6 MARKETING AUTOMATION TACTICS YOU SHOULD CONSIDER
Marketing is a creative and highly inventive domain and yet there are several actions that simply become repetitive in time. Nowadays, every marketer has the option of upgrading their workflow by automating some of the jobs and functions. There are quite a few marketing automation tools available that will definitely make campaigns run faster and smoother.
But what is marketing automation ? This term defines the process of transforming certain marketing activities and operations into automatic ones. Using specialized software, several routine tasks, such as email campaigns, social media posts and even some advertisements, can be efficiently automated.
Marketing automation is able not only to increase the level of efficiency for these tactics, but also to secure more customized content on media platforms.
Efficient marketing strategies rely on a combination of two factors: software and planning. Locking these in can provide a greater number of leads for your brand and help your company turn those prospects into loyal customers which benefit from personalized, practical content.
The successful marketing automation process can be poetically compared to growing a garden: you nourish the seeds (marketing leads) until they grow into fully developed plants (satisfied clients).
Next you may find 6 decisive marketing tasks that can be easily automated in order to achieve optimum results for any marketing strategy or campaign.
1. EMAIL MARKETING TACTICS
Email marketing automation is one of the first steps to take, due to its simplicity and proven efficiency. Since the great majority of marketing strategies entail email campaigns, creating automatic emails for sign-up or registration forms, as well as ebooks and reports is only logical. Plus, it can be a real time saver and also replace and boost downloads from browsers on individual computers.
- Email newsletters
You have plenty of options to streamline the email newsletters operation, while saving both time and effort. You can begin with basic actions like designing email templates or duplicate headers and thus simplify and speed up the production process. Afterwards, you can opt for more complex automation tools that are appropriate to your specific needs and objectives.
- Drip Campaigns
Email drip campaigns are crucial to any digital strategy and they are, without a doubt, the favorites of the marketing automation tactics. The first task is to automatically sign up your contacts for campaigns based on clear criteria, like the purchase of particular products or services or opt-in emails. Only then you can start sending automated emails with personalized content at specific periods of time.
Another thing worth mentioning is that drip campaigns work better with a firm objective for the leads, subscribing to a paid plan, for instance. Therefore, when a target is reached, the customers can be automatically switched from that drip campaign to a different one.
Check out this straightforward example of a drip campaign built by GetResponse:
2. SOCIAL MEDIA TACTICS
- Facebook Bots
A very useful marketing automation tool, the Facebook chatbot is able to generate leads that can be truly influential and highly personalized at the same time. Its main function is to assist the leads throughout the conversion process.
Take a look at this simple example of an automated content delivered via Facebook Messenger:
- Social Media Scheduling
One of the most effective instruments in marketing automation is a social media management app that can expedite your media posts and schedule them in advance. Buffer, for instance, can streamline your social media calendar, help you upload assets and post at your chosen pace, amongst many other features.
Buffer Analytics introduced the ‘Share Again’ button, a practical feature that allows users to reschedule posts with previous satisfying results and which don’t require any changes.
Lately, social media platforms are changing on a regular basis and as they become more and more diverse, they gain traction in front of other paid or organic channels.
3. LEAD GENERATION TACTICS
One of the most common challenges brands have to overcome is creating and implementing proper, smart lead generation tactics. Even if you lack inspiration, there are various techniques and strategies available that include refined ways of lead generation automation.
The Minimalists is a group of bloggers and podcasters who built a remarkable lead gen, a model of simplicity that can bring in significant results:
- Website Banner Promotions
Upcoming or ongoing promos advertised on your website can be real opportunities for lead generation. By inserting a discreet banner on your homepage you can draw attention to and inform visitors about future webinars, soon-to-expire offers, and many other exciting projects.
- Landing Page Call To Actions (CTA’s)
Another bright tactic to generate more leads is to make it easier for visitors to check your website in depth, page after page. The more time they spend on your site, the higher are the chances of becoming actual customers. Marie Forleo has come up with a truly creative solution for boosting time-on-site, the “New here? Click me” button on the blog headers.
Such a button can be efficiently designed to automatically appear either on a blog’s homepage or on each of the blog posts’ headers or anywhere you think it might be helpful.
- Dynamic CTAs
One of the many advantages of using marketing automation tools is the wide range of alternatives they supply. HubSpot Marketing, for instance, is the creator of Smart CTAs, valuable instruments that attract visitors through tailored incentives.
