When you hear the phrase “marketing automation,” do you think about robots coming in and taking over your job?
When it comes to building marketing campaigns, there’s tremendous value in human connections – in crafting messages that evoke emotion, in envisioning what could be. However, robots, or rather, marketing automation, have their place in a well-crafted marketing strategy.
How Does Marketing Automation Work?
Marketing automation uses technology and a network of software/platforms to automate repetitive tasks and to deliver relevant content to prospects when and where they want to see it. Marketing automation allows you to build a deep and trusting relationship with potential customers, giving them information, positioning yourself as a trusted advisor.
Ultimately, using marketing automation should lead to stronger relationships between your company and its clients, where they stay more loyal, and spend/invest more with your company. Nurtured leads, those who receive content and communication targeted to them, spend 47% more than non-nurtured leads.
Well-designed marketing automation processes deliver the right information at the right time to the right prospects. You can use marketing automation to advance them through the stages of buying behavior – awareness, interest, decision, and ultimately action.
How Can Marketing Automation Make My Sales/Marketing Processes Flow More Smoothly?
When you build marketing automation workflows, you save yourself the headache and hassle of manually sending every email, social media message, etc.
Customers and potential buyers are still receiving communication from you, and often times receiving more targeted and specific messages in tune with their needs. However, you’re not committing yourself to the tedious processes of sending messages, choosing the best times and individually targeting prospects for communication.
Instead, through a system of smart data and pre-designed workflows, your prospects receive messages targeted to their interests. If you sell beauty supplies, for example, and an online shopper browses several products for dry skin, you could reach out to them individually and ask them about their skincare needs.
As your business grows, you won’t have bandwidth to scale if you’re reaching out to each shopper individually, though. By building automated workflows, you can follow up on shopper behaviors with content specifically targeted to their needs.
Each interaction with your brand gives you data that helps you to know your customer better and to nurture your relationship with them.
Going back to the skincare shopper, your marketing automation programs can track their site browsing or links they’ve clicked in your emails. Then, if you’ve built a workflow, you can tell it, “Once they’ve browsed five products that relate to dry skin, let’s send them a video that shows tips for moisturizing effectively.”
It’s a win-win situation. You’re presenting further detail on products they’re interested in. They’re getting content that’s more valuable and useful to them than a traditional product-packed sales message would be.
Skincare is a B2C offering, but marketing automation works for B2B communications as well and can help you contract your buyer’s decision-making timeline by getting more relevant content in front of them faster.
If I Use Marketing Automation, Will My Company Sound Not-Human or Out Of Touch?
Many people worry about sounding like – well, a robot – if they’re using technology to automate processes and buyer touchpoints.
However, using marketing automation doesn’t mean that your messages have to sound stiff, generic or out-of-touch. Instead, marketing automation can actually afford your business the opportunity to present itself as even more in tune with buyer needs.
How?
When you use marketing automation, you “learn” your prospects. You can track their engagements and interests, so you can then present them with content that’s personalized to their journey and that’s most likely to resonate.
When people think of personalized content, they often think of basic personalizations like inserting a person’s first name into an email. While those types of tactics can work, there’s a deeper level of personalization that marketers/business owners should tap into.
It’s the personalization of intent, of understanding what consumers want.
- Which pages are they visiting on your site?
- Which links are they clicking?
- Which emails are they opening?
- Which downloads are they requesting?
If you own a coaching business, for example, you might offer group and individual coaching. Within those segments, you might break our offerings down even further – like individual coaching for aspiring leaders or senior leaders; or coaching and accountability programs targeted at women.
When you use a marketing automation system, your platforms (email, social, CRM, website, etc.) work together to synthesize data about what your prospects are interested in. Then, messages are sent out based on pre-defined triggers. If a website browser in the previously mentioned coaching scenario:
- Visits your First Time Leaders landing page.
- Provides their email address to download a checklist of “12 Things To Do Before You Ask For A Raise.”
- Opens your email with the subject line “Ready to ask for a promotion?”
Your systems should be tracking these interactions and flagging this user as an up-and-coming leader who wants to be in growth mode. From there, your system can trigger a sales email targeting the shopper for an online workshop on confidence and assertiveness.
The email they receive can then be much more highly targeted and focused on their area of interest than if you send a confidence-focused email to your entire subscriber list and just hope it gets a response from a small group-within-a-group that could show interest.
Your personalization can even delver further into the types of content they tend to engage with. Use it to analyze what’s interesting to your prospects, then build smarter, more in-touch overall campaigns.
The time you would be spending on manually managing a higher quantity of messaging can instead be committed to analyzing interactions and finding the messages that resonate with specific audiences, so you can create content that packs a bigger punch and moves prospects faster through your funnel.
How Do I Set Up Marketing Automation?
To start building marketing automation for your business, you need three things:
- An integrated sales and marketing strategy and a clear understanding of your marketing funnel/sales pipeline.
- An understanding of how people interact with your company across various platforms (social media, email, website, etc.), and the role each platform plays in their decision making process.
- The technology infrastructure required to build and manage your marketing automation campaigns.
An Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategy
It’s common for companies to invest their resources in generating awareness – putting up billboards, sending out direct mail, buying PPC ads – all in an effort to get the word out about their business.
While you do need to generate awareness of your product, you also need to make sure you’re following that awareness with additional support to move buyers toward decision-making.
It’s rare that someone will click on a search engine ad then immediately make a purchase. That statement rings even truer for companies in the B2B sector where price per product and buying timelines can both be more expansive.
