Improving Marketing Automation | 6 Steps to Success

Marketing automation is the implementation of software that automates a myriad of marketing tasks for you.

But don’t worry, it won’t put you out of a job.

On the contrary, automation helps you do your job more efficiently by prioritizing tasks and streamlining your marketing strategies.

When used properly, marketing automation software will free up some of your time, relieve you of the duty of performing mundane tasks, and help you grow your business at a faster rate.

Needless to say, you’re in business to make money, and the best way to do so nowadays is to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into leads and customers.

Marketing automation offers the greatest opportunity to increase your conversion and close rates, which is often the greatest challenge facing marketers.

Here are several ways you can use marketing automation to your advantage and raise the ROI on your marketing content.

1. Send specific content to a highly-targeted audience

The definition of insanity for marketers is sending out the same general email blast after email blast to the widest possible audience while expecting the alarmingly low conversion rate to change. In other words, performing the same task over and over and expecting a different result.

Long gone are the days when it made sense to flood the internet with general, non-targeted marketing messages. It was never a good idea to begin with, but it was the best we had at the time, and we had only one rule of marketing to work with: bigger is better.

Nowadays, marketing automation makes sending a broad message to your contact list obsolete, which saves you time, money, and needless intrusions into your contacts’ inboxes.

Limit the danger that one ill-targeted email will land you and all of your future correspondence with a given company in the spam box by properly segmenting your audience and sending them the appropriate content.

2. Give the people what they want

Narrow down your audience by tailoring the messages to specific segments of your contact list, and give them what they want – content they can use.

Let’s say a customer has shown an interest in some products on your website. Perhaps they’ve even viewed an online demo. If your message further stirs their curiosity or presents a related offer they can’t refuse, this could be an excellent opportunity to push them over the edge and convert them into paying customers.

If your next contact with the customer is a promotion for an unrelated product, it could also be a turnoff. The customer may feel that their info was “sold” to another internet marketer, or that showing interest in your brand will lead to more spam than it’s worth.

By not catering to your leads’ needs, you’ll lose potential customers; by not catering to your customers’ needs, you’ll lose your business.

3. Use custom redirects to see what your customers are clicking on

Custom redirects are shortened tracking URLs that give insight into your audience’s tastes and preferences, and few marketers take full advantage of this information.

It’s easy to see which links are being clicked and which are being ignored when you track their preferences with custom redirects. Then you can use this data to tailor future campaigns, keeping up with customers’ needs at all times.

Another function of custom redirects is to assess the effectiveness of various strategies through A/B testing, which can help you determine which exact wording and visuals produce the best results. This affords you the most bang for your marketing buck.

4. Establish a scoring system to rate leads

You’ll often hear that “inbound” marketing shortens the sales cycle. This can be true. But what you don’t hear is that now the marketing cycle is longer.

Marketing automation tools are the best way to sort leads into “hot” and “cold” categories, using a rating system that aligns with your definition of a valuable lead.

For B2B lead generation, the criteria for rating a good lead may include the respondent’s job title, industry, and company size.

Through the magic of marketing automation, a marketer can further break down the scoring system to include additional information that is equally important but often overlooked, such as:

Number of pages viewed
Time spent on each page
Webinars attended
Content downloaded
Email open rate
Social media activity

The more information you have to segment your contact list, the more relevant your messages become and the higher your conversion rates will climb.

5. Always keep your repeat customers in mind

In any business, regular customers are the pillars of the company, so remember that customers who have already purchased from you are worth their weight in gold. It is much easier to sell to someone who has already been converted because they are open to your suggestions (assuming you’ve delivered on your brand promise and have a trusting customer relationship).

Let marketing automation keep you in touch with your regular customers and maintain goodwill by sending highly segmented customer-only content that distinguishes you as a source of accurate information and a reliable reference.

Not every email and contact has to be sales-driven or product-related. If you use marketing automation programs to educate and engage your customers, they will appreciate it.

6. Use marketing automation to improve your strategy

The last thing you should do is use marketing automation to make the same mistakes you’ve been making, only a lot faster. A key purpose of automation is to handle mundane tasks, freeing up more of your time. You have that time (and the data your marketing automation gives you) to analyze, segment, and prioritize your messages. You can further tailor your campaign using A/B testing data monitored by the marketing automation software.

Instead, when many marketers first get their hands on marketing automation programs, they just try to automate exactly what they are already doing.

For content marketing, the goal has always been to generate high-quality leads, and the advent of marketing automation provides a wide array of invaluable tools for novice and seasoned marketers alike.

Take advantage of marketing automation to make your content work smarter, not harder.

We are a Certified HubSpot Silver Partner and highly recommend HubSpot for marketing and sales automation. However, if you’re not ready to invest in a system yet, talk to us about how we can set this up for you using our agency platform.