What is Marketing Automation?

The business landscape is rapidly changing, which means organizations are starting to shift from a product focus to a more customer-oriented approach. A reliable marketing strategy is becoming a vital part of any business plan, and it’s especially crucial for growing businesses, such as start-ups, small and medium enterprises or scale-ups. Marketing indeed helps businesses to succeed but can be time-consuming and repetitive. This is when marketing automation comes in handy.

When developing your marketing automation strategy think about your customer’s journey and the touchpoints between the business and the client. You start with the ideal avatar and build your way up to finding that avatar online and connecting through the company website, social media platforms, newsletters, mobile applications, and so on.

But how can you convert a cold lead who visited your website once to a loyal brand advocate? The answer is simple: through lead nurturing.

This is a long process, but with the right tools, your leads will be seamlessly guided through the purchase funnel and converted into customers. It’s the marketing department’s responsibility to be there for the customer every step of the way. Now all you have do is to develop and implement a winning marketing automation strategy to correlate three main digital marketing areas, such as email marketing, social media, and landing pages.

One aspect important to remember is that marketing automation is not a tool to acquire leads and prospects, but a tool to nurture them.

If you want to start implementing marketing automation in your business strategy, these are the top five tools worth considering:

• Hubspot’s program allows you to tailor emails, content, and offers according to the lead’s behaviour.
• Marketo’s software has many benefits but in essence, it’s there to target, attract and engage with your customers throughout the entire buying journey.
• Customer.io helps automate not only your email marketing strategy, but sending SMSes, push, slack and webhooks.
• Constant Contact is an affordable solution to develop email and online marketing campaigns.
• Pardot’s solutions help with lead generation, email marketing, and sales processes, among other tasks.

Now let’s dig deeper and have a look at the main stages of marketing automation that convert your leads into brand advocates:

1. Lead generation: to capture attention, you can offer a freebie — like a document available for download — on your website. In exchange for the download, you gather that person’s name and email address, which gets automatically added to your company’s mailing list.
2. From cold to warm lead: a couple of days after the download, send an email with some information on the same topic the prospective client showed initial interest in. Repeat this a couple of days later by providing another interesting piece of information. The next email sent needs to be more interactive. Invite your subscribers to attend a webinar on the topic, for example.
3. Warm lead to customer: now that you increased the interest of your subscribers, it’s time to convert them into customers by sending product offers, ideally with a discount.
4. One-time customer to a life-long customer: retain the interest of your customers by upselling, offering higher-end products, cross-selling with complimentary items or suggesting seasonal products, known as cycle-based selling.

Before incorporating marketing automation techniques into your overall marketing strategy, make sure you understand your customer’s needs, likes and dislikes, the online platforms they are using and how they research and purchase desired products or services.

By implementing a marketing automation system, you will be able to have a better overview of what is working, increase your sales, reduce the cost and time spent acquiring customers, and win new brand advocates.

SPIN Ideas is a strategy marketing agency, focusing on startups and SMS. We help our clients find their place in the market and grow. You want to hear more about what we do and have monthly marketing updates, subscribe to SPIN Ideas’ Journal.