Instead, they want to learn more, to browse your site and competitor sites; to find social proof through reviews and online feedback; to read case studies; to conduct phone calls or demos with your team.
You need to build those in-between steps – the processes between initial awareness and purchasing decisions – in order to convert more of those prospects into bonafide leads and then into customers.
An integrated sales and marketing strategy ensures you’re creating a cohesive network of touchpoints for your prospects so you have higher overall conversion.
(Want to delve further into this? This ebook covers the process of building an integrated sales and marketing strategy.)
An Understanding of Prospect Interaction
People make decisions in different ways based on a number of different criteria, including their income level, their role within an organization, their gender, their age.
To have the best chance of converting and interested prospect into a buyer, you need to understand how they shop and why.
Dive into analytics and research the way people interact. Use surveys with your existing customers to understand how they interact with your website and what worked/didn’t work for them.
Find the friction points and the places where people are abandoning your site. And, conversely, look for the interactions that lead to success.
Do you have an email that generates much higher opens and clicks than your other messages? What’s special about it? Test and re-test your messaging to see what’s resonating with your audience, or with particular segments of your audience.
Then, once you have a good idea of which interactions and processes are most successful, you can build marketing automation workflows that use those touchpoints to drive success.
Which Marketing Tools Do We Find Most Useful for Building a Marketing Automation System?
Many platforms exist to manage your email marketing, your website, and more. Andmany of them offer extremely useful and innovative features to manage your marketing campaigns and outreach.
All can be useful. Some, however, play nicer together than others.
To build your marketing automation program, you want to link up systems that interface with one another so data can be passed smoothly and processes can be fully automated.
You don’t want to leave gaps in your process, where you have to depend on yourself to manually launch an email or make a connection, because those types of steps tend to get skipped over when work gets busy and other projects or tasks take priority.
The platforms below are ones Phlox Partners uses for marketing automation. These platforms interact well and are easy to use in conjunction with one another.
Website Top Pick for Marketing Automation: WordPress
WordPress is the gold standard for simple, elegant theme-based website development (Divi (by Elegant Themes) is our favorite builder theme, as it makes website development more accessible to people who aren’t professionals when it comes to coding.
It’s easy to use and reliable – approximately 30 percent of all websites are powered by WordPress, and over half of the top million sites in existence are WordPress sites as well. It’s well-known for its 5-minute install and requires no coding knowledge to build a site.
And, WordPress makes integrations easy, so we can tie our automation processes together. Through plug-ins, you can easily connect your technology so you can add ecommerce functionality, opt-in forms, social widgets and more – all making your marketing automation more robust and your site more intuitive and user-friendly for your prospects/buyers/clients.
Email Top Pick for Marketing Automation: Drip
Drip is a well-designed ecommerce-oriented email platform and CRM (customer relationship management) platform. We chose Drip because of its focus on building customer relationship and understanding customer needs.
While some email platforms are basically just tools for blasting out messages, and others are extremely complex relationship management systems (see also: they’re expensive!), Drip is a great middle ground.
It’s intuitive; it gathers information; it fits seamlessly into a marketing automation focused strategy. And, Drip has a particular focus on ecommerce, which should be a priority for every business functioning in a business atmosphere impacted by a pandemic and economic uncertainty.
On the practical side, Drip’s campaign builds are easy to use and intuitive, even for newer email/CRM users.
Social Media Management Top Pick For Marketing Automation: Coschedule
Coschedule is a platform for managing and scheduling social content.
We can build out detailed campaigns and processes for clients – including everything from emails we’re planning to launch to blog posts and social posts across multiple platforms. Coschedule uses predictive intelligence to learn audience behavior, then to schedule social content during times when fans/followers are most likely to engage.
That means less time spent trying to choose the best time to post or to catch the audience at their most engaged moment. The technology does it for you, and will even requeue your messages, posting messages you approve at times when your social calendar looks a bit thin.
The calendar features are useful for us and for clients, as we’ll use a shared link to give them an overview of their month or to allow them to review content that’s being published on their behalf.
There’s more on why Coschedule can be a great, affordable fit for businesses building marketing automation – check out our post on it.
Ecommerce Top Pick for Marketing Automation: WooCommerce
WooCommerce is an easy-to-use plug in for WordPress. It’s simple and user-friendly, but also offers robust tools for managing an online store.
In a world where ecommerce sales grew by 49 percent in a single month, making it possible for your customers to buy from you online is not a nice option to consider. It’s a mandatory requirement to grow and stay in business.
By incorporating an ecommerce tool like WooCommerce into your website, you allow potential buyers to go through the sales/marketing process from awareness to decision/purchase and to track each step of the process.
WooCommerce allows you to sell more by taking advantage of online audiences. And, because WooCommerce offers robust analytics, it also enables you to understand why people buy more so you can put that data to work as well.
Then, you can build automated series that continue to engage with buyer when they abandon their carts, when they browse extensively yet don’t purchase, and more.
Conclusion: Marketing Automation Makes Your Business Better
On the surface, it’s worth looking into marketing automation just because it saves time and prevents you from manually handling tedious and repetitive processes.
The real value of marketing automation, though, is that it allows you to engage more successfully with your prospects and customers. By leveraging technology to understand their shopping habits, needs and desires, you can present them with the right information at the right time to guide their decision-making and move them to yes.
The next step in considering marketing automation? Looking at your current processes and goals, then determining whether your workflows are correctly connecting with consumers and reducing friction in their decision-making processes.
If you’re interested in learning more about marketing automation, we’ve also put together a briefing on how and why we use it. You can download it here, then let us know what questions you have about making marketing automation work for your business.
