Marketing involves endless complex processes with many different steps and strategies. So how do you simplify everything? How do you make marketing easier? The answer lies in automation. We’ll tell you how to develop strategies for automation below!
what is marketing automation?
Simply put, marketing automation means outsourcing marketing to AIs or robots. Many programs can take over the routine tasks related to marketing. And specifically, we mean marketing that looks at sending automated messages through:
- Social media
- Advertising
Set those up, and you save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars! But why automate your content marketing? What are the pros to doing so, and what are you outsourcing exactly? We’ll discuss all of these details below!
The Pros of Automated Marketing
First, it’s effective to the point of becoming a business standard. As of 2022, 51% of businesses in the US have marketing automation strategies. Plus, 58% of B2B should adopt them throughout 2022 (source). This makes marketing automation less of a nuance and more of a requirement. Within the next five years, expect it to be a staple marketing approach! Second, automated marketing has increased leads for 80% of businesses, with sales productivity rising by 14.5%.
So it’s profitable, and it gives your business a chance to attract more clients! The third and most obvious advantage is cost-effectiveness. You can now have fewer people on your marketing team. Through automated marketing, you can outsource routine work to software that’ll track, contact, and generate more leads for you! With that, you can’t just adopt any marketing strategy you find online. You need to craft a strategy that works for your industry, products, and the kinds of clients you’ll attract. Below, we describe how to develop a successful marketing automation strategy in five steps.
Research Your Market
One of the cons of automation is that it requires initial input on your part. Automated software do not track new markets and trends by themselves. You need to do research to find out which products work best in your line of service and the kinds of customers you want to attract. This leads us to the next step.
Define Your Ideal Customer
You need a profile of the demographics of your marketing targets. You can develop multiple profiles but not too many. This should be the main result of your research. When creating profiles of ideal customers, focus on metrics that matter to your sales.
For example, let’s assume you’re selling prepackaged diet food that’s sugar-free. Your main metric will be obesity levels and locations where obesity rates are highest. Next, you can look at something like age. Most buying diet foods tend to have their own incomes and are likely to be past their thirties. You can further hone and detail your profile through research. Referencing the past example, you can look at the age groups who are more likely to buy diet food.
Set Your Marketing Goals
Before picking software, you need to define what you’re trying to achieve. You can aim for the five goals below. Though if you’re just starting one, we recommend approaching one goal at a time:
- Setting up real-time performance measurements. This is needed if you’re trying to A/B test different marketing approaches.
- Acquiring and retaining more customers. Automation helps you access more targets while following up with the existing ones.
- Personalizing your campaigns. When you automate marketing, you can use more of your time to interact in person with customers.
Track the Correct Metrics
So, you’ve defined your customer profile and marketing goals. Next, you need to define the metrics you’ll focus on. Those metrics should define how successful you are in reaching your marketing goals. For example, if your goal is customer retention, then values to look at include:
- Repeat traffic to your pages
- % of sales from repeat customers
If your goal is to personalize campaigns, then you should look at metrics such as:
- Customer satisfaction (through reviews, increased referrals, etc.)
- Frequency of emails from customers
Pick Automation Campaigns
Choose a software or platform that allows for marketing automation. For example, if your goal is email automation, you can try platforms such as:
- MailChimp
- HubSpot
- GetResponse
If your goal is to set up performance measures, then you’re aiming for analytics platforms, such as:
- Google Analytics
- Clicky
- Mixpanel
Maybe you want a platform for SEO automation. In that case, you can try the following:
- SEM Rush
- Moz Pro
- Ahrefs
Launch Your Strategy: Review Results
Keep in mind that marketing strategies are dynamic. You don’t set them in stone and move on. You should track their success at fulfilling your goals. This means constantly reviewing and adapting your strategy for the market. We recommend giving your strategy around two months before reviewing its performance. Since this is a long timeframe, you should be testing multiple strategies at once and comparing each one’s results!
Build Better Sales Funnels
Sales funnels connect your automated marketing to your store’s “buy now” buttons. You’ll need to modify them too. Why? It’s because while you may have a successful automation strategy that gets you clicks, your funnel may not be convincing enough to keep customers around! Sales funnels aside, something else you can work on in is…
Building an Email Auto-Responder
This saves you time, ensuring you can welcome new clients (and update old clients) in record time. You do so by creating segmented lists. Each list contains multiple emails, and the messages you write can automatically be sent to them all at once. Every list, of course, is customized by the platform with the personal data of the client – allowing you to personalize communication with them!
Wrapping Up
Automation isn’t difficult. It’s like testing a new tool or adding a new routine to your life. But it’s one that saves you time and money and gives you better and faster outcomes. Many businesses in PEO business are adopting it today, so expect it to be a marketing requirement tomorrow!
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