As marketing efforts span over wider audience cohorts, many tasks become very repetitive and prone to human error. Marketing automation proved solutions that not only automate such tasks but also increase the efficacy of one’s efforts.
Here are some marketing automation strategies to help you get started.
- Research your Competitors
To achieve success in your marketing automation strategy, rather than just looking internally it is vital to look at what the industry leaders are doing. This can provide your brand a roadmap for your automation efforts. This serves a two-fold purpose. it saves your time and effort in terms of research and gives you a direct framework for success. however, you should not directly emulate competitors’ plans. You should take inspiration from it and tweak it to match your business’s vision and mission.
- Automate your Socials
Social media marketing can drive reach and engagement for brands. However, these platforms also require a consistent activity for success. Automating your posting with the help of tools like Hootsuite and Social Pilot. This can help you save time and optimize your social media strategy.Such automation can also help you focus your energy on tasks like customer relationship management, lead generation and analyzing your results. Using social media automation tools can also give you insights into audience behavior and allow you to monitor conversations to understand the sentiment around your brand.
- Personalize your messaging
The biggest trend for marketing automation currently is personalization. Today’s consumers look for brand messages that are directly curated for them. This allows for brands to have a higher rate of visibility and conversion by adding personalization. this can be product suggestions based on past purchase patterns or a simple first name in cooperation in a subject line for an email marketing campaign.
- Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is a useful feature available in marketing automation software. They don’t only offer value to marketing but also offer great direction to the sales team. Lead scoring is a process where leads are ranked in a hierarchical manner by assigning value to certain attributes which have a higher potential of converting. These are usually based on behavioral and demographic data points. This strategy can allow you to understand where your marketing efforts should and shouldn’t be concentrated.
- Drip Campaigns
The best features marketing automation tech can offer is setting up a drip campaign. A drip campaign takes action based on behavioral responses of a lead. It sends out emails that offer value to the reader based on their actions. For example, if a user has visited a business’s profile to check their product offerings and did not take any further action, the drip campaign set up will send a follow-up email with the promotional code for the same item. It has been observed that drip campaigns have 80% higher open rates.
- List Segmentation
All your lead information can cover various aspects like geographical, social, demographic and economic information. Segmenting your leads into multiple cohorts by grouping similar leads together can help you create targeted campaigns. Although this process can be done manually, automation tools can help you speed up the process with reduced errors.
- Check your results
After creating and implementing your marketing strategy, the most important step for success is keeping a close check and measuring all your results. Before implementing your strategy and deploying automation tools, create a baseline of all your metrics. Then create a periodic schedule to measure your efforts to assess their success or failure. This can help you realize the optimal potential of your budget and efforts. Some measurement metrics might include click-through rates for email marketing, engagement rates for social media and conversion rates for display ads.
With so many automation strategies available to marketers, the path to a successful marketing campaign is highly accessible. What strategies can you apply to your business?
