Let’s Talk Marketing Automation Strategy

What is a marketing automation strategy? Imagine a marketing world where the mundane aspects of your job are no longer a factor.

Let’s pretend that you can be in back to back meetings all day but still have time to send out emails to potential customers and to post on all your social media accounts and still have time to put up new blog posts.

When it comes to digital marketing in Adelaide what would this mean for your business?

Less stress, less exhaustion and less chance of burning out are a few of the benefits that come to mind.

Sounds impossible right?

Well, the good news is that there is a solution to your problems. Not only can the tedious tasks be taken care of, but you can complete them more efficiently with a marketing automation strategy.

The best part about a marketing automation strategy is that everything will look and sound like it came straight from you!

What is a Marketing Automation Strategy?

Marketing automation strategy refers, in large part, to software that automates your marketing for you. This software is designed to organise and execute your marketing tasks in a timely and efficient manner.

But what does this mean for you as a digital marketer in Adelaide?

Well, it’s like having your very own outsourced digital marketing consultant working for you.

Automation is often associated with the introduction of robotic equipment that makes your job irrelevant.

This isn’t the case with a marketing automation strategy. As a digital marketer in Adelaide, or anywhere else in the world, this marketing strategy works alongside you. It takes care of the routine tasks to free up your time without compromising the authenticity of your content.

Ultimately, a marketing automation strategy will help you to reach your goals faster.

All marketing activity exists to generate revenue for your organisation. To achieve this, we need to drive traffic to your website, convert traffic into leads and then close the leads into customers.

Marketing automation has the most significant impact on the conversion and closure stages of this process.

How to use a Marketing Automation Strategy?

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways for digital marketers to reach their customers. But it is often done in a non-targeted and haphazard manner.

Sending out blast after blast to your entire list of prospects, crossing your fingers and hoping that the message will resonate with someone, and hoping they will buy or take up the offer, doesn’t work.

I’m sure this produces SOME results in the digital marketing world, but the reality of this style of marketing is this:

• You’re wasting valuable time. The time that you could be using to convert leads that are ready to buy.
• You’re wasting money marketing to customers who aren’t interested in what you’re sharing.
• You are potentially burning through your list by annoying your contacts with irrelevant messaging. And possibly losing opportunities to market to them in the future.

No digital marketing consultant in Adelaide worth their salt would recommend this as a sustainable way of communicating with customers and building your database.

A marketing automation strategy, on the other hand, takes a different path. It allows you to nurture your leads through the entire buying process, delivering targeted, and personalised messages that address specific barriers to purchase.

In comparison to the standard email blast, here is an example of what a basic marketing automation flow can look like:

1. You send an email invitation to a targeted list to download your latest eBook
2. You send a thank you note to all of the people that downloaded your offer.
3. After a few days, you send a follow-up email to the list of people who downloaded the eBook, offering them a case study related to the topic.
4. Finally, when someone downloads the case study, your sales team will get an automatic notification, and they can follow up with the lead.

Let’s think about this experience from your customer’s perspective while engaging with different online marketing in Adelaide.

If this was you receiving emails from a marketing agency or business, wouldn’t you prefer to read messages targeted to your interests and actions? As opposed to a blast that could have been sent to anyone?

This type of marketing activity is personalised and tailored to you. It makes you feel like the company understands you and that you can trust them.

Ultimately this puts you in a position more likely to buy, doesn’t it?

And that’s how it’s done!

Driving revenue for your company using an automated system.

In a nutshell, this is the foundation of a marketing automation strategy.

Using marketing automation will give you the ability to target your contacts and send them content that relates to their specific needs.

Giving information your customers need and giving it to them when they want it.

You’re making their buying decision more accessible, and as a result, your conversion rates and revenue will increase.

Marketing Automation Basics: The Dos and Don’ts of Marketing Automation

Now you know what marketing automation is, we want to give you some tips from a digital marketing expert on marketing automation before you implement a new platform into your process.

Don’t automate your current process without revisiting your goals

Marketing automation is designed to reduce the time you spend on routine tasks. As time-poor marketers, we are always looking for ways to make our jobs easier.

An easy trap to fall into would be to implement this new process and automate what you currently do. You want to see the efficiencies and results quickly, so you forget about the background work.

This is understandable but remember that you were quite likely adopting a blast email approach previously and not targeting your messages or segmenting your database.

It would be a waste of your efforts to automate your old behaviours without first defining the goal you want to achieve and understanding what your customers need from you.

Do integrate marketing automation with your inbound marketing strategy

Inbound marketing is all about creating valuable content centred on your customers’ needs and interests.

This won’t change, you will keep producing this great content and marketing automation will enhance your inbound strategy by delivering your customers the right information at precisely the right time.

Don’t blast or broadcast general messages

With marketing automation, we are trying to get away from the email blast approach. There is no need to broadcast a generic message to your entire list when you can quickly schedule personalised and targeted communication.

Do send highly targeted and specific content to a narrowed audience

The goal of marketing automation is to provide people with the content that they are looking for.

You can understand this by putting yourself in their shoes. If you had downloaded one piece of content from a company, and then the next piece of content you received was on a completely different topic, would you find this useful?

Wouldn’t it be more useful if the company gave you content that drove you deeper into the content that you were interested in?

If this were the case, you would be much more likely to buy a product or service from them. Marketing automation can help you to achieve this sales conversion.

Don’t forget about your customers

When you implement a new tool like marketing automation, it can be easy to become focused on gaining new business and forget about your existing clientele with whom you already have a relationship with.

Your existing customer base is likely to convert and buy more, so it is essential to continue working with them while you put in the hard yards to get new customers.

Do setup customer engagement campaigns to keep your current customers happy and coming back for more

Without wanting to sound like it’s all about the money, one thing is true: it’s easier to sell to people that have already purchased from you before.

Keeping existing customers engaged with your content marketing is an important part of growing your company.

Nurture them with targeted, customer-only content that educates and encourages them to continue their journey with you for your thought leadership and expertise.

Let’s Bring The Marketing Automation Strategy Together

So now that you understand the basics of a marketing automation strategy, we can bring it all together.

• Look to move away from the hard sell approach in favour of producing content that is tailored and relevant to your customer’s needs. By layering marketing automation on top of this, you make this process even more accessible. It gives you the ability to map your marketing efforts back to your goals.

• Marketing automation will help you to generate high quality leads for your sales team to successfully close into customers.

• It will assist in streamlining your inbound marketing process by giving you greater insight into what your leads are doing and how they are interacting with your content.

You can quickly find:

1. What content they’re downloading
2. How they are responding to your emails
3. How they are moving through the sales funnel

• Each step of the way, you can monitor and measure how the marketing automation system is performing and see where you might need to make tweaks to get better results.

• Leveraging marketing automation and finding a platform that gives you flexibility will assist you in reaching your marketing goals.

To find more about out how marketing automation can specifically help your business call Baker Marketing today on (08) 8352 3091.

Image: Robot by Robin Zebrowski accessed via Flickr