Configuring an appropriate approach to marketing automation can save you a serious amount of time.
Most buyers complete roughly 75% of their purchasing decisions before they ever even engage the seller. They do this through independent research, such as reading through product reviews, and looking through online content. This means that your inbound marketing strategies take on even more importance, since you need to provide them with the incentive to engage with you. This takes a lot of work, including doing market research about your audience, creating search engine optimization strategies and crafting compelling content – not to mention engaging your audience via social media.
Many companies are turning to marketing automation to help with their workload and make their marketing more efficient and effective. Marketing automation can go a long way in helping you to convert qualified leads into customers.
Tracking Your Lead
Using cookie ID, you can use marketing automation software to track anonymous visitors and turn them into known contacts. This is incredibly useful, since it allows you to track a potential lead’s digital footprints. You can see where they have gone on your website, what they have searched for on your site, and what content they have viewed. This information is extremely useful as it allows you to understand the role and preferences of the buyer as well as pinpoint where they are in their purchasing cycle.
Implement Scoring
When tracking your leads, the last thing you want to do is push them into the sales process right away. The majority of buyers are looking to do research on a product or service before engaging. Scoring your leads by assigning points based on certain attributes and behaviours, will allow you to assess their willingness to buy. For example, a marketing automation system can automatically assign points to a lead based on how many times they visit your site, what pages have viewed, what has been downloaded, and more, in order to determine when a lead is qualified and ready to be captured.
Nurturing Leads Along the Sales Path
Once you have captured a lead, you will want to nurture it. Most of the time, this is done through an email marketing campaign. However, sending out personalized emails to each lead is incredibly time consuming. You can use marketing automation in order to send out content automatically to your leads based on how far into the purchasing cycle they are. Obviously, you don’t want to send out the exact same content to every lead, as each lead is different. This is where list segmentation comes in. By breaking your leads down into groups, you can tailor your content to specific groups of leads based on their specific needs.
Timing is Everything
There are specific times during the day and week when your target audience tends to be online. It’s important to reach them at these times, however waiting around and manually posting content is not very efficient. You can use marketing automation software to have your content scheduled to be released at certain times on all of your online platforms, from your blog to your social media platforms.
As you can see, marketing automation is incredibly helpful. However, it is meant to make the conversion process easier and more efficient – it is not meant to eliminate the need to do things manually. Some things you still need to do yourself, such as engaging with your followers on your social media sites. While you can automate posts to your Twitter feed or your Facebook status, you shouldn’t use automation to respond to your followers. This can actually hurt your reputation, since most people are smart enough to realize when a real person is responding to them versus when they are receiving a canned response. Show your followers you care by engaging with them personally.
The use of marketing automation can be incredibly helpful in making your marketing campaign much more efficient. However, don’t become dependent on it – while it does help save a lot of time and can help provide you with valuable data, you still need to have a hands on approach to ensure a successful inbound marketing campaign.
