Marketing automation is quickly becoming a new buzz word for marketers and for good reason. Over the last decade the rise of digital business channels through social media has meant that as business owners we’re increasingly disconnected from much of our customer base. The widespread take-up of social media by consumers and businesses and the decline of traditional media channels in effectiveness has only served to increase this disconnect.

Many business owners have combatted this shift through the adoption of CRM (customer relationship management) systems and broadcast email platforms such as awebber and mailchimp however these technologies have created a new problem. That is larger lists of increasingly irrelevant and out of date, or insufficient information.

The complete opposite of what your sales team wants to grow sales volumes.

Database segmentation has gone part of the way to addressing this issue by trying to treat groups of customers and prospects more like individuals without the headache, and time consuming task of having to do so. Lets face it, a modest prospect + customer database of 5000 contacts with only 5 minutes of contact, 4 times per year quickly adds up to around 277 days/year effort to maintain those relationships. You can quickly see why it doesn’t happen in practice. This is where marketing automation can help.

What exactly is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation describes the use of a piece of software to map out and execute the decision process that a human user would go through when dealing with a customer or prospect.

The appeal of marketing automation software is that it allows you to control all your communications in one place and interconnect them. It enables you to store customer profiles that contain all contact information, such as phone, email, and social media and also provides channels for interaction.

When such diverse marketing platforms began to surface with the rise of the internet, they were overused to the point of creating spam issues. Since then, marketers have learned first to develop marketing lists based on a value conversation and then send email or newsletters to recipients who request information. Tracking engagement automatically from those recipients who interact with your content allows customers to segment themselves, rather than your sales team having to do so manually.

From there you build customer loyalty by creating a personalized dialogue that forms a history. And for sales teams this information is invaluable in creating and understanding each client’s needs and flagging those needing a more human touch as and when they become ‘hot’ prospects.

As you develop your marketing list, you will be able to schedule communication to particular customers to remind them about deals and upcoming products. You can also use the list to do follow up emails that provide case studies for the products they buy from you. This communication gives added value to the purchase and lets customers know you care about their satisfaction.

The key to making marketing automation work is to expand your marketing channels and pay closer attention to each customer’s needs. The software will bring you closer to your clients, giving you instant access to conversation log history and data on their behaviour. The process ultimately strengthens your relationships by giving you personalisation tools, leading to more conversions, repeat business and customers are promoting your company.

Why Marketing Automation is Hot

One of the main reasons marketing automation is so popular with businesses is that it’s an efficient way to organise contacts, automate communication and personalise messages starting with templates.

But it’s much more than just an email platform. You can use it to craft newsletters, syndicate podcasts, post messages across various channels and much more. It essentially turns you into an influential publisher and an interactive communicator. Ultimately, you can use it to nurture many quality relationships at once. It allows your customers several ways to get a hold of you so that you can answer their questions much more quickly than the old-fashioned marketer who lets phone messages or emails stack up.

The platform is also useful for collecting a broad range of data from your customers. Analytics tools help you learn about consumer behaviour and give you insights into how to improve your marketing campaigns by tracking which communication attracts higher levels of engagement

Benefits for Your Business

• fast way to construct and customise emails
• simplifies traditional tedious tasks
• easy A/B testing for gauging user reaction
• social media tools simplify posting across all networks
• simplifies content creation
• provides fast easy way to study marketing analytics
• integrates with CRM
• useful for lead generation, scoring (the process of identifying hotter prospects), and management

How Marketing Automation Relates to Target Audience

Even though automation can speed up communication with your customers, you still need to put in the time to craft personalized messages for each. Consumers increasingly want to deal with companies that recognize them on a personal level, but you can still use various templates as a starting point for messages. You may only need to add a line or two to give it a personal touch or embed merge fields that reference back to prospects previous engagement (like where you met someone)

By creating individualized buyer personas that reflect various segments of your market, you can design templates accordingly so that you’re not wasting time always typing the same general content over and over. When you are prospecting, you are also learning who fits your target market. As engagement increases, you will need to hyper-personalize your marketing messages. In the process of learning about new prospects, you will be qualifying and prioritizing leads.

