Marketing is heavily integrated with sales it is the ongoing relationship between a brand and prospect (customer). Without marketing, the companies wouldn’t be in a position to distribute their products or rather introduce their product to the consumer. It is through marketing that marketing automation comes in, as it is software whose primary objective is to ensure marketing actions automation.
The Automation of repetitive tasks by many marketing departments such as social media, website action, and email handling. These tasks are made more accessible by the marketing automation technology. Companies can buy and sell through different tactics with the help of the software by the use of specialized content that can convert prospects into delighted customers.
Companies can generate significant revenue through marketing automation, thus ensuring outstanding return on investment. Marketing automation is not a simple marketing initiative to execute neither is it impossible. Just like growing a plant you need to prepare the fertile land, acquire the seeds and plant and lastly water the seed so that I might evolve into a blooming plant. Like nurturing a plant that’s how useful marketing automation should look like because at the end of the day your objective is to nurture leads that would produce paying customers.
However, in reality, marketing automation is nowadays considered as a buzz-word as marketers integrate marketing automation with the impression that all marketing tools which are essential for growth like those that generate leads. Marketers are left with complicated tools for automation with this misconception but without solutions in the first place that will enable generation of new points. It is not a lasting solution instead of a quick fix as it doesn’t create a conducive environment for lasting relationships with prospective customers. Using the plant analogy, it's like trying to make your plants grow faster by the use of artificial enhancers or chemicals. Indeed, it is okay or rather a quick fix, but the process doesn’t offer long-term success or set you up for future.
Best Practices for Marketing Automation
An array of business optimization can be driven by marketing automation, but it can as well be overwhelming to your users when you adopt them all at-a-go to launch which in turn enable process changes. That’s why marketers find it easier to begin with a few primary features and expand into sophistication in time. You can decide to make partial implementation of the software on a given timeline like a year as you gradually increase the effectiveness and efficiencies of other options of marketing automation installation.
Marketing automation has multiple aspects that helps in determining new processes. Below are some of the best practices for marketing automation:
Ten Best Practices for Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation Best Practices 1- Define your Persona
In the past few years different channels and strategies have appeared, but that still doesn’t change marketing foundations. The deep understanding of the customer is considered as one of the vital marketing fundamentals, but it’s so unfortunate that when marketers or marketing team start the implementation of new acquisition tactics, the essential tasks tend to get lost. The first phase of marketing automation implementation planning should be based on developing customers personas.
The emails and offers should be designed in such a way that it speaks directly to the buyer and based on their personas like customer modeled representations, research-based, pains, and their needs. The definition of your persona process should start by asking the right questions like: who is your respondent, what are your buyers goals, which goals fuels their behavior, their level within the company and their mode of thinking and its influence towards the buyer behavior. Answers to some of the questions can be extracted from a mix of qualitative data and quantitative data.
Marketing Automation Best Practices 2- Data Management and Integration
For the success of digital marketing is fundamental to have an effective integration and data management strategy. Having relevant and up-to-date information as you penetrate into the market, through the planning of data consistent integration into marketing automation. Integration of marketing automation with CRM system enables sales representatives to extract from their CRM self-selected accounts in marketing automation solution.
Marketing Automation Best Practices 3- Map your Buyer Journey
On developing your ideal customers, you will uncover that each of them has a specific set of problems and needs. Other customers are more into the price of your products while others would want to compare you with your competitors so that they may see your competitive advantage. Thus, it is essential to develop different flows to convert your prospects into customers.
To begin, its key to define buyers journey steps from the paying customers to recent acquired leads. The next step would involve content establishment for each of your customers to move forward along their journey. The last step would be mapping the specified content information from each steps of the buyer. A good example would be, suppose if your buyer is an active consumer of business leadership eBooks and they're a medium-size CIO, IT enterprise.
You can start to create the buyers' route by developing an eBook but place your primary focus on leadership then end up by introducing the buyer to a specific webinar offer. To nurture and guide the process, marketing automation set of emails can drive the campaign each phase of the way. With the use of eBooks as the center of information and other chunks of content to flow from it such as emails and webinars can ensure creation of targeted insights that is of importance to your customers.
Marketing Automation Best Practices 4- Routing and Scoring
It improves the provision of sales leads quality and ensures the insights provided are relevant to your customers. Routing with emails isn’t allowed thus it is considered as a dynamic process. The routing process works best between integrated CRM system and market automation systems. With that, the sales representatives would be able to manage their sales processes, and sales-ready leads would be displayed in the system.
Provision of marketing alert dates to help representatives get essential steps or suggestions to take when following up. Maintain a positive engagement with the prospects that haven’t decided to engage in sales by delivering valuable content and offerings example webinar, articles, white papers, and events.
