One of the most powerful outreach tools for businesses is marketing automation. This allows businesses more flexibility and efficiency in marketing and can result in a greater return on investment. In what follows, you’ll learn about the best marketing automation strategies that can make your business stand out against the competition!
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is a method of systematically managing your brand’s interactions with your audience. This allows them to be more efficient and focus on other aspects of their business.
Why Should You Create a Marketing Automation Plan?
It’s important to make a marketing automation plan because it can save a lot of time. It’s scalable, allowing your business to grow its marketing engine into the future. It’s also more efficient, allowing you to make greater gains with less investment. It’s ideal for smaller businesses with limited time and staff. With less time spent, a smaller workforce is needed!
According to TrueList, marketing automation produces 451% more leads. Businesses that use marketing automation also see a growth in productivity of 20%.
In addition, marketing automation allows for greater reporting and data management. This makes it possible to review the progress of your business and make informed adjustments and improvements. This technology also allows for customer personalization in the form of targeted suggestions, as well as improved branding and customer service.
How to Create Marketing Automation Strategies with Examples
Planning out what tasks you need to be automated with your team is a great way to get started with creating your marketing automation strategy. It’s important to find software that can fit the needs of your business. You’ll need to review and update your plan consistently as you go by reviewing the data you’ve collected. This will ensure that your marketing is relevant and valuable to your customers.
Social Media Automation
One of the easiest ways to achieve marketing automation is through social media scheduling. For example, you can schedule Instagram and Pinterest content in bulk. This makes it easier to focus on the big picture.
Email Marketing
Just as you can with social media posts, email can be scheduled too! Make plans to send out newsletters and other emails to your subscribers. You can also plan to automate promotional emails and transactional ‘thank you’ emails to customers after they make a purchase. By sliding targeted deals into their inboxes, they’ll be more likely to come back.
Customer Service
Marketing automation can be an effective first step in customer service. If customers send in emails or engage with website chatbots, automation tools can send users messages to help them find quick answers or to let them know that your team is working on helping them.
Generating Data Reports
Automating your marketing isn’t just about engaging with customers. It’s also about improving your strategies over time. Automatically generating data-driven reports about your performance is a great way to evaluate your progress and make your business more productive. Another important example of why this data is useful is that it can help tell you when the best time is to push out content.
Content Optimization and Generation
Another important example of marketing automation has to do with optimizing and generating content. Automation tools can help you optimize content that you want to push out to make it more effective. Some tools can even create content for you or help you create high-quality content. In extreme cases, artificial intelligence is already doing much of the heavy lifting. However, it’s important to have a human touch to genuinely connect with your audience.
Social Media Marketing Automation
Social media is a powerful tool for connecting with your audience. Let’s zero in further on how marketing automation can benefit your business’s social media!
What are the Benefits of Marketing Automation for Social Media?
These tools can save you a ton of time. It also allows you to increase your company’s brand awareness. You’ll be able to engage with more followers while creating and maintaining brand consistency.
Examples of Social Media Marketing Automation
Automation tools make it possible to automate social media posts on sites like Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram. You can schedule on individual platforms, but some tools like Tailwind can help you create content for multiple platforms at once.
When creating posts in bulk, you have a chance to optimize them in relation to one another and think more carefully than if you make them at the moment. In some cases, chatbots can help you respond to users who engage with you on social media.
Automation tools can also alert you to important events like social metric milestones or a decrease in metrics. You can also get notifications about relevant social trends and conversations to help you plan your next move.
Email Marketing Automation
When it comes to email marketing, automation can help you nurture leads and customer relationships without a whole lot of intervention. You can also automatically personalize emails for users to suggest relevant deals and products to them. Email marketing can help you build brand awareness as well.
Examples of Email Marketing Automation Strategies
Some of the most popular email marketing automation strategies include:
· Confirmation emails
There are many more examples, but you’ll notice that most of these are transactional emails. These are emails that are generated automatically in response to user actions. However, newsletters are their own category which is made by your team and then scheduled for a future date. They can still be personalized by greeting the user by name!
As we’ve discussed already, marketing automation is helpful not only for keeping a personal touch with customers and followers but also for saving money and time. Let’s talk about some other general applications for strategic marketing automation.
Examples of General Marketing Automation Strategies
Personalized customer onboarding on your website can be an important first step to making a great connection and securing a lead. If you guide them where they need to go, you’ll be more likely to secure a lead. Text message communications can be a great way to communicate transactional messages with users automatically.
Gated content is another approach that businesses can take. This is content that is only accessible if a user fills out a form or provides other information. This not only can expand your contacts list but can build relationships with users automatically by providing them with the information they need to succeed.
Lead scoring is another avenue that can be automated using the data that you have been collecting along the way. By automatically identifying which customers are most likely to buy your products, you can better allocate resources to capture more leads and generate more revenue.
Surveys can help you understand your audience more deeply. Automatically distributing and evaluating these surveys can help save you time when learning about your customers.
Conclusion
Marketing automation is a great choice for small to medium-sized businesses. It not only helps save time and money, but it can also foster relationships with followers, and customers, and generate leads. Automation also helps create a consistent brand image and voice.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. Simple marketing automation is a great place to start and may be just what you need to succeed and grow your business. It can be a great option for businesses looking to make the most out of their marketing budget.
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