You ought to seriously consider integrating a Smart CTA in the sidebar of your website or in a blog post, as it allows you to provide a complex, versatile online content. For example, you can promote a product-focused webinar to potential clients, while entertaining new visitors with excellent, up-to-date content.
4. CONTENT TACTICS
Dynamic content can be a powerful tool for any brand, as it can turn leads into actual customers faster, at an accelerated rate. By definition, this type of content will automatically present each visitor information that’s most relevant to them. One of the best examples in the field is HubSpot that adds smart content to website and destination pages, templates or emails.
Once you decide to use smart content tools, the marketing automation process carries on with content partition, an operation quite similar to audience segmentation. One way to complete this step is by splitting the content into categories, such as:
- Country
- Preferred language
- Device type
- Reference source
- Contact list membership
- Contact lifecycle stage
Content Production Queue
The production process is sometimes a true extensive undertaking, which is why marketers rely on various tools to make their life easier, the most popular being content automation. On this line of work, Trello is a project management app that can deliver several automation options you might find very useful. They include managing the content queue of your team, keeping track of the content pipeline or following the team’s schedule. The latter functions on hundreds of logical algorithms, written by an automation feature named Butler.
5. SEO TACTICS
- SEO Site Audit
There are numerous tools available for you to use when improving your SEO or keeping the website issues under control. Recruiting SEO freelancers for particular projects, like conducting audits, building out roadmaps and automating some of the optimization tactics can be a sensible way to keep the cost in check.
Furthermore, companies of all types and from all industries are now familiar with software like Ahrefs or SEMrush and use their vast features specially designed to increase a brand’s search presence.
One more tool of interest is the Site Audit, built to examine every area of a website, identify and record all issues and in the end rank them by type and priority level. The audit can be rescheduled at specific periods of time, to check for new potential problems and consider possible upgrades.
Therefore, although financially feasible, an in-house SEO expert may not always be the best option for marketing strategies.
- Keyword Research
A beneficial component of marketing automation tools, keyword research enables you to easily track all the keywords you are targeting and also recognize new prospects in areas of related topics. In addition, you can run competitive analysis to detect keyword gaps between you and your major competitors.
6. MARKETING-SALES TACTICS
- Upselling Customers
Successful marketing strategies don’t target only prospects, but also existing customers. For that reason, marketing automation plays an important part in building an upselling strategy to determine your clients to upgrade the products and services they are already loyal to. Upselling techniques include automated emails, smart CTAs or display ads.
- Live Chat
Live-chat has actually grown in the last couple of years, turning from a subtle touch into a crucial, must-have instrument for brands of all types and sizes. After all, customers will always appreciate an efficient and easy to reach service department where they can get the information or the answers they need.
Some of the live chat apps, like Drift, allow you to set up automatic chatbots which practically help you pinpoint true marketing leads.
- Lead Scoring
Lead scoring tools are quite useful in tracking engagement effectively and identifying the leads with the highest potential, the ones you should focus on.
There are several resources available, such as ActiveCampaign, for example, that simply function on a rewarding and deducting points system. They analyze visitors’ behavior and level of engagement, like a lead downloading pricing lists or other website content.
- Automated Product Demo Video
Marketo is an inspiring example of automated lead generation, covering its demo video in an online form that collects data from leads.
What does good vs bad marketing automation look like?
Even though, at the beginning, marketing automation relied solely on scheduled emails and on email opens and clicks, this field looks so much different nowadays. A marketing strategy based on customized leads is no longer a recipe for success. Current automation tactics are bound to be more intricate, in order to attract leads and spike their interests and ultimately turn them into real customers.
Marketing automation is much more efficient when it is based on an inbound strategy, centered around leads. Inbound marketing automation uses all the collected data to offer the leads what they want to know and when they want to know it, so they could make an informed decision to purchase your product or service.
An efficient marketing automation process includes all aspects of targeted leads, from their ever-growing needs and online purchase behavior to interactions on multiple media channels.
The bottom line is, successful marketing automation is a complex procedure that goes beyond email strategies. If you want to really understand your leads’ pain points and make sure your product is just the right solution to those, you need to be aware of the multiple channels that impact a client’s decision, including social media, inspecting a pricing page or a certain piece of content.