Marketing Automation Best Practices 5- Attract leads by offering great value
It’s becoming hard to attract or convert individuals into leads as there are massive amount of insights that is available. For business to excel they must ensure that they are delivering content that is of high-value. Whether your offering an article, webinar or even an eBook the offer should outline buyers needs and appeal. The benefit of marketing automation is that it enables you to scale your outreach efforts. Business is able to offer immense value to prospective leads due to their outstanding A/B testing tools. They can provide different content types to attract to the different personas by using their resources like:
- Designing better landing pages that boost the return of investment
- Increasing conversion rates on webinars
- Developing a killer writing copy
Marketing Automation Best Practices 6- Obtaining the right insights for your leads
It is easy for marketers to collect valuable information from its leads. To pursue all leads effectively, you need to set some standards on the data collection as what you need depends on what you are asking.
The Marketers are allowed to overwhelm prospects with questions by marketing software companies, but that doesn’t imply that quantity is quality. Somewhat less is always more, thus narrowing of the facts will assist in connecting the customers with relevant offers. This increases the chances that you will attain the required responses from your potential customers.
The first step is creating a list of all the vital data that you expect from your customers. The essential data may vary from their website details, their revenue either personal or company, the location of the company or prospect then note that to your list. Ensure that you include all the critical information and don’t leave aside any information. Once you have established your list of attributes, the next step would be trimming it down. In this step, you should be careful as you should leave what’s essential to enable you to score your leads and communicate with them. A good example is payment gateways do when they offer an eBook, they only ask for information that is vital and likely to increase the conversion rate.
Marketing Automation Best Practices 7- Landing page and Data Collection
The first impression is crucial because the first page where a customer gets in contact with an organization is the landing page. It offers customers an opportunity to understand the product your offering without having to contact you. Incorporation of hidden URLs parameters that can be used to store information that will provide metrics which you can gain insight into advertising effectiveness. Customers data is captured easily and placed in a marketing database.
Marketing Automation Best Practices 8- Score your leads
The leads are not all the same as there are some that are more vital than the others according to your sales goals and objectives. That’s why for development of marketing automation campaigns leading scoring is quite crucial. The process is simple and straightforward as each lead is assigned a numerical score that is seen worthy. Within your marketing automation is where the lead scoring process takes place.
You can leave them to the CRM once you have clearly defined your business standards for ranking the leads. Your sales and marketing team can prioritize their efforts with the help of lead scoring as it is vital for scaling your business. Your team would not be able to follow up on each lead if they have limited resources at the end of the day. That might be considered as an ethical problem, though its essential ensure the leads that are crucial for the business bottom line. The data that you will send to your leads vary depending with the lead scoring.
Leads are likely to be low, if you don’t outline any intent of purchase. With marketing automation software, its significant interest in ensuring that communication is focused on achieving higher-intent type on insight. The benefits of having a high lead score is that it gives an assurance on taking further action. With that you can send your sales team to your customers either directly, in-person or through call. To measure the interactions with onboarding programs, lead scoring can be a crucial and influential attribute, as well as identification of emerging advocates. Marketing power is multiplied once you are in apposition to determine your supporters, both previous and current customers who have had a good experience with your business
All of these practices offer a comprehensive view of the functionality that can improve the marketing department dramatically and effectively. Before this group of functionalities have never helped marketers meet and exceed their business goals until the introduction of market automation technology that has pulled all these features to your fingertips.
Marketing Automation Best Practices 9- Campaign automation and programs
They provide unique capabilities that can move prospects through repetitive marketing steps without the need of queuing, sending or manual marketing efforts. It includes integration of customer contacts during the process of sales by the sales executives to increases success rates and readership. It deploys message to several versions based on your database and requires a single email template which in turn leads to increase in effectiveness and efficiency.
Marketing Automation Best Practices 10- Reporting and Analysis
This ensures improvements in your marketing efforts. Due to inaccuracy and incompleteness, you might arrive at wrong conclusions and especially when you don’t have a distinct discipline on data management. Helps in the tracking of visitors as they change into customers by a provision of crucial information which enables effective assessment of both sales and marketing. Reporting and Analysis also help in identifying the strengths and weakness and areas in which improvements can be injected to facilitate growth.
Here are the trending and the top rated Top Free Marketing Automation Software for you to consider in your selection process:
Here are the trending and the top rated Top Marketing Automation Software for you to consider in your selection process:
You may also like to read How to Select the Best Marketing Automation Software for Your Business
What are the Best Practices for Marketing Automation?
The Best Practices for Marketing Automation includes Define your Persona, Data Management and Integration, Map your Buyer Journey, Routing and Scoring, Attract leads by offering great value, Obtaining the right insights for your leads, Landing page and Data Collection, Score your leads and many more.