Marketing automation allows you to devise different campaigns that target specific subgroups. Instead of using generic messages that do not fit every prospect or customer, you can send the right message to the right person, at the right time. By learning about your clients’ needs instead of treating them as statistics, you will be able to fuel their interests more on specific issues that are relevant to them personally. This will also enable you to avoid bombarding your prospects with messages in which they’ve shown no interest.

Developing a Deeper Bond

One of the main ways businesses lose customers is by forgetting about them, many times by accident or complacency. Sometimes a sales team’s focus only becomes the next promotion, which might not appeal to everyone in the customer base. Marketing automation eliminates this problem by reminding you to engage with individual customers at set time intervals to keep them interested in your brand.

You can also check up on them from time to time to find out what their interests are and even ask for suggestions, which can give them the feeling of contributing to your team. Furthermore, when you use marketing automation software, there’s no reason to let customer complaints go unresolved. Whenever you come across complaints, you can turn to a template matching that problem and then customise the email to address the particular issue. Solving issues quickly is a major key to retaining customers.

Thought Leadership

Marketing automation gives you the tools for engaging with prospects and clients in real-time or otherwise as soon as possible. It adds to your company’s competitive strength by providing you with the opportunity to share your industry expertise, establishing thought leadership. This principle has enormous importance because part of the reason customers stay with you is that they trust your authority.

Thought leadership can be developed through blogs, newsletters, emails and social media. While you can build this credibility through your web content on landing pages, you can further develop it on a personalised level when replying to emails or posts on social media. The more you use different channels to reach people, the further you establish your expertise.

Success Beyond Technology

Finding success with marketing automation requires more than mastering the technology, which is relatively easy to understand and use. One thing that you need to know is that the automation can only speed up certain processes, but overall it can make your job more efficient.

You should avoid the temptation of buying lists of email addresses as a long term solution or replacement for lead generation. One of the problems with buying email lists is that it can trigger spam complaints. Developing organic leads through inbound marketing is your best scenario, and then nurturing those leads through your automation system. Nurturing leads are vital for future sales.

Part of nurturing your leads involves contacting them through various channels. The more different ways you approach people, the more successful your marketing campaigns will be. In other words, success still comes down to your communication skills and creative strategies.

Evaluating Your Marketing Goals

Marketing automation will not only help you improve your communication with prospects and customers, but it will also provide you with powerful tools for evaluating your email campaigns and your business model. The most successful companies are the ones that can make the proper adjustments to marketing as they receive feedback from their audiences.

Never before in history have small to medium businesses had the tools to present themselves with the same magnitude as large corporations. While last century was about crafting one-size-fits-all messages through expensive mass media channels, this century’s technology allows you to market to multiple niches with tailored messages to each niche at a fraction of the cost.

This ability to reach target markets more efficiently gives you the opportunity to focus on setting more realistic benchmarks for success. Using marketing automation provides you with a broad array of valuable analytics that help make forecasting more accurate.

The Future of Marketing Automation

As technology advances, there will be scores of phenomenal and innovative ways marketing automation can generate leads that convert to sales. The direction, online technology is moving toward, is a more seamless user experience on any device, including mobile. Marketing lists will become more refined as lead scoring filters and prioritizes qualified leads more quickly, more scientifically and more accurately.

Now is the time to build your knowledge of all the valuable state-of-the-art tools that can give your business an edge over competitors. This technology will continue to grow in sophistication and will give you more opportunities to attract, sell and wow your target customers.

You can expect the future of marketing automation to integrate even more fully with multimedia. You can already use the software to promote any media you wish to sell or offer for free content. Selling ebooks then thanking each customer for their purchase is already part of the technology and will certainly become even easier to use as time goes on.

Expand Your Market

Get started today with Win More Clients to increase your contacts, leads, and sales. Learn how marketing automation and engagement strategies can attract leads, increase sales and wow your target market into becoming not just repeat customers, but also enthusiastic promoters of your business, leading to referrals and increased revenue.