Marketing plays an important role in popularising your brand/organization. When it comes to marketing you always have to update yourself on the latest trends. One such trend is marketing automation. This is a tool that has proven to improve the lead conversion rates manyfold.
In this blog, we will learn in-depth about developing the marketing automation strategies that companies use to boost their sales.
What is a Marketing Automation Strategy?
Almost all organizations make use of marketing automation software. But only a few employ powerful strategies to make effective use of the tool. This is why developing a marketing automation strategy is important for your growth. So, a marketing automation strategy is essentially a plan laid out to understand and effectively use the tools of marketing automation.
You can effectively use marketing automation in different ways to ensure a boost in sales. But, the following are the areas in which a marketing automation tool should thrive in:
- Automate marketing emails
- Automate social media marketing
- Track and rate customer actions
- Automatically recommend products
- Nurture more leads
A marketing automation tool can do much more than what’s mentioned here. But, most companies just use them to send automated emails. Emails are one of the best ways to get leads. But when marketing automation can do much more, why not use it to its full potential?
Developing a successful marketing automation strategy
Image: PeppyBiz
Initially, before setting out to create a marketing automation strategy, set up definite goals. Try to ask yourself what you need to achieve and how you need to achieve it. However, there are certain generally accepted ways in which you can develop a winning marketing automation strategy. We will dig deep into those steps to fully understand the process.
1. Understanding where to use automation
As said earlier, there are many ways in which a marketing automation tool can be useful. But there are some tasks that the automation is simply not fit for. So, the first step to developing a marketing automation strategy is to understand where and when to use automation.
If you are in the marketing field, you must have an idea about what the sales funnel is. For those who don’t, the sales funnel is the series of steps an individual goes through before becoming a customer. Marketing automation has helped organizations in the following ways to advance the lead you must use;
- Keeping the new leads interested in your service/product.
- Helping potential customers in making critical decisions
- Keeping the existing customers engaged. This helps retain existing customers.
For example, consider a marketing automation strategy that has plans to send triggered emails. Timely emails can help your leads get invested in your website and eventually provide an opportunity to convert them into customers.
So, it is crucial that you use automation only when necessary. Sometimes, repeated automated emails can annoy the lead and steer them clear for good. Thus, making sure that your strategy doesn’t bug the leads by carefully evaluating the sales funnel, is the best way to start your journey.
2. Establish benchmarks
It is often difficult to identify the progress of your marketing strategy. But one of the efficient and proven ways of tracking the progress is setting up benchmarks. These crucial points are the ones that mark the journey of the lead through the sales funnel. It also helps you determine whether your marketing automation strategy is making progress.
You can set up the automation tool such that it can also identify the key stages of a lead. For example, consider a potential customer who has gone through all the essential checkpoints. The automation tool must be pre-programmed to alert the sales team in this situation. The sales team can further contact those leads to convert them into customers.
Tracking these benchmarks lets you know whether your marketing automation strategy achieves what you desire. If not, it is extremely easy to change your marketing automation strategy.
3. Research and Development
Like any other strategy development, marketing automation strategy development also needs research. You must effectively use your marketing automation tool to gather useful information and insight. And when it comes to modern technology, it always has room for development. So, the automation tool that you choose must be highly flexible to suit your needs.
Using customer data to optimize the strategy is one of the effective ways of increasing sales. In this step of developing the marketing automation strategy, you can exploit the tools available in the software. Making efficient use of the software’s potential is the very reason we develop a marketing automation strategy.
Let us point out some useful ways in which you can optimize marketing automation.
a. Keep your marketing automation software updated:
This is one of the most basic ways, but also one of the effective ways in which you can improve marketing automation performance. Your marketing team might find the current software interface the best fit. But it can also be the fact that they got used to it. So always update yourself with the changing trends. If your marketing tool does not produce desired results, it is time to make some changes. To keep the performance in check, generate reports from time to time, that help see the performance better.
b. Rely on actual data rather than vanity metrics:
It can often be confusing, that your product receives appreciation on social media posts but the sales are still low. This can be due to a false measurement of performance. You should only focus on important data such as acquired leads, conversion rates, etc.
These metrics are the real data that help you figure out what you should optimize. Collecting these data becomes easy when you use a marketing automation tool.
c. Conduct Surveys and Polls:
It is a well-known fact in the marketing sector that customer feedback helps them improve. You can up your game if you simply listen to what the customer has to say about your product/service. You can conduct surveys and polls by using marketing automation software. You can create surveys in such a way that from their answer you can extract what they expect.
4. Lead nurturing
What is the primary goal of your marketing automation strategy? Obviously, to increase sales. To increase sales, you should nurture your leads with care. These leads can become your future customers. With the automation software in hand, you can create personalized content for each lead. The marketing automation tool amazes us with personalized content using the data gathered.
People are more likely to open emails that have their names on the subject. This is exactly the place where you need to use an automation tool. Imagine collecting all customer information and categorizing them based on that information manually. It is highly impossible to reach all leads with personalized content if not for the marketing automation tool. But be sure to use them only in the right places and not overdo them.
Benefits of using an effective marketing automation strategy
There are a lot of benefits to using automation tools. When there is a perfectly laid out strategy used to enhance those benefits, it highly profits the organization. The following are how an effective marketing automation strategy benefits you:
- Saves time: Lead generation, lead nurturing, sending personalized emails. A marketing automation tool can do all these. Why wouldn’t it save time?
- Quick closure of sales: Due to timely response from the tool at all times, it is easy for the lead to move up faster in the sales funnel.
- Improved lead nurturing: Sure, marketing software can alone perform lead nurturing. But strategic use of the software further facilitates the process.
- Proper flow between the sales and marketing team: Miscommunication is one of the major problems that affect sales. Having an effective strategy serves as guidelines to use marketing automation to ensure better alignment between departments.
Conclusion
Running a business is not just about investing in the right resources. It is also about how we utilize them. So, in this blog, you’ve learned how you can start to develop a strategy that makes the best use of tools available. Automation software is easily available and highly flexible. Why not try putting automation to work today and see how it helps in your business growth?
