As the old adage goes, there are only two guarantees in life: death and taxes. The last time I checked, there are always 24 hours in a day as well. No one has figured out a way to extend their day beyond 24 hours (I’m sure in a lab somewhere they’re trying to nail this down). With only 24 hours in a day, there’s only a few ways for a small business to increase output: hire more people, work more hours, or automate. Automation allows businesses to outsource repetitive tasks while still maintaining control over the customer experience. One of the best use cases for automation is in digital marketing. Marketing automation software and workflows allow lean, budget conscious small businesses build a marketing agency like marketing team for a very minimal investment. Now you can attract, engage, and convert your traffic into customers.

There are a plethora of marketing automation software in the industry. Before diving into what marketing automation platform might suit your needs best, you have to understand the basics and know your why. A good marketing automation platform is only as good as the input you provide. A tool is just a tool, if you don’t know how to use it or why you’re using it in the first place.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is a process of using technology to automate digital marketing tasks. This could include tasks such as email marketing, social media marketing, and lead management.

Email Marketing Automation

Email marketing automation (EMA) is a powerful email marketing tool that can help you to attract and engage prospects, and convert them into customers. EMA can help you to automate the process of sending email campaigns to your email marketing lists, increasing the likelihood that your messages will be received and acted upon. Email marketing tools can also help you to track and measure the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, providing valuable insights that can help you to improve your marketing strategy.

Social Media Automation

Social media automation is a process of using marketing automation software to automatically post content on social media platforms. This can be done through an app, an email service, or a website. Automation can help to increase the frequency and quality of posts, as well as the reach and engagement of the posts.

Lead Management Automation

Lead management automation can help you and your sales team manage the customer journey process more effectively and efficiently. By automating your customer journey process, you can reduce the time it takes to process and respond to leads, and increase the chances of converting them into customers; resulting in a net positive customer journey experience.

How can you use marketing automation to attract, engage, and convert prospects?

Below, we will go over a few steps to cover the basics of how to use marketing automation to achieve your digital marketing goals and ensure you’re utilizing your marketing automation platform to its fullest and generate positive ROI for your marketing campaigns.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

The first step in using marketing automation is to define your goals. What do you want to achieve with your automation? Are you looking to increase leads or conversions? Do you want to reduce costs or increase efficiency? Once you have a clear goal in mind, it’s easier to choose the right tools and tactics for achieving it.

What do you want to achieve with your marketing automation?

There are a number of reasons why businesses might want to use marketing automation. Some might want to increase the efficiency of their marketing operations, while others might simply want to improve their customer engagement rates.

There are a number of different marketing automation tools on the market, so it’s important to choose the one that best suits your needs. Some of the most popular tools include lead gen forms, email marketing software, and social media automation. It’s important to choose the right tool for the job, as overuse of any one tool can lead to decreased effectiveness.

Ultimately, the goal is always the same: to attract more customers.

Do you want to reduce costs and increase efficiency with the help of marketing automation?

Marketing automation software can be a great way to reduce costs or increase efficiency. For example, if you have a large customer list, marketing automation can help you target your messages more accurately and save time by automating the process of sending emails, creating landing pages, or sending out notifications. Mobile marketing automations for SMS, push notifications and even geo-location make it almost impossible to hide from marketing messaging when the customer is on the go.

Step 2: Choose the Right Tools

There are a variety of marketing automation tools available on the market, so it’s important to choose the right one for your business. Some of the most popular options include email marketing, lead capture forms, and social media automation. It’s important to select the right marketing automation tool for your specific needs, as not all tools are created equal. For example, email marketing is a great way to reach a large audience quickly, but it can be less effective when it comes to lead capture forms. Social media automation can be incredibly helpful when it comes to building relationships with potential customers, but it can be less effective when it comes to lead capture forms. It’s important to select the right automation tool and marketing automation software for your business and to test it out before investing in it.

Some of the most popular marketing automation tools in the industry include:

Social Media Marketing Automation Software: Hootsuite, Buffer, Ocoya, Publer, and Predis.ai — A social media marketing automation solution helps businesses manage their social media accounts, schedule posts, track analytics, and more. They provide deep customer data insight on demographics to help you build customer personas. Some of these platforms also use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to determine best posting times and types (such as motivational, educational, promotional, etc.) to capture the attention of a potential customer.

