3 Aspects of Marketing You Can Supercharge With Automation

Posted at 18:16on 02 Febh in Marketing by Raman Arora 0 Comments

Today’s marketing and advertising landscape in the digital world is entirely different from how it once was. In the past, ratings and circulation were key — now pageviews, engagement, and conversions reign supreme. This requires firms to learn new tactics and embrace forms of media such as blogs and social networks which have emerged as viable marketing strategies. There are some Aspects of Marketing which needs to follow to make best strategy.

However, staying on top of various day-to-day marketing activities such as blogging, social media content, email marketing, and more can seem like an impossible, overwhelming, time-demanding task. Without the right marketing tools, it pretty much is. For this reason, firms are choosing to utilize marketing automation tools that help marketers simplify many time-consuming tasks.

To be clear, marketing automation refers to the software that is utilized with the goal of automating marketing actions. Many firm’s marketing departments are now automating repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions.

So now the question becomes, “Which aspects of my firm’s marketing do I need to automate?” Here are three aspects of marketing you can supercharge with automation.

1. Lead Tracking and Nurturing

The digital landscape has created a lot of opportunities for marketers, yet the increasing amount of noise and activity online, makes it tough to be heard and seen. For a business, this means two things:

1. Every lead is precious and needs to be fought for
2. The marketing effort required in today’s digital landscape is several times higher than it was 10 years ago

As leads are so significant, it is inefficient to nurture them through manual processes. No matter whether your firm is working with 50-100 leads a month, or several thousand, marketing automation technologies can help you effectively track, capture and nurture these leads.

The best sales and marketing automation providers offer automatic lead capturing from contact forms. But gathering the data in an orderly way is merely the beginning; the real battle is actually using this data to drive conversions. Marketing automation technology can help you identify the various touch-points and opportunities for follow-ups, and then automate the follow-ups themselves or the reminders for the personal ones (this will depend on the kind of business you run).

In a typical SaaS scenario, you have 30 days or less to get a user engaged and then converted. Having an automated series of well-planned emails sent on a programmed schedule (based on the user activity pattern), can improve conversions significantly. It also allows you to create the much-needed touch points for user interaction, early problem resolutions, and feedback.

While it is possible to set up these types of email campaigns in a manual way, if your firm wants to supercharge its marketing efforts, you should explore the option of using a marketing automation solution.

2. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is one of the most challenging tasks to manage manually – engaging thousands of fans and followers is hard work. There are three critical components of social media engagement and marketing:

Posting content on social accounts
Conversations on social
Community building

The second component should never be automated. However, the other components have a reasonable scope of automation.

Your firm should aim to be posting on social media platforms every day. As there is so much content, and it moves so rapidly, if you are not there every few hours, your account will have reduced visibility. Automating this process can reduce the intensity of making, creating and posting this vast amount of content.

Community building should be driven by effort from real people. Many prospective leads dislike automated direct messages, likes and retweets, as they go against accepted principles of social media. That being said, as long as you respect the basic principles of social media, social media automation can bring much-needed efficiency in attempting to stand out in a crowded space.

3. User Onboarding, Engagement, Cross-and Up-Sell

Once you have converted a user, you will need to work hard in order to retain them. You want to ensure that they remain engaged and that you are identifying opportunities for expanding your relationship. These are the next significant and vital challenges. However, a lot of this can be managed by a smart automation process that is backed by data.

Automating this process includes onboarding a user — a critical part of SaaS sales — that begins when a user creates an account. At this point, a well-written automated email campaign for the defined conversion cycle is required. This should start with a welcome note and then lead into emails/in-product messages about usage-prompts (based on the user activity), an offering of support and resources, and a few reminders about paid plans and trial periods coming to an end (if this applies to your business).

If the user converts to a paid plan, continue to help them out by sending resources, tips and gentle notification nudges to boost activity. These small actions can go a long way in ensuring user retention.

To really supercharge your marketing strategies for engagement, your firm must make smart use of data. By segmenting users by activity data and then classifying them into brackets, you will be able to generate personalized automated marketing campaigns.

For example, your most engaged customers could receive prompts for discounted upgrades or add-ons, while low activity users can receive emails about tips to use the software better, or a cross-sell of the add-ons that can bring more value.

If you run an e-commerce business, utilize previous e-commerce purchase history to do product cross-sell (complementary products) or up-sell (upgraded versions of what a customer has previously purchased).

Despite common understanding, marketing automation is not just the territory of large businesses. While large companies are using it on a significant scale to prompt greater efficiency within their marketing processes and engage with their customers on a deeper level, small businesses also need to utilize it to make good use of their marketing resources and convert more leads to maintain a competitive edge.

Automating your marketing processes doesn’t mean you have to utilize complex systems running large operations on big data. Even smaller operations with partial process automation can make a substantial difference in your marketing results.

Above all, you must maintain thorough thinking about marketing processes and continually identify areas of opportunities in your firm to implement automated systems. Let them run the show for you.

Wrap-Up

I hope you got an idea from this post “3 Aspects of Marketing You Can Supercharge With Automation”. If you want to ask something, leave a comment below.

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3 Aspects of Marketing You Can Supercharge With Automation