5 Marketing Automation Best Practices You Can Implement to Outfox Your Competition

Creating and delivering a marketing strategy that works to secure growth for your business is no small task. To cultivate leads you must first put in place a strategy that delivers new and exciting content to keep correspondence going, click through rates up and fundamentally lead to sales.

Below are some marketing automation tips which, if followed, could help you stay ahead of the competition.

Segmentation

Once you have some leads coming in it is a good idea to separate them into different groups based on their specific needs. You can look at the data patterns on downloads, clicks, visitation numbers etc. and work out different customer needs. From this you can then create groups of clients with similar needs. This will help you to tailor specific emails and campaigns rather than sending every person the same content. When you send blanket content out, people are more likely to consider your emails spam and ‘opt out.' If you take the extra time to create target-specific emails, this is more likely to make the customer feel valued, therefore leading to sales.   

Social Media Marketing

Marketing techniques are ever-changing. Whereas once email marketing and telemarketing were king, we have now seen a shift in where the success rate lies. Social media marketing is one of the most powerful routes to follow. Approximately 2.2 billion people worldwide use social media with that being expected to rise to 2.5 billion by 2018. People are more likely to interact with social media posts than emails, people see it as less of a hassle/annoyance. If people are inundated with emails, they are more likely to regard it as spam and either block it or become aggrieved at the company therefore leading to loss of leads. With social media, you also have the potential for a larger audience, with the ‘Sharing’ function (re-posting so family and friends see it too) being popular. This means that not only can you target existing leads, you are likely to generate new ones too.

Content

Coming up with a head-turning campaign is one of the most important factors when thinking about successful marketing. The key is to remember that clients aren’t just cash cows, they are people that want to feel valued and noticed. Injecting humour into campaigns via mini viral videos is a dead cert way of attracting a lot of new leads fast. Getting your audience involved is also another key part to a successful campaign. With Instagram drawing in 300 million users per month we are now seeing the power of pictures. Getting people involved in hashtag campaigns is another great way of generating new leads. A few examples of these include Charmin #TweetFromTheSeat which was seen to break the company’s ‘boring’ image, Coca Cola’s #ShareACoke which gained them a huge new following and allowed them to create more sub-campaigns to keep the ball rolling, and one of the most successful hashtag campaigns, Audi’s #WantAnR8. This campaign is thought to be one of Twitters most successful campaigns, seeing the highest number of interactions and even getting a nod at the 2012 Cannes Lions awards. Learn more about how the Twitter hashtag can benefit your business with this great article - The Power of the Hashtag and How Important it Has Become.

Track Progress

One of marketing automation’s best practices is to keep a track of your data. Because software is automated it is easy to forget about it after a while, but analysing and adjusting all the time is crucial. As mentioned before, the world of marketing is forever changing so it is important to keep your eye on the ball at all times to be able to switch things up if needed. Having weekly progress meetings is a good way of making sure this is achievable.

Teamwork

Once all systems are in place and things are rolling along nicely it is important not to forget to liaise with other team members every now and again to make sure you are taking full advantage of the data you are collecting. The sales team play a vital role so it is useful to set up automation software that can alert them when specific customers, that you want targeting, return to the website. Working closely as a team will help you maximise your full potential. Also, you never know from which employee a great idea might come!

Overall simplicity is key when it comes to marketing automation. People don’t want to feel like they are being force fed stuff, they want to feel like they have discovered it for themselves. The aim is to keep monitoring and changing your approach as necessary to keep the plate spinning. The good thing about marketing automation is that it is flexible and adaptable. You always have the option of changing your tactics and adding to it to try and get the best results!