What Is Marketing Automation?
Is your business experiencing a growth spurt? This could mean a steady flow of new qualified leads is trickling in. You’ve defined your personas and are developing quality content for them. You’re feeling comfortable in your everyday marketing tasks and ready to scale.
If any of these statements resonate with you, it may be time to look into Marketing Automation.
Marketing Automation is the delicate balance between software and strategy, helping you create efficiency and a personalized experience for your clients.
Finding the right software for this automation practice is important and can make or break your implementation success. To keep it simple, we’re going to breakdown a few ways we commonly see our clients use marketing automation:
Social Media Posting & Scheduling
This one feels like a no-brainer. If you have a content strategy down, finding a tool like Hootsuite, Tailwind, or Buffer to help you schedule posts is the next step! This marketing automation software can help you schedule social media posts weeks in advance, so you can set it and forget it. This is a great way to schedule redundant posts such as, for example, “Tuesday Testimonials” or “Wednesday Wisdom” without being trapped into logging onto Facebook every day.
Social Messaging
Are you getting bombarded with questions in-person, through your website’s contact form, via email, and now on social media? If you’re overwhelmed with inquiries, automate your response to some of them. A great way to utilize marketing automation is with Facebook’s Instant Replies. In fact, they have a slew of automated responses you can set up.
These responses can help you greet customers and set expectations for times you may be out of the office or not able to respond as quickly. It could also redirect customers to a support article where they can find the answers they’re looking for faster than chatting. Tailor these experiences to meet your customer’s needs.
Email Marketing
With your social posting handled, consider adding an auto-response to your email marketing software that responds to website inquiries. Again, these messages are a great way to let prospects know their contact form was received and set expectations for your response, typically within 24-48 business hours.
Have these marketing automation tools mastered? Then let’s level up your email marketing campaigns with a dash of lead nurturing.
Auto responses are great, but what if you could help foster that prospect through a set of emails that answers their questions, provide relevant solutions, and leads them to purchase? Sounds like magic, right? It’s not; it’s still marketing automation set on a foundation of really, really good strategy.
Lead Nurturing
Let’s say you’ve created a landing page for a checklist relevant to your service. Once a client downloads that checklist, you can trigger an email that sends it straight to their inbox for safekeeping along with a thank you note. A few days later, another trigger sends a follow-up email with a case study for how effective your service was for someone else in the industry. If they choose to download the case study, now you know it’s time to personally contact them to determine if a sale may be in your future.
Thanks to your marketing automation, that prospect is much farther along in your buying process, and you haven’t done a thing!
CRM Software
If you’re still reading and checking off these boxes like a boss, we’ll admit, we’re impressed. If you’re a big-time business owner or lead a marketing department and are looking to take your company to the next stage, it may be time to assess the value of customer relationship management software (CRM).
Marketing automation helps capture and nurture leads INTO a CRM that can maintain customer data and typically facilitate a sales process. Finding the right CRM is a journey. There are hundreds of solutions available, each with hundreds of features. Take your time in finding the right one for you.
Analytics/Reporting
This is one facet of marketing automation often overlooked, which comes as a surprise because it’s also one of the most dreaded tasks. Reporting. If you have the higher-ups demanding “proof” of your success or you’re one of those cool bosses who share data of how the business is doing company-wide, listen up, we’re about to save you some time.
With a CRM implemented, they often come with their own reporting features, sometimes customizable to auto-generate reports on the stats you value most. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, say it with us. AUTO-GEN-ER-ATE. No more spending hours jumping from platform to platform, finding the numbers, and then crunching them.
If you don’t have a CRM in place or are on that long journey of finding one, you can use Google Analytics! Google Analytics offers the ability to create and manage custom reports. You can even create multiple reports featuring different items that are valuable to different managers company-wide. For instance, does the owner like to see that dollar amount? Show them page value. Is the sales team looking for conversion rates to compare to their own sales? Show them goal completions, goal value, and conversion rate. Does your web team like to track traffic? Deliver them unique page views, sessions by device, and your top active pages. Each report is delivered automatically to their inboxes before your monthly meeting.
And if you’re into seeing a good ol’ fashion spreadsheet, Moz shows you how to import and customize all that data here.
You Got This
As a small business owner, this all may sound intimidating. Let us assure you it’s the exact opposite! Once a strategy is put into place, it’s one less thing you’ll have to worry about. As with most good things in life, the initial setup of Marketing Automation can take some time and effort. This upfront work will lower operating costs, provide better data, and improve your ROI.
Ready for the next step? GreenCup Digital can help you determine what Marketing Automation could make the most significant impact on your business. We’re also pretty handy at getting some of those strategies set up. Contact GreenCup Digital today to get started!
