The 5 Best Practices Of How To Use Marketing Automation In A Way That Powerfully Grows Your Business

It has become imperative for businesses to deploy marketing automation to remain competitive. In particular, sales teams typically experience a 50% productivity increase post-implementation. When buying a marketing automation tool, it's crucial to implement it strategically to maximize its benefits.

Achieve the most success with marketing automation with these 5 best practices:

Expand Your Horizons in Content Creation.

We need to rethink content creation because it's crucial for businesses. Generally, any URL contains content at some level, whether it is words, photographs, or videos. Content must connect with your target market to attract new customers and strengthen relationships with existing ones.

There is a vast array of potential content that you could incorporate into your marketing initiatives.

Here are some tips and example phrases for incorporating URL links to build out your content:

• Link to thought leader accounts on social media. Compose a post like, “Do you follow Malcolm Gladwell? He is one of my favorite thought leaders!”

• Link to questions on Quora, i.e. “Did you see this discussion on the importance of marketing automation? There are some best practices that you should implement.”

• Share a link to a blog relevant to your customers. You could post, “Here is a blog post you should read on how to manage lead scoring in the CRM of your marketing automation system.”

• Post a link to a useful SlideShare presentation with the message: "Check out this informative guide on how salespeople can use your marketing automation system."

These links direct users to a landing page where you encourage them to share their contact information for content that interests them.

Define Your Buyer Personas

Planning your marketing automation strategy should also begin with defining your buyer personas. These are fictitious customer profiles that are reflective of the different types of customers, influencers, and prospects of your business. You will tailor your workflows and how you personalize your marketing based on your buyer personas. A persona profile may include demographic information, job title, industry, education, and challenges they face.

Marketing Automation Helps Target Prospects Based On Their Stage In the Sales Funnel

Make your content relevant to each stage of your target customer’s journey. Customers like short-form content, like infographics, during the awareness phase, but prefer long-form content later to understand your value in more detail.

Using your content strategy to address questions at every stage helps marketers give precise answers, boosting conversion rates. In addition, you save other content for contextual next steps when you optimally should answer one question at a time. Delivering content in stages is 40 times more effective at generating sales because it aligns with what today's buyers expect.

Use Marketing Automation to Build Agile Marketing Initiatives.

Incorporate the potential of marketing automation first when you plan your marketing initiatives. Develop your marketing initiatives, including lead nurturing programs, using an agile approach to effectively gather feedback over time. We recommend creating nurturing programs that deliver a series of three emails over the course of a week using a marketing automation platform. This builds brand awareness and helps you identify the best leads at any time.

Start small by building sponsored social media posts and setting up retargeting display ads in a “two-two-two” method. Identify the first two segments of your sales cycle and develop two distinct messaging themes to test against each other. Target the ads to the same group, and then pause or reduce the spend for the one that isn’t working, and increase spend for the one ad that is performing. Generate new versions of the winning ad and continue this process for optimal long-term results.

Use marketing automation to remove manual tasks like lead follow up to streamline your sales department. Creating templates for follow-up emails can save time. You can also group prospects after their appointments to improve lead nurturing.

Here are the two activities you must do to gain acceptance of building automated follow-up tasks from your sales department:

• Have your best salesperson provide the content and times of all emails they send. Build nurturing programs using this data to save you the work of creating a program from scratch. Make sure you compose follow-up campaigns using data on how your salespeople currently follow-up with customers.

• Test this follow-up strategy with your best rep once you have built it. Once you win the deal, present this campaign to as many stakeholders as possible to gain the team's support. You will only help your salespeople become even better once you accomplish this.

Leave Room To Grow

There are many automation solutions, ranging from specific tools like standalone email software to comprehensive integrated marketing automation systems. We suggest researching solutions to find the best ones for achieving your business goals effectively. You need to decide how to trigger lead scoring based on content engagement to prioritize content in your CRM automatically according to how people interact with your brand. What happens if a single contact accesses the same report on three separate occasions? What if they don't visit your website for three months? These simple ideas show that a tool to re-engage inactive prospects or target highly engaged clients could be very valuable.

Many businesses outgrow their marketing tools within two years and switch to more advanced options to enhance growth. Choose marketing tools that not only maximize your business growth potential but also align realistically with your current budget.

Selecting the right marketing automation tool can enhance your business success by allowing you to develop your marketing initiatives gradually. This will only maximize the engagement of your prospects and deepen relationships with your existing customers. We are proud to be recognized as a leading Digital Marketing Agency in Massachusetts by Design Rush. Contact us today by emailing us at michael@primemarketingexperts.com or calling us at 617-651-1457 for a free one-hour strategy session on how our marketing automation services can profitably grow your business today.