Marketing automation can seem a bit daunting at first. However, there are a number of things you can do to prepare you and your employees for the change.
Businesses both large and small are beginning to recognize the crucial benefits that marketing automation can bring. Whether you are a business looking to grow or one looking to retain what it has, marketing automation is there to assist. However, for those new to the system, it can appear quite confusing at first. In order to help, we’ve gathered a few tips to prepare you.
How to Introduce Marketing Automation to Your Business
Optimize your website
One thing that you should always be keeping on top of is the quality of your website. There is no point putting all the work into drawing people to your website if they aren’t going to be happy with what they find. This will only result in you achieving a high bounce rate, as people leave your site after a poor experience. The first thing you want to optimize your website to lower your bounce rate.
Have quality content, and plenty of it
Something you will most definitely need in order to make the most of marketing automation is quality content. The leads that you are targeting need to be able to see value in your brand and what it has to offer them. Whitepapers, e-books, and videos are all types of content that are great at building the brand and engaging leads.
SEE ALSO: How to Use Content Marketing to Build Your Digital Brand
Content that has had a good amount of time and effort put into it can act as a base from which other content can build on. It needs to be captivating enough to make people want to either unlock the content through a contact form, or follow up on some other CTA that the content is pushing for.
Prepare your list of contacts
Chances are you’re going to need more than just a couple of hundred emails in order to make a real success of marketing automation, depending on your business’s size and industry.
Collect Leads: Try to accumulate a large number of contacts you believe to be relevant to your target audience. Relevancy is important, as it will limit the number of people unsubscribing from your list, or marking it as junk. Not only do these actions shut off access to future potential leads, but they can negatively impact your standing with the system you are using, possibly leading to a ban.
This is because with most marketing automation systems, you are actually sharing the platform with other users. This means that you are potentially affecting their ability to deliver their own campaigns.
SEE ALSO: 5 Stealth Strategies for Generating Business Leads
Segment: Segment your contacts according to factors that may impact their buying behavior. This allows you to target the different challenges or fears that different groups will be facing as they progress through your sales funnel. Cleaning your list of duplicates, spam emails, and old emails is also important, so try to validate the contacts you have before you use them.
Define your sales funnel
Marketing automation isn’t just about automatically sending all of your contacts the same piece of content every week or so. You need to be able to determine where individuals are in the sales funnel, so that what they receive helps them progress towards that final purchase.
What are the stages of your sales funnel?
Outlining these stages in detail will make it much easier to determine where leads are. Knowing the challenges or concerns that they face at each stage allows you to target them more directly. This requires you to know your target audience pretty well, so make sure to do your research.
Match the right content to the right stage
Think about how the content you already have can be used to help leads progress down the funnel. Where does it apply most? The way you present the content can also be a big factor in its effectiveness; think about why that lead needs or wants your product. Try to create future content that answers the questions that leads will be asking themselves at different stages.
Test it first
A small but important piece of advice that we always give is to test marketing automation out on a small group first, before you go live with your whole list of contacts. This way you can iron out any issues you encounter early on, and prevent any potential embarrassment.
In conclusion
Marketing automation is not a short-term marketing activity and should be a key component of any modern business’s marketing strategy.
Marketing automation enables companies to drip-feed their messages to nurture warm leads into hot leads, and potential customers, making it ideal for both acquisition and retention strategies.
What is your favorite marketing automation tool? Let me know in the comments.
