6 Steps to Worthwhile Marketing Automation!
Automation could be the best thing to happen to digital marketing. The current marketing landscape is so vast and competitive that anything offering the ability to improve workflows – saving time and increasing productivity- without sacrificing the effectiveness of campaigns is worth its weight in gold.
The evolution of marketing automation technology presents opportunities that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Marketing automation has the potential to make lead generation easier and more efficient than ever. However, the success of any lead generation tactic has always be depended upon the effectiveness of the strategy supporting it.
Having a piece of software to take care of the bulk of your marketing, frees you up to focus on other areas of the business, like research and development, customer experience and a huge backlog of e-mails in your inbox.
But, as useful as it is, marketing automation is only as good as the marketing being automated.
Automation can’t make miracles. It can’t make bad marketing look good.
This makes the process before setting your automation extremely important. This is exactly where the human element should make its robust presence. The marketing team must come up with a solid strategy – one that gives automation the best possible chance of getting positive return on investment.
To achieve this, there are 6 steps that need to be pursued!
Step 1 – Market Research
“Marketing without research is like driving with your eyes closed” – Dan Zarrella.
During your research, you should find out the following:
- Who is your targeted audience?
- What do they look like?
- What they consider when making a purchase
- What prices they feel are appropriate
- Their likes and dislikes of current products/services
- Things they would like to see improved
Collect this data, analyze them and also take a look at how competitors operate.
Step 2 – Find your voice
People tend to buy on emotion and justify with logic. It seems that they want to feel a connection with a brand or business. This connection surely comes from how you present yourself.
Your brand’s tone of voice should be in keeping your audience and in speaking the same language as they are. Your tone of voice needs to be aligned with your overall brand message – one that instantly informs people who you are and why you are their best choice.
Step 3 – Establish point of communication
How are you going to reach your audience?
An obvious choice is social media. Facebook has over 2 billion users, Instagram over 800 million, Twitter 330 million and LinkedIn over 450 million. There is also YouTube, where over 1 billion watch videos every day, and platforms such as Pinterest, Snapchat, Viber, Google+, all of which have user bases in the hundreds of millions.
Your audience surely exists on social media, it is up to you to find out where.
Step 4 – Create a campaign
Design and build your campaign with the customer in mind. Your market research can help guide this process. Take what your audience is into and use it to inspire something memorable that fits in with your brand story.
You might not get it right from the first time, but you have the next step to amend that.
Step 5 – Testing, testing
It is always about testing. From designs to content to email headlines to customer segmentation, test everything. Test campaigns against different points of communications to find out what works, what needs improvement and what doesn’t belong there.
Test one thing at a time, gather all need information and concrete statistics and then, it is time for optimization.
Test, learn, adjust and test again!
Step 6 – Showing the human behind the automation
With the above steps in order, marketing is ready to be automated, but the human element shouldn’t disappear from the whole picture.
Automation delivers your message to your target audience as efficiently as possible, but it’s important to remember that you are marketing to people; and these people want to feel that there is a personal connection with the business.
To conclude…
Automation only displays what you feed it with. Follow the above steps and you will be rewarded with the results your efforts deserve!
Also published on Medium.