Business growth is possible today only using automation tools that help to scale your operations. Here are some of the best strategies to help do that
Businesses need to scale their marketing operations to meet their growth objectives. Marketing automation platforms are the best choice to ensure scalability, customer retention, and continued engagement. This is also useful to ensure continued personalization and customer satisfaction.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation uses automation tools to help businesses streamline their marketing processes and maximize customer engagement. It’s about using software tools and platforms for working on common marketing activities like lead generation, customer engagement, and retention.
Automated platforms for marketing use various tools, in addition to automation, to carry out all marketing tasks very efficiently. They use data analytics, AI, ML, and other tools to analyze customer data. This way, using data-based decisions, these platforms allow for better customer management, analysis, and outreach.
Automated marketing tools ensure customized services and products for all customers, ensuring higher satisfaction and loyalty. They can also target potential customers with personalized emails, newsletters, social media posts, or outreach to convert them.
Following this, marketing automation enables companies to track and view the entire customer journey. They can measure satisfaction and then improve it. Thus, marketing automation improves the overall marketing function and makes it more efficient and profitable.
Why Companies Need Marketing Automation?
Finance Online’s study on marketing automation –69 Compelling Marketing Automation Statistics in 2023: Market Share & Data Analysis shows (verbatim):
Data speaks for itself, but here are some pointers as to why every company needs marketing automation:
- Better lead generation
- Base data to study customer behavior
- Delivering higher levels of personalization
- Higher customer satisfaction with a better engagement experience
Best Marketing Automation Strategies to Boost Your Business
There are a few steps that will ensure your marketing automation implementation delivers the advantages you need. The process will need careful planning, market study, and implementation. It should also have constant optimization of processes and a follow-up analysis of measurable RoI.
Here is the groundwork that is needed:
- Strategic planning.
- Setting clear goals and objectives,
- Identifying the target audience
- Planning for clear, targeted campaigns
- Creating a roadmap of customer journeys to see where the automation tools will add the most value
Selecting the most suitable platform:
- Carefully study each platform’s features, strengths, and weaknesses.
- Decide on the platform after ensuring its features and functionalities align with your business plan and objectives.
- Price is only one consideration. A cheaper but unsuitable platform can be a budget-guzzler in the long run.
So here are the steps involved in making the best marketing automation strategy to boost your business:
Step 1: Define Goals and Objectives of the Automation Initiative
Get complete clarity on the goals of this investment. Is it for lead generation? Or will there be more focus on customer acquisition? Or maybe it will focus on higher and better customer engagement?
The goal of this platform will be to address the challenges your marketing team is currently facing. Using automation tools, it is possible to mitigate all those challenges. So, the automation platform’s features and functionalities will be per the brand’s business goals and market objectives.
Another critical activity is identifying the target market. Accordingly, you can understand their needs and preferences, perhaps even choices. Analyze market research data to get deeper insights into the target audience’s thinking process. Then, the suitable functionalities in the chosen marketing automation platform should tackle these data points.
Step 2: Identify the Most Suitable Marketing Automation Brand
This is the key part of the implementation. The losses will far outweigh the gains if an unsuitable platform is identified, deployed, or used for any reason.
So, critically study the functionalities, configurations, and features before deciding. While many very efficient brands are available for marketing automation, the best one will be one that matches your needs. Here are some popular names to choose from:
- HubSpot
- Adobe Marketo Engage with Adobe Sensei GenAI
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement –also called Pardot
- Oracle Eloqua
- ActiveCampaign
- Keap
- GetResponse
- Customer.io
- Dynamics 365 Marketing
- Act-On
Step 3: Create a Customer Journey Roadmap
Get a clear timeline and data on the start-to-finish journey of your customer.
Ensure every touch point, every interaction, and every engagement is covered. The starting point of the timeline should be from the very first transaction – to the latest one. This is a critical component of the omni-channel offerings roadmap.
Marketers need to know every point of acceptance, rejection, and feedback to incorporate into the personalization strategy.
Armed with this knowledge, brands can better use automation platforms to create meaningful customer engagement strategies.
Step 4: The power of Personalized Content
Today, personalization is the biggest differentiator in the highly competitive financial sector. Customers are most likely to patronize brands that meet their specific requirements and craft products per their preferences.
Big Data and advanced analytics are necessary to get to this level of personalization.
Only deep-dive knowledge of their preferences, habits, and needs can enable banks to craft such specific offerings.
The advantage this platform will provide is that, with time, it can continuously fine-tune data insights. So, the offerings become increasingly more specific. Customers appreciate that, and the engagement translates into a long-term relationship.
So, this is the strategy that will make the marketing automation platform invaluable for customer offerings.
Step 5: Automate the Workflows for Higher Efficiency
Automation’s biggest value is timely support, targeted offerings, and specific messaging. Customers will appreciate this clear connection, cutting through the clutter of marketing jargon.
With automation as the base of this customer relationship platform, it is easy to ensure the delivery of tailored content to customers at every touchpoint of their journey.
While the automation workflow for re-engagement is critical, you should automate various workflows.
A few of them can be:
- Customer onboarding workflows
- Abandoned cart workflows
- Lead nurturing workflows
- Win-back workflows
Step 6: Measure and Analyze Results
After decisions, implementations, and onboarding of an automation platform for marketing, it is also critical to set up an impact measurement strategy. Brands need to see the success or failures of strategies. They need to pinpoint areas not performing optimally or functionalities that need more tools or data. They have to assess the RoI for this investment.
Hence, it is critical to set up an analysis assessment system to see the business impact of the platform. Marketers must track the Key performance indicators to ensure the setup works as intended.
How to Ensure the Strategy Works?
To make sure that this 6-point strategy works, here are a few pointers:
Ensure Marketing and Sales Work Together: While the goal of both sales and marketing is to increase revenue, many organizations work at cross purposes. However, a marketing automation platform will only show benefits if the marketing activities convert into sales leads.
The most common challenge to this is a lack of intra-team communication. This gets them to work with conflicting incentives, creating a lack of trust and silos. Brands must overcome this misalignment to benefit from a marketing automation platform.
Know your Customer- WELL: Without in-depth knowledge of the customer, this plan won’t work. We have already discussed the value of a personalized offerings system to get market share.
Ensure an Efficient Omni-channel Engagement: Customer connection must be uniformly efficient across all engagement channels. They should get a similar experience interacting with your marketing touchpoints- whichever channel they use.
This will ensure your automation strategy works since your identity is what your customer thinks of you.
Technology comes later- impressions come first.
Also Read: How Data Security and Marketing Automation Drive Marketing Excellence
Monitor Your Campaign Regularly: Monitoring each touchpoint for any shortcomings or drawbacks will ensure your customer is satisfied across the board of engagements.
There can be no letup in the assurance of a uniformly excellent experience. The leaders need to visualize and foresee issues so timely course correction is possible with no time lag.
Embrace the power of Big Data: Data is gold, platinum, and everything in between– as far as customers are concerned. For any marketing automation strategy, big data will play a critical role. Ensure ample, clean, structured data for the analytics to draw meaningful insights.
Conclusion
With the huge array of tools, marketers have many opportunities to maximize their impact. But marketing automation is still one of the most efficient ways of doing it.
With the right strategies and the correct foundation for the deployment, it can be the best method for the long-term success of marketing campaigns and revenue growth.
