Customers lining up to get your highly sought after product or service? Servers failing due to the overwhelming demand? It used to be that easy with a handful of brands in the market. As our world matures and brands multiply, we have to be better, more sophisticated and deftly with our marketing strategy and initiatives.
Let’s take a look at how to be deftly with our marketing efforst. There are ways to target specific segments of customers that are smart, effective ways of building trust in your brand and generating leads that turn into sales. It makes your job easier, and frees you up to do the heavy lifting of analyzing the marketing funnels and continually optimizing segments, testing new funnels and executing on successful tests.
Marketing automation is what large companies have relied on for the last decade to execute sophisticated funnels with hundreds of tests continually running to optimize paths, messaging, offer and imagery – even some large organizations are struggling with implementation and efficacy of usage.
Marketing Automation Basics
Marketing automation software enables you to set up pre-defined paths known as marketing funnels for specific customer segments. It enables you to leverage what you know about your customers therefore you can deliver appealing content your customers are looking for and find value in. It can be used to target customers via email, social media and through your website, building the trust in your brand that is crucial to your marketing strategy.
Best of all, with the automation part, once you set your segments and funnels up, it can send out those emails and social media posts while you continue to run tests and optimize the original program.
We’ll go over a list of marketing automation software companies later on. First, however, let’s find out how to use it as part of your marketing strategy.
How Would Marketing Automation Software Work in Your Marketing Strategy?
Marketing automation software handles full funnel marketing starting with top of funnel branding; tracking how many exposures prospects have seen and what happens next. Prospect A sees 4 display ads brand impressions and does not engage, prospect B sees 4 brand impressions and does engage, now you are on your way to automated next steps. Prospect A gets more impressions attempting to gain next level information like email and name. This is where you will set up tripwires and lead magnets. That is, they get something from you, like an ebook, white paper, article, infographic or web series; if they download it, that tells you that that customer might be interested in the topic.
There are two ways to set off a tripwire: Advertise the free giveaway of your ebook or content of interest, or take your current email and blast out the offer to them. No matter which way you do it, the goal is to build segments of customers interested in your products. This is how you “nurture the lead,” or put them into a funnel that turns a regular customer into a loyal customer. It’s also where your automated marketing software starts doing its job.
How Marketing Automation Software Nurtures Leads Through Email
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Email marketing is one of the best ways to connect with your customers, and has ROIs that are 40% more effective than social media posts. If you’re not making use of email marketing, get on it. One of the best uses of email marketing is to personalize the content to the customer and what they’re interested in. And we can’t say it enough, everyone you want to do business with has an email – 100%, not everyone goes where you advertise or has social media.
On a small scale, you can probably do this on your own. However, if you have several groups of customer segmentations, keeping track of what they are all interested in on your own can be impossible. What else is impossible? Narrowing down your segments to the customer level so you learn more beyond their name, gender, demographics, age. What is it they really like? What will they always click on? Who is ready to buy?
This is where your marketing automation software is absolutely essential to your marketing strategy. Not only can it help you keep track of all your customer segments, it can narrow them down further. That means you can create the personalized content they really want. And of course, it makes this all automated so you aren’t frantically trying to keep track of who’s who in your customer segments.
So how would marketing automation software work in the above scenario? If a customer sets off your tripwire, the software can get to work right away. After the customer gets the tripwire content, your software can send them an email thanking them. Then, in a few days, your software can send your leads more information: Maybe an interesting blog post on the same topic as the ebook or content of interest. Or perhaps a ‘how-to cheat sheet’ that they can print and put up on their wall. Try A/B testing to see what people are more interested in. And be sure all of your content is branded. Be sure your logo and message are always associated with your great content that they found of value.
At this time, you can start collecting the hard data about your customer beyond a name and an email. Maybe to get that cheat sheet, they have to input their job title and industry. Further down the line, when you send them the next personalized email with a downloadable item, you can ask for their address and phone number.
Other types of data will come from your automation software, which can tell you what people are clicking on, and lets you follow them throughout the website to see what else they’re interested in. If they read your blog post, did they immediately click on a relevant topic? That data better helps you create the content they want, which you can then later email to them.
How Marketing Automation Software Nurtures Leads Through Social Media
A key marketing strategy is to target your customers wherever they’re at online: in their emails, on your website and on social media. Social media can be incredibly finicky, however; the algorithms can keep your from reaching your target audience. If someone doesn’t like or click on links you’re putting up, they’ll slowly disappear from their news feed.
Much like email, you want the tripwires in place that get leads into your funnel. Some tripwires include things like Facebook ads, which you can target to specific demographics. From age, to gender to interests to specific locations, Facebook helps you reach the customer segmentation you are most interested in.
However, once you reach out to those customers and they start reading your information, it’s up to your marketing automation software to do the rest. If they sign up for emails, you can then put them through the marketing automation email funnel you have. You can also use marketing automation to deliver the content your customers want, so it shows up on their feeds. That builds brand awareness and loyalty. Now mind you, you must set up all the funnels and review response analysis continually to optimize funnels and the creative they are utilizing for acquisition, continuity, up-sell/cross-sell and Loyalty.
You can also do it vice-versa: Take your email list and use it to find your customers on social media. Since you already have a general idea of what they’re interested in, you can set up your software to post things they’d like and create the ads that can turn them into buyers.
The Key Aspect of Marketing Automation Software
Let’s be clear: this software is only a tool to help you nurture your leads without you having to remind yourself to send out emails. However, this takes a lot of upfront work of creating the content your customer would want, setting up the tripwires and A/B testing to better personalize your content. Marketing automation software makes you more efficient in better creating customer segments and ensuring your targets consistently get your content in their inboxes or feeds.
It’s an investment, both for the software and setting up your marketing campaign within the system. But the ROI is more than worth it, not to mention the time you’ll save once the system is in place.
Marketing Automation Software Companies
Want to know what marketing automation software programs to try? Check out the leaders in the field:
- Hubspot: One of the highest-rated programs, Hubspot’s marketing software, called Hubspot Marketing, has an easy-to-use visual editor that can help even the least tech-savvy among us get started.
- Marketo: This award-winning program is perfect for small and medium businesses that are looking for an easy-to-use software, and want to launch marketing campaigns without a lot of efforts.
- Pardot: Need help getting started with Pardot marketing automation software? Their customer service team is willing to help you with anything you need, and often puts out daily content to help you make the most of your software.
- Eloqua: This is a more hands-on software (and a costly one for small and medium businesses), but combining it with the Salesforce CRM can make your marketing automation campaigns second to none.
Have you made use of marketing automation software in your company? What has marketing automation done to improve your business? Any creative uses, let us know and share with our community.