How to Develop a Successful Marketing Automation Strategy

Marketing is complex. The processes are endless, and many steps are involved (especially with online marketing).

So how do you simplify everything? How do you make marketing easier?

The answer is automation. We’ll break down what it is below and how to develop strategies for automation!

What is Marketing Automation?

It means outsourcing marketing to AIs or robots.

Many programs can take over the routine tasks related to marketing. And specifically, we mean marketing that looks at sending automated messages through:

• Social media
• Email
• Advertising

Set those up, and you save hundreds of hours and dollars!

But why automate your marketing? What are the pros to doing so, and what are you outsourcing exactly?

We’ll discuss all of those details below!

The Pros of Automated Marketing

First, it’s effective to the point of becoming a business standard.

As of 2022, 51% of businesses in the US have marketing automation strategies. Plus, 58% of B2B should adopt them throughout 2022.

This makes marketing automation less of a nuance and more of a requirement. Within the next five years, expect it to be a staple marketing approach!

Second, automated marketing has increased leads for 80% of businesses, with sales productivity rising by 14.5%.

So it’s profitable, and it gives your business a chance to attract more clients!

The third and most obvious advantage is cost-effectiveness. You can now have fewer people on your marketing team.

Through automated marketing and easy-to-use micro-interactions on your website, you can outsource routine work to software that’ll track, contact, and generate more leads for you!

With that, you can’t just adopt any marketing strategy you find online. You need to craft a strategy that works for your industry, products, and the kinds of clients you’ll attract…

Developing a Successful Marketing Automation Strategy (5 Steps)

You’ll need to do some manual work before relying on automation. This’ll include the following steps.

1. Research Your Market

One of the cons of automation is that it requires initial input on your part. Automated software does not track new markets and trends by itself.

You need to research to find out which products work best in your line of service (and) the kinds of customers you want to attract.

Jaden Oh, Marketing Director at TRAFFV says, “To boost your research, use marketing analytics and data visualization solutions to create reports and share dashboards with the team and stakeholders. It’ll make your research outcomes comprehensive and representative.”

2. Define Your Ideal Customer

You need a profile of the demographics of your marketing targets. You can develop multiple profiles (but not too many). This should be the main result of your research. When creating profiles of ideal customers, focus on metrics that matter to your sales, says Gene Fitzgerald, Head of Marketing at Best Osmosis Systems.

For example, let’s assume you’re selling transcription services. Your main selling point is that you have US-Based employees that guarantee the highest accuracy possible. In this case, your pricing may not be the cheapest, but you are the best. So, you’ll need to consider who might buy your services. In this case, it could be it’s someone in the legal field looking for someone to handle court transcriptions.

You can further hone and detail your profile through research. Referencing the past example, you can look at the age groups more likely to buy diet food.

3. Set Your Marketing Goals

Before picking software, you need to define what you’re trying to achieve. You can aim for the five goals below. Though if you’re just starting one, we recommend approaching one goal at a time:

• Setting up real-time performance measurements. This is needed if you’re trying to A/B test different marketing approaches. You can use time-tracking software to measure timely performances.
• Acquiring and retaining more customers. Email and LinkedIn automation tools help you access more targets while following up better with existing ones.
• Personalizing your campaigns. When you automate marketing campaigns using PPC management software, you can use more of your time to interact in person with customers.
• Offering a payment plan to your customers that they can pay by credit card is extremely attractive and will increase your conversion rate, says Leo Ye, Co-founder and CEO of CUBO.

4. Track the Correct Metrics

So you’ve defined your customer profile and marketing goals. Next, you need to define the metrics you’ll focus on. Those metrics should define how successful you are in reaching your marketing goals.

For example, if your goal is customer retention, then values to look at include:

• Repeat traffic to your pages
• % of sales from repeat customers

Or, if your goal is to personalize campaigns, then you should look at metrics such as:

• Customer satisfaction (through reviews, increased referrals, etc.)
• Frequency of emails from customers

5. Pick Automation Campaigns

Choose software or platform that allows for marketing automation. For example, if your goal is email automation, you can try sales management software such as:

• MailChimp
• HubSpot
• Snov.io
• GetResponse

If your goal is to set up performance measures, then you’re aiming for analytics platforms, such as:

• Google Analytics
• Clicky
• Mixpanel

Maybe you want a platform for SEO automation. In that case, you can try:

• SEMRush
• Moz Pro
• Ahrefs

Maybe you need to integrate social media feeds on the website such as you must try –

• Taggbox to add live IG media feed
• Pixlee
• Tagembed
• SaveMyLeads
• ApiX-Drive

Launch Your Strategy: Review Results

Keep in mind that marketing strategies are dynamic. You don’t set them in stone and move on.

Milosz Krasinski, Managing Director at Chilli Fruit Web Consulting says, “You should track their success at fulfilling your goals. This means constantly reviewing and adapting your strategy for the market. We recommend giving your strategy around 2 months before reviewing its performance. If a certain channel or tactic isn’t working, don’t be afraid to pivot to something that will.”

And remember, social media is always changing. What works today might not work tomorrow. So it’s important to stay nimble and adaptable in your approach.

Since this is a long timeframe, you should be testing multiple strategies at once and comparing each one’s results!

Build Better Sales Funnels

Sales funnels connect your automated marketing to your store’s “buy now” buttons. You’ll need to modify them too. Why? While you may have a successful automation strategy that gets you clicks, your funnel may not be convincing enough to keep customers around!

Sales funnels aside, something else you can work on in is…

Building an Email Auto-Responder

Building an email auto-responder saves you time, ensuring you can welcome new clients (and update old clients) in record time. You do so by creating segmented lists. Each list contains multiple emails, and your written messages can automatically be sent to them all at once. Each, of course, is customized by the platform with the personal data of the client – allowing you to personalize communication with them, says Claudia Torres, Founder of TheFab20s. Don’t forget to secure your email domain with email authentication protocols like DMARC.

Wrapping Up

Automation isn’t difficult. It’s like testing a new tool or adding a new routine to your life. But it saves you time and money and gives you better and faster outcomes. Many businesses are adopting it today, so expect it to be a marketing requirement tomorrow!