The 5 Best Practices Of How To Use Marketing Automation In A Way That Powerfully Grows Your Business

It has become imperative for businesses to deploy marketing automation to remain competitive. In particular, sales teams typically experience a 50% productivity increase post-implementation. Though, once you move forth in buying a marketing automation tool, it is essential to deploy the technology in a strategic manner to maximize its benefit.

Achieve the most success with marketing automation with these 5 best practices:

Broaden Your Content Creation Horizon.

It is time to reframe how we think about content creation as it is one of the most essential factors for businesses. Generally, any URL contains content at some level, whether it is words, photographs, or videos. However, content needs to resonate with your target market so that you can attract new customers and deepen relationships with existing ones.

There is a vast array of potential content that you could incorporate into your marketing initiatives.

Here are some tips and example phrases for incorporating URL links to build out your content:

• Link to thought leader accounts on social media. Compose a post like, “Do you follow Malcolm Gladwell? He is one of my favorite thought leaders!”
• Link to questions on Quora, i.e. “Did you see this discussion on the importance of marketing automation? There are some best practices that you should implement.”
• Share a link to a blog relevant to your customers. You could post, “Here is a blog post you should read on how to manage lead scoring in the CRM of your marketing automation system.”
• Include a link to relevant SlideShare presentations by posting “Wow, here is an informative presentation on how salespeople should utilize your marketing automation system.”

These links would then lead to a landing page, which is where you would entice them to provide their contact information in exchange for content they will be interested in.

Define Your Buyer Personas

Planning your marketing automation strategy should also begin with defining your buyer personas. These are ficticious customer profiles that are reflective of the different types of customers, influencers, and prospects of your business. You will tailor your workflows and how you personalize your marketing based on your buyer personas. A persona profile may include demographic information, job title, industry, education, and challenges they face.

Marketing Automation Helps Target Prospects Based On Their Stage in the Sales Funnel

Make your content relevant to each stage of your target customer’s journey. Customers prefer short form content such as infographics, in the awareness phase, but may prefer long-form content in latter stages to help them inform them of your value in more detail.

By utilizing your content strategy to answer questions at each stage, marketers can provide more specific answers to help increase conversion. In addition, you save other content for contextual next steps when you optimally should answer one question at a time. Delivering content in stages proved to be 40 times more likely to produce a sale because it meets the expectations of today’s buyer.

Use Marketing Automation to Build Agile Marketing Initiatives.

Incorporate the potential of marketing automation first when you plan your marketing initiatives. Build your marketing initiatives, including your lead nurturing programs, over time in an agile format so that you can effectively gather feedback. We recommend composing nurturing programs to send out three emails within a week, and

Start small by building sponsored social media posts and setting up retargeting display ads in a “two-two-two” method. Identify two the first two segments of your sales cycle, and create two different themes for your messaging that would be tested against each other. Target the ads to the same group, and then pause or reduce the spend for the one that isn’t working, and increase spend for the one ad that is performing. Create the next set of variants from the winning ad, and repeat this process to achieve the best long term results.

Use marketing automation to remove manual tasks like lead follow up to streamline your sales department. For example, creating templates for follow up emails can often save time, and you can build action groups that you can put prospects into after their appointments to ensure effective lead nurturing.

Here are the two activities you must do to gain acceptance of building automated follow up tasks from your sales department:

• Have your best salesperson provide the content and times of all emails they send. Build nurturing programs using this data to save you the work of creating a program from scratch. Make sure you compose a follow up campaigns using data on how your salespeople currently follow-up with customers.
• Test this follow up strategy with your best rep once you have built it. Showcase this campaign as an example to as many stakeholders as possible after you win a deal to get the acceptance of the rest of the team. You will only help your salespeople become even better once you accomplish this.

Leave Room To Grow

There is a vast array of automation solutions available, from tools that focus on specific marketing functions, such as standalone email tools to integrated marketing automation solutions. We recommend that you research all solutions to choose the best ones that will help you reach your business goals in the most effective manner. For instance, you would need to consider how you would trigger lead scoring based on content engagement if you wanted to automatically prioritize content in your CRM based on how people engage with your brand. What if one contact views the same report three times? What if they don’t return to your website for 3 months? While these examples are simple ideas, the tool that would enable you to re-engage inactive prospects, or target clients who heavily engage with your brand could provide immense value.

Many businesses quickly outgrow their current marketing tools after two years, and migrate to more robust tools to maximize their business growth potential. Ensure any marketing tool allows your business growth potential, while realistically fitting within your budget now.

Choosing the right marketing automation tool will maximize the success of your business as you can gradually build up your marketing initiatives. This will only maximize the engagement of your prospects and deepen relationships with your existing customers. We are recognized as a top Massachusetts Digital Marketing Agency on DesignRush. Contact us today by emailing us at michael@primemarketingexperts.com or calling us at 617-651-1457 for a free one hour strategy session on how our marketing automation services can profitably grow your business today.