Re-Evaluate Your Marketing Operations to Achieve Automation Success

You cannot drive a nail in with a screwdriver, you need a hammer. The screwdriver, however, can align the nail – in the ways that a hammer cannot. If the analogy is extended to marketing, the nail is your lead generation and nurturing. The screwdriver is the marketing automation, and the hammer is your marketing operations.

Moreover, by understanding your prospects’ behavior and then building your strategy for lead generation, scoring, and nurturing you can gain more. However, to do that you need to rethink your marketing operations. And, to help you get started here is a list of some of the easiest things you can start doing:

1. Automate only what is needed– Marketing automation is a means, not an end. The entire marketing ecosystem does not need automation; rather you should intelligently deploy marketing automation to those components, which are repetitive and are time and effort intensive. Marketing tasks like email marketing, custom landing page for each campaign, prediction, lead management, social marketing are some of the tasks that improve ROI and save time with automation.
2. Focus on creating customer-centric content – High quality content, which resonates with your audience drives engagement. Good content ensures customers come back and they look forward to what you say. With an engaged customer you gain better insights about consumer behavior, because he is ready to consume what you want to say. With these insights, you can improve the quality of your content to reach out to even more customers.
3. Do not let your customer feel confused – An engaged customer might not be ready to make a purchase decision. You have to guide him through the steps of the buying cycle. Your communication should build customer expectations early in the buying cycle. For example for promoting an eBook, you mention about it on your homepage, from there the customer goes to the custom landing page, and then there is a custom thank you page. When the customer experiences logical and systematic communication, he likes the experience and sees you as a likely partner in the future purchase decisions.
4. Leverage the insights from campaign tracking – Once you know which campaigns are delivering increased ROI, record the features of this campaign for easy replication in the future. For example, track the website visits, number of downloads and so on for an announcement/product launch. The kind of audience engagement with your announcements can help you better understand engagement level and re-evaluate your approach for other campaigns.
5. Deploy multiple channels for effective marketing– For today’s socially connected customer, follow a holistic marketing approach. Along with emails, actively engaging your prospects on social media is required. As per Kissmetrics, email has three times as many user accounts as Facebook and Twitter combined. However, for moving the maximum number of prospects into buying, it is crucial to use social channels.
6. Market your company as well as the product or service – Promoting a product or a service is beneficial for short-term results but for engaged customers, you should market your company as well. Let your customers peek into who you are and what you stand for. An easy way of doing this is by sharing news about your company’s in-house events, events you are attending and success stories.
7. Repeat buyers -When we understand the repeat buying customer generally makes his purchase within first 30 days of his first purchase then we should optimize marketing spend according to this insight. Secondly, plan the engagement campaigns around this timeframe instead of sharing all that you have within the first 7 days after purchase.

Closing Note

Marketing automation is an amazing platform that enables better communication with your audience, improves efficiency, and increases number of sales qualified leads. However, to gain maximum benefit from MA, you need to rethink your marketing strategies. If you agree or even disagree with this statement, leave a comment. We would love to see your take on this.

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