How can a marketer make the most of their marketing automation efforts? These eight practices give a framework teams can use when planning out their campaigns in order to ensure that they use automation to their best effect:
1) Set goals
Look at how marketing automation can improve the number of:
- + Quality leads you attract
- + Leads deemed ready to pass onto sales
- + Conversions you help contribute to, and at what points in the customer’s journey do these conversions happen
2) Develop buyer personas
Create buyer personas by looking at your audience’s backgrounds, demographics, interests, preferences, location, jobs, industries, the challenges they meet, and more to understand where they are coming from and what their pain points are. By knowing that, marketers can understand how they can help their audience, offer solutions to their problems, and thus better market to them.
3) Build workflows based upon the buyer’s journey
Map out workflows for the personas you create to engage them and address their concerns at each point of the buyer’s journey. Teams should have a workflow based upon each stage of the buyer’s journey:
- + AWARENESS – A prospect has identified a problem and is seeking a solution.
- + CONSIDERATION – They are weighing their options and considering which solution to use.
- + DECISION – They decide upon a solution and make a purchase.
- + POST-PURCHASE – They might have questions about the solution or need add-ons or other products and services in the future.
Knowing what persona you are targeting at what stage will help marketers send the right message at the right time.
4) Create engaging content
Marketers must ask themselves who their personas are and what stage of the buyer’s journey they are in. This will help dictates the type of content that will produce the best results. However, the content must be relevant, compelling, and present something of value, such as information, a pro tip, an invitation to an event, or even an offer.
The possibilities for content are endless. However, all the content must be relevant. It has to capture the audience’s attention, keep it, and present something of value, such as information, a pro tip, an invitation to an event, or even an offer.
5) Personalization
Use customer data to personalize content (and marketing in general) as much as possible to better win prospects and customers over.
6) Multi-channel approach
Customers now expect a seamless, multi-channel experience. Hence, marketers have to engage them with consistent content and marketing across on the channels they prefer and be ready to jump from one to the other.
7) Lead scoring and qualification
Once they see leads start coming in, marketers have to develop a model by which to score them. Then they can see which leads need more nurturing and which are qualified to be handed off to sales.
8) Measure your performance
How many leads did a campaign attract? How many were handed off to sales? How many conversions did the marketing team help make? Review your goals and see where leads might have dropped off and how you can tweak, revise, and improve your process.