that middle funnel area where you have already attracted the attention of a prospective audience. Continuing the conversation and continuing the process of lead nurturing alongside, will generate their interest in you as a provider.
e) Branding and Marketing for professional services
The fifth strategy is identifying sales-ready opportunities. After passing the stage of the middle funnel, with the help of this software you will know when the people are ready to engage with you. This further helps you know when is the right time to make those offers and extensions like a free consultation.
f) Making your expertise more visible
To build a strong personal brand, it is important to drive up your own visibility within the industry. With the right tools, you can deliver your desired output.
g) Improving client retention
It helps you improve client retention because you are continually staying in front of the clients in a meaningful way. Marketing automation helps you seamlessly share content with your existing client base.
h) Tracking and optimizing marketing investment
This is a tool that will track, measure, and then make necessary adjustments to all of the good strategies and techniques. These strategies are those that you might be employing. A tracking tool will reduce manual work and give feedback that will increase efficiency.
i) Increasing productivity of your marketing team
It has become a challenge to keep marketing teams productive. Marketing needs to find and develop techniques to be more efficient. The automation tool will take care of things that can be automated so that the team can focus on other priorities.
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**About the Author: Sara Williams is a content writer at PeppyBiz, a platform that helps businesses automate repetitive tasks and increase work efficiency through marketing automation software.