Email Marketing Automation Software: MailChimp, Vbout, SendInBlue, Mailjet, Klavio, and Drip — An email marketing automation solution helps organizations send and manage email campaigns more efficiently and effectively. By automating email marketing tasks, such as sending content based on predetermined criteria, you can save time and resources while also increasing the likelihood of receiving a response. Additionally, email automation can help you track and measure your campaign success in attracting and engaging a customer with AB testing, which can help you make informed decisions about future marketing initiatives.

Lead Generation and Growth Marketing Automation Software: Hubspot, Salesforce, and ActiveCampaign — Growth marketing platforms are typically Swiss Army knives of the automated marketing industry. These tools typically handle the entire gamut of digital marketing, while not specializing in any particular area. These types of inbound marketing automation software help:

Identify and nurture sale leads
Capture customer information
Send targeted content
Trigger automated follow up
Track and measure results with Google Analytics

Content Marketing Automation Software: Marketmuse, Frase, Wordsmith, and SurferSEO — A content marketing system helps a small business:

Identify and curate high-quality content
Create a content marketing schedule to ensure your customer is digesting fresh content
Build trust and loyalty by becoming a subject matter expert
Generate organic leads from SEO content marketing strategy
Trigger automated customer interactions
Track and measure results

Content marketing is one of the most important aspects for growing organically within any niche. It’s one of the slowest areas to see an ROI, but one that will dramatically affect a small business in the long run. Inbound content marketing allows a highly intentional organic customer find your business.

Bonus content – AI Writers for Content Generation: Jasper, Copy Smith, Rytr, Writecream, ClosersCopy, and CrawlQ— This is one of the newest, and perhaps most exciting developments in automation marketing. Machine learning models such as OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-J are trainable models that allow people/companies develop their own writers. AI Content generators, such as the one listed above, run on these models based on extensive inputs that have been built over time. The higher quality the input, the higher the quality of the output. While this technology has made great strides in easing the burden of copywriting and developing content, they still have a long way to go to replacing an experienced marketer.

Process Automation Software: Zapier, SyncSpider, Pabbly, Integrately, and n8n.io — Automation platforms such as the ones listed here have been around for awhile and have drastically changed the digital landscape. Almost every aspect of the customer journey can be automated with these tools; from customer service self help prompts to live chat recordings with triggered actions, to lead funnel generation and follow ups. Any modern age marketing strategy must include an automation software such as these.

Step 3: Set Up Your Marketing Automation Process

Now that you have a list of prospects and have determined their needs, it’s time to set up your marketing automation process. The first step is to create a funnel. This is simply a chart that shows how prospects progress through your marketing automation system. The first step is to identify your lead generation sources. These can be email campaigns, social media, or other forms of lead generation. Once you have a list of leads, you need to set up your autoresponder sequence. This will determine when the leads are contacted and how they are contacted. The next step is to set up your landing pages and conversion tracking. This will help you see how many people convert on your landing pages and how much money they spend. Finally, you

Step 4: Track and Optimize

Once you have gathered customer data and optimized your marketing campaign, it’s important to track and analyze your results. This will help you to determine whether your marketing efforts are producing the desired results, and identify any areas in which you may need to adjust your strategy.

Data has quickly become the new oil. Data is becoming more and more valuable as we move into the future. Data is what allows companies to track their customers and understand their needs. This data can then be used to create targeted marketing campaigns that will attract and engage customers. Creating customer personas and models helps small business gain traction against larger companies by understanding their consumer and making a deeper connection with them.

Marketing automation software can help you achieve your digital marketing goals and help you understand your customer data. Having the right tool could be the reason you boost the ROI of your marketing campaign. It is important to choose the right tools and set up your process correctly. Be sure to track and optimize your results so you can continue to improve your marketing efforts and grow your small business.

Interested in learning more about Marketing Automation? Reach out to HeyOtto today!

Attract, Engage, and Convert: Using Marketing Automation to Drive Traffic