WHAT IS MARKETING AUTOMATION?

Marketing automation is the utilization of software (used by various businesses - big and small) to save time and money on repetitive tasks that are key to a company's inbound marketing strategy. Various automation platforms aim to tackle different tasks in an attempt to make the lives of users easier. Everyone agrees that automation for digital marketing makes life easier, but does it help the bottom line? Does it generate revenue and ROI?

The simple answer is that it depends on how many marketing avenues are integrated into the strategy along with the marketing automation. For instance, if you invest in an email marketing automation software and that is the extent of your marketing efforts, you will likely not see an ROI. In order for marketing automation to generate real results is to combine different (while relevant) digital marketing channels into one strategy. By having a more well-rounded digital marketing strategy that incorporates different channels, you can create a flow of inbound marketing that will allow the marketing automation to repeatedly generate more and more opportunities for your business to convert.

HOW DOES MARKETING STRATEGY WORK?

So what do you need to make sure of so that your marketing automation efforts yield results, leads and revenues? You will need a powerful combination of Social Media, Advertising, Website (ecommerce if applicable), Content and SEO when possible.

“80% of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77% saw the number of conversions increase." – VB Insight, Marketing Automation, how to make the right buying decision (2015).

WEB DESIGN

The first step in your marketing strategy should be to make sure you have a website built that will explain the following to your customers:

1. Why they are on your page.

2. Why your product or service fits their needs or solves their problem.

3. How they can expect to receive the product or service.

This will act as your primary base, sending prospects and traffic towards your page.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Once your business webpage is up and running, you will want to create your social media pages as additional marketing channels. Through social media, you will be able to reach a larger audience of prospect clients, inform them of how you can help them and ultimately convert them. More importantly, however, social media marketing is where you will be doing a bulk of your retention. Whereas a website is the place people will go to make purchases and orders, your social profiles are where you will remind your audience that you are still an option. You will constantly display that you are ready to help with useful and informative posts and let them know of new deals coming their way.

Another added benefit to social media is that once your fan base begins to grow, your posts will reach a larger organic audience, simply with the existing fans who are interacting and sharing your content. Naturally, marketing automation here becomes a key player, as you will only grow your organic reach by posting consistently. Post scheduling for social media is imperative to any business owner who is pressed for time and may find only one afternoon a week that can be dedicated to social media. That business owner (you) must seize the opportunity to automate the posts for social media, and the rest of the week or month you can get back running your business.

ADVERTISING FOR YOUR BUSINESS

The next step in the strategy is advertising. Now that you have channels where users can come across your products, business information and content, we have to give them that extra push to get them there. This is where advertising comes in. You will be able to target either keywords or user profiles (Depending on whether or not you are using Facebook/Instagram advertising or Google Adwords), and you can delegate whether you want people to become a fan of your social pages, subscribe to your email list, buy a product or reserve your service. Some marketing automation platforms include advertising campaign building with simplified targeting, so you can effectively advertise your website without too much previous experience.

It is important to run a few different ads per campaign so you can be sure that you are doing the following:

A) Sending traffic to all the different places of your marketing strategy (landing pages, website, social media pages).

B) Seeing which ads are working better than the others.

If you are using a marketing platform for your business and you are operating things on your own (or with your team), it is important that the platform gives you access to analytics. Without that data, you can’t measure your progress and it will be difficult to see where you need to improve or even if the marketing automation and efforts are paying off.

“Analytics and reporting (52%), Campaign management (46%) and Lead nurturing (46%) are considered the most useful Marketing Automation features. Followed by lead nurturing (46%), email marketing (42%), Integration capabilities (40%), Lead scoring (32%) and list segmentation (26%)..” – Ascend2, Marketing Automation Trends Survey (2016).

CONTENT

Now that you have created the infrastructure for successful inbound marketing to take place, you will need content to feed into your automated marketing machine. It would be highly recommended that you add a blog section to your website. This will be the primary location for your business to publish content from your website that can be shared across your social channels (where you can have it seen by an increasing number in your organic reach), resulting in prospects following the link back to your website. If you are not ready for a blog, sharing relevant content that will provide value for your prospects is also an option. For instance, if you own a shoe store you can post tips about how to extend the life of your favorite shoes. This will still generate interest in your page and create a larger organic reach, which in turn leads to more prospects, more inquiries, more leads and more sales.

SEO

Last but not least, is improving your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Once you have done the steps listed above, your automated marketing platform or software will start to work as it should. SEO will be the crown jewel in getting the most out of your marketing strategy. SEO is the function of optimizing your pages and content to get the best rank and most visibility online. If you thought you were already going to have your hands full with new prospects banging down your door, good SEO is what brings that online visibility and digital marketing to the next level. Always be sure that your SEO expert is using white-hat methods (practices accepted by algorithms like Google) and not black-hat methods (the exact opposite of white-hat, known to search engines as “cheating” or spam). Some automated marketing platforms offer SEO assistance as part of their services. It’s best to get a platform that offers everything “in-house” so you don’t need to start keeping tabs on several different service providers.

WHY IT WORKS?

Now that you understand what is necessary for successful marketing automation, the question you should ask yourself is why this recipe works. The answer is that it creates a cycle that never stops moving and is constantly engaging your prospects at various levels of the buying cycle.

So if for instance, if I am a hot-to-trot prospect that searched on Google for your service, saw your ad come up and I’ve come to the website and purchased your product, then the social media pages I find linked to your website and their content is what will retain me and prime me for my next purchase.

If I am someone who doesn’t even know your product exists, a funny post from your business can make its way onto my timeline. From there, I will check the source, potentially like your page to keep seeing that content and eventually I can be converted into a paying customer. It works like this at every level and it is what keeps the wheel turning.

“91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is ‘very important’ to the overall success of their marketing across channels.” – Marketo & Ascend2, Marketing Automation Strategies for Sustaining Success (2015).

Social media also acts as an interface between you and your clients. You can see what they like, when they are active, what they engage with and use that knowledge to your advantage. From there, you can tweak your efforts to yield further results.

That’s why, as we learned above, for an automated marketing platform to show results, it needs to include all the key components of your marketing strategy. This process is even more effective when you can find one marketing platform that includes all of these functions. The rest of the success is up to you, but it is certainly there for the taking.