A decade ago, businesses were still trying to wrap their minds around digital technology and modern solutions, but now most start-ups invest in these innovations before anything else. When dipping into a heavily competitive niche, your business needs to offer something unique and unforgettable for it to stay ahead of competitors. This is where marketing automation software can help organizations provide better experiences and achieve their bottom line.
Nowadays, most brands seek heightened exposure to drive sales and retain customer engagement. To place your business at the top of the market and in front of your audience’s mind, then you should consider marketing automation. It can streamline your social campaigns, eliminate repetitive tasks, schedule engaging and compelling content, and drive positive leads.
This article addresses all you need to know about setting up marketing automation for your business.
1. Outline your goals
Before you begin anything, it’s essential to address what you wish to achieve with marketing automation. Whether it’s for revenue growth, lead generation, exposure and brand awareness, or better customer relationships – it should be specified as each of them would require a different strategy tailored to its objectives.
Clearly identifying and stating these goals can help you recognize the metrics you need to track and how to improve those numbers. This requires you to go over your existing marketing strategy and performance reports so you can compare and make adjustments after the implementation of the automation system.
After defining your goals, you need the right resources and tools to put your marketing strategy into action. This calls for a tool that puts all required metrics in front of you and aids in monitoring the engagement metrics from one dashboard.
- Automated Social Media Tools
Hootsuite and Buffer are some of the most valuable social media management tools to help businesses manage their social campaigns effectively and amplify their reach. They have a repository of tools and solutions that can transform your enterprise and build long-term customer relationships. One of which includes, automated scheduling which allows marketers to save time and schedule posts across different social networks. You can plan your content in advance after collaborating with team members and view your scheduled posts on a content calendar. This allows marketers to easily manage, approve, and edit posts according to their posting time under a single platform.Additionally, marketers can curate content according to customer interests, location searches, and more so they can share quality content regularly. Teams can save pre-approved posts and schedule relevant and valuable content for different social campaigns accordingly. The concept behind automating these posts is that it saves time from assigning someone to share posts every day and instead let the software do the posting for you. Moreover, you can track the performance of your shared content and campaigns to get a deeper understanding of your audience. The tool generates reports based on audience behaviors, and engagement metrics that are can be transformed into actionable information.
2. Audit Existing Content
Once you’ve specified your marketing automation objectives, it’s important to understand the performance of your existing content strategy. This requires an in-depth analysis of the content that is on your webpages and the engagement it receives. In simpler terms, auditing content helps you identify your best performing content and how close it brings you to achieving your bottom line. It will also help you uncover areas that have insufficient or poor content so you can modify them accordingly. A powerful tool for website audit is ScreamingFrog SEO Spider, which comes with a repository of features and helps enhance onsite SEO, amongst other advantages.
3. Create relevant content
If you want people to find out about your brand, then you need to create content that is compelling and interesting. The internet is filled with vast amounts of information, which makes it harder for your content to be found; however, if you follow some basic principles, it can boost your brand’s visibility online.
The advantage of working with marketing automation is that you can work with existing content and make it better. You don’t have to spend hours trying to come up with a breakthrough topic; instead, find out what’s popular amongst your niche and what they’re searching for. If you’re a carpet cleaning company in London and want more visibility, then track the keywords that are being used to search for services like yours. You can use the appropriate keywords in your content and use the marketing automation software to integrate the keyword in all the text that goes on the site and social media. This way, prospects that search for the term “carpet cleaning Dartford” will be directed towards your services and boost conversion rate.
4. Track Audience Flows
After employing marketing automation, you wait to see if there is any improvement or changes in the way prospects perceive your business and whether any action is taken once they land on your webpage. Tracking the user flow can help you identify how long a visitor spends on your site before they take any action.
Some users land on your website with the intent to make a purchase, whether it’s via organic search, social campaign, email, etc. On the other hand, some require more information and browsing before they’re convinced to make a purchase or leave the site. There are numerous solutions dedicated to tracking user flows and other valuable insights that can help marketers rank and segment leads. In doing so, they can find out which stage a lead is and what approach should be taken for them.
The way a prospect engages with your site and content mirrors the readiness of their conversion status. Marketing automation creates a sort of lead-scoring model based on the actions and behavior of leads on the site. As a result, you can decide who requires more information and who can be handled by the sales team.
Wrapping Up
After implementing these steps, keep in mind that measuring and tracking the success of your efforts is imperative. Treat this as a learning process and navigate what works best for your business and helps drive better results. Some companies require a more comprehensive strategy, while others can generate leads through traditional email marketing. Consider these key steps before diving into marketing automation, so you have all the right tools and resources needed to make your investment worthwhile.
Shaheryar provides ghostwriting and copywriting services. His educational background in the technical field and business studies helps him in tackling topics ranging from career and business productivity to web development and digital marketing. He occasionally writes articles for Carpet Cleaning Dartford.