
What Is Marketing Automation?
How Can Marketing Automation Help?
Who Uses Marketing Automation?
Who Should Use Marketing Automation?
What Are The Reasons Companies Use Marketing Automation?
What Is The Value And ROI Of Marketing Automation?
Features And Functions Of Marketing Automation?
Why Does Marketing Automation Fall Short?
What does “bad” or “good” marketing automation look like?
“Marketing automation campaigns can run the gamut in terms of functionality and effectiveness. Let’s explore what it looks like when a marketing automation approach is ineffective, and which approaches produce the highest ROI for your marketing automation efforts.
How do you know if it’s time to invest in marketing automation?
“If you’re producing effective inbound marketing content, you’re generating a steady flow of new, organic leads, and you’re ready to scale your successful efforts, chances are it’s time to focus your efforts on a marketing automation strategy that will nurture those quality leads into paying customers. Below are some good questions to ask yourself when deciding if marketing automation is the right move for your business.
What are the keys to successful marketing automation?
“Though there are many pieces that must be put in place to establish a successful marketing automation strategy, there are two extremely key principles to keep in mind when developing a strategy that scales and evolves with your customers.
What are the Marketing Automation Trends?
How do I choose the best marketing automation provider for my business?
“When considering a marketing automation provider, it's important to choose the software and company that best suits your business and your unique goals. Don't focus on the individual features–focus on the business results and the long term partnership.
” by Hubspot
Can you recommend more resources to help me understand marketing automation better?
“Here are a few good places to start:
” by Hubspot
What is Inbound Marketing?
“The terms “inbound marketing” and “content marketing” are used interchangeably. Inbound marketing is a customer acquisition practice that is built on human-to-human relationships. HubSpot calls it “the most effective marketing method for doing business online.”
Instead of relying on outbound marketing methods of buying ads, buying email lists, and aggressively pushing audiences into become leads, inbound marketing is the practice of attracting users through quality content that pulls people toward your company and product naturally. By closely aligning your content and marketing materials with your customers’ interest, your brand is in a position to attract, delight, and engage customers over time.
Hubspot calls these the biggest forces behind inbound marketing:
- Content Generation: Create targeted content that directly addresses your customers’ demands. That content should be extremely high-quality, entertaining, engaging, & shareable.
- Conversion Funnel Targeting: Marketers should pay attention – and respect– the fact that people go through stages as they interact with your company. Each stage requires different marketing needs. A customer who is just learning about your company for the first time, for instance, may not respond well to an aggressive, ‘buy-now’ CTA.
- Personalization: As you build out your inbound marketing and marketing automation strategy, you will learn more about your leads. This learning process will empower your company to re-invest that data into refining your marketing strategy. Marketing automation software will help you streamline this process and build 1:1 connections with hundreds of thousands—and even millions—of users.
- Cross-channel: Multi-channel marketing strategies connect all touch points in the customer journey. It’s common for users to engage with your brands across channels – email, social, and content before deciding to engage in a sale. Analytics will be crucial to this framework, so make sure that you are well-acquainted with basic web analytics tools.
- Integration: Your marketing and analytics software need to communicate effectively with each other. This integration will help ensure that your brand is delivering the right marketing messages to the right audiences at the right time in their journeys.
HubSpot also explains these four important marketing actions as part of Inbound Marketing:
Attraction & Engagement
Traffic acquisition is only part of the marketing equation. Organizations need qualified, targeted traffic to be successful in their marketing. We want to attract audiences who will ultimately become happy, long-term customers (who will refer other customers). The following marketing activities can help attract audiences to your website:
- Blogging: Create educational content that answers your audience’s questions.
- Social Media: Create profiles and human presences where your target audiences are likely to engage.
- Keywords: Be accessible to your audiences in the exact moment that they’re searching for information.
- Website Pages: Optimize your website to appeal to and speak with your ideal buyers. Create a flow between webpages to answer your target audience’s core questions.
Marketing automation can help connect and simplify these seemingly disparate actions. Instead of reaching customers manually, you can use software to establish these 1:1 bonds.
Conversion & Progression Through The Funnel
Once you have visitors on your website, the next step is to convert them. At the very least, you should start collecting their email addresses. Once you start building an organic email list, you can start reaching out to your customers and prospects so that you can re-engage them through your content: ebooks, whitepapers, and tip sheets. Here are the most important components of conversion optimization:
- Calls-to-Action (CTAs): These are e-mail sign-ups, lead generation forms, and ‘purchase’ buttons. CTAs are crucial for moving audiences through the conversion funnel and converting them into paying customers.
- Landing Pages: Landing pages present specific offers to online audiences and shoppers. The best-performing landing pages are build around one CTA.
- Forms: To effectively pursue leads, you need to collect some information. Ask your online audiences to share their name, interests, and job title so that you can connect them with the right targeted offers.
- Contacts: Don’t let your new leads fall through the cracks. Keep them close in an email database so that you can build a relationship with them for the long-haul.
Marketing automation can help connect your prospects and existing customers with the right messages at exactly the right time. This strategy is more than a traffic acquisition tool – it’s an engine for boosting conversions. The key is to deliver personalized landing pages and custom CTAs to your audiences, across marketing channels.
Closing
You’ve become a lead magnet, what comes next? Now, you need to seal the deal by triggering marketing messages that inspire users to take action. At this point of your marketing strategy, you need to transform leads into customers (and existing customers into repeat buyers). These techniques should be integrated with your marketing automation:
- Lead Scoring: Use a numerical representation of the propensity that a lead will become a sale. Marketing automation software (like HubSpot) can do this analysis for you.
- Email: A lead completes your form, follows up, redeems your offers, and still doesn’t convert. What do you do? You send an automated email, that’s what. You can customize your marketing automation software to send personalized messages based on user triggers. Think of this approach like a logic puzzle. If users take actions x, y, and z on your site, your marketing automation software will deploy message “q.” This process is something known as sequencing. Tip: When you send an email to distribute a blog post—don’t show the full text. Show a snippet, and link back to the original website.
- Marketing automation: HubSpot says that marketing automation is crucial to the ‘closing’ stage of marketing. You need to move customers through your sales conversion funnel – this process will be continuous and require some degree of nurturing, guiding, and even hand-holding. Marketing automation can help your company take the lead in guiding prospects through the sales conversion funnel.
- Reporting: Marketers don’t throw darts in the dark. With infinite reporting capabilities on your side, you should be tracking everything to make sure that you’re investing your time in high-yield efforts only. Integrate a reporting system with your marketing automation efforts – from day one. Don’t wait. Pair systems (i.e. your analytics tools with your CRM) so that you can monitor data.
Delight
A sale isn’t the end of a brand-to-consumer relationship. It’s the beginning. And it’s probably the customer acquisition channel that you’re ignoring. Delight is what helps marketers navigate the art of upselling. Marketing automation, social media, and emotion-driven calls to action are crucial to this stage of marketing. This idea holds true for consumer and B2B marketers alike.
Make sure that you’re maintaining your relationships with your customers for the long-haul. Focus on more than just acquisition – embrace the art of retention. It’s easy to feel like new user acquisition is the low hanging-fruit. Keep in mind, however, that growth from within is just as—if not more—important to your marketing process.
Care about your customers. Send them marketing messages that inspire delight. Always be looking for opportunities to listen to feedback.
Stop thinking about “pushing” email blasts, and focus on ways to pull audiences close to your brand. Marketing automation means targeting the right users with the right message at the right time in their buying journeys. by Quicksprout