Can you afford to invest $50 each month in marketing for your business? Can you afford not to? Marketing is beyond important for business functions. How else can your future customers know what you do and where to find you? Keeping up with your marketing goals, though, is hard—small business owners and freelancers are often too busy to fully implement the marketing campaigns that they devise. Today, let’s talk about how marketing automation strategies can revolutionize your lead generation and boost your sales revenue.
Where to start with marketing automation
The most successful marketers know that automating routine marketing functions has multiple benefits: enhancing your campaign outreach effectiveness and providing the best possible buyer’s journey for prospective customers. When you put marketing automation software in place, all requests for info about your products or services will receive timely follow-up. You, your team and your company will look good as a result—professional, responsive, trustworthy and reliable, all brand-enhancing qualities.
Why should I bother?
Marketing automation uses technology and software to automate your company’s marketing activities across all of your digital channels—your website and social media platforms. By using automation, you can target prospective customers easily and efficiently, launching special, automated outreach campaigns that are personalized to reflect the customer’s buying history or interest. BTW, according to a recent survey, 80 percent of prospects reported that they were more likely to do business with companies that offer a personalized buyer’s journey experience. Data from consulting giant McKinsey revealed that personalized emails sent to prospects can reduce customer acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent and increase sales revenues by five to 15 percent.
Consider the following marketing automation strategies. Implementing these can potentially free up 10 hours/week of your valuable time and allow you to focus on other aspects of your business. Marketing automation service packages and pricing vary widely, but a basic plan offered by most companies is unlikely to take a big bite from an inflation-impacted budget. Plus, there is reason to be optimistic about adding to top-line sales revenue. Spend a little money, make more back.
Build targeted email campaign lists
Despite the obituaries that have been written over the years, email marketing has shown us all that, like a cat, it has nine lives. Email marketing automation is very useful for LeadGen, helping to generate sales from prospects in your funnel. Marketing is all about providing the right information at the right time in the buyer’s journey. Automating email outreach enables you to send that perfect message, simultaneously saving time and increasing efficiency as you communicate with prospects.
Nurture warm leads
Encourage the process of converting prospects into engaged clients by personalization—from correct names to accurate buying history data. Help yourself and your team respond quickly: use contact forms that prospects submit when they’d like to schedule a call or meeting. Follow up fast on calls-to-action from prospects who’d like to receive your newsletters or attend a talk that you’ll give. Implementing marketing automation strategies will ensure that you avoid the awkward situation of leads getting lost in the shuffle and falling off your radar.
Your goal is to move prospective customers through the buyer’s journey, AKA the sales funnel, to become paying customers. Your marketing automation system can monitor consumer activity and assist you in determining where in the sales funnel your prospects are. You can select the info that your leads will receive and the frequency of emailing at each step of the buyer’s journey to help you execute an effective lead-generating strategy.
For more tips on keeping the customer first, pick up a copy of Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture that Drives Value for Your Business.
Automate social media posting
At the beginning of each month, help yourself and create a calendar by planning 30 days’ worth of social media content ideas. For example, every week, vary your content by type (i.e., educational, entertaining, inspiring, tips and tricks, behind-the-scenes). This will help keep your social media audiences engaged and interested in your posts while making it easier for you and your team to create the content.
Furthermore, when filming videos or taking photos for social media accounts, aim to capture a variety of content to reuse and repurpose for various posts. This will cut down on the content creation time, as you’ll utilize one shoot for multiple pieces of content.
Analyze campaign performance
Measuring the success (or failure) of marketing campaigns is often guesswork. For freelancers and entrepreneurs, it’s easy to obsess over your client acquisition rate—that is, the bottom line represented by the clients you bring in or bring back. More ambitious types likely work with spreadsheets to monitor the performance of marketing initiatives. I’ve done it before, and I find spreadsheets to be very time-consuming. Plus, not everyone on the team who should regularly post updates will do that without prompting from the team leader, which takes time.
The beauty of marketing automation is that when you program the software to perform certain functions, the results will always be accurately reported. Once you’ve categorized your leads and customers according to where they are in the buyer’s journey, you can email targeted content that’s specific to each lead, increasing your marketing and sales effectiveness. Next, the lead tracking function will automatically update the system if that lead becomes a customer or makes an important action that might signal a movement toward becoming a customer, such as downloading a price sheet or requesting a copy of a case study.
Once you customize your system, all you’ll have to do is log in, view the results and evaluate what the information tells you. Appropriate follow-up and other trust-building actions can take place every time. Potential customers are not lost in the shuffle. You make more money!
See the best marketing automation options for 2023 here: https://www.g2.com/categories/marketing-automation.
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