5 Steps To Creating The Ultimate Marketing Automation Strategy

A successful marketing automation strategy is the holy grail of the business world. If you get it right, a good strategy can catapult your business into the big leagues. 

Marketing automation strategies are designed to help raise the value of your business and products, push sales and keep customers coming back for more. It does this by taking tasks that used to need doing manually and automates them all. Client management, testing websites, generating emails and tracking the performance of your strategy are some of the tasks that automation software can help with, giving you time to focus on making sure that your strategy is as strong as it can be. 

To create the best strategy, you must make sure that from the outset you have a clear idea about your audience, your goals and be able to come up with content that sets you apart from the rest and appeals to your audience more than other competitors. So here are 5 steps to help you create the ultimate marketing automation strategy:

1) Foundations

Start by using automation tools to look at your target audience. This will help paint a picture about how they work and what they are looking for. These tools can help you look at things like how many clicks, page views, time spent on a page, content being most interacted with, social media interactions and things they are downloading, which will help you create strong leads.

2) Customer lists

Once you have identified your target audiences and gathered data on their behaviours and needs, a good idea would to be create lists. You could have a list for new leads (first-time customers), leads that are consistent (customers that come back every now again) and leads that are hot (customers that come back more than average). These lists will help you prioritise the groups you need to target and work on. From that, you can start working on tailored email automation. Tailored email automation is the biggest tool used when it comes to automated marketing. To add an extra layer to email automation it is a good idea to include links to articles, blogs or other products that may be of interest to them based on what they have clicked on, purchased or expressed interest in. This will make them feel valued and thought about, which will help you maintain their custom. The key to successful email automation is high quality, lower frequency. Find out more about email marketing with this great article - Why Use Email Marketing? If You Hate Spam Emails, So Will Your Customers....

3) Content

After looking at the data collected you can then think about ways of promoting your content. The easiest way to do this is through tailored emails. Tailored emails, as mentioned above, are a quick and easy way to cover a large number of people, and a safe and sure way of generating new leads. However, all companies heavily rely on this method meaning customers can sometimes see this as a nuisance and have the tendency to ignore emails. You want to avoid doing this so other avenues e.g. social media, online videos, apps etc. are key to focus on.

An example of a successful automotive social media strategy comes from the car manufacturer BMW. BMW run a very simple Facebook page sharing photos of their cars every now and again, encouraging the public to get involved and share their own photos on the posts. This makes people feel part of the brand, it makes them feel involved and if you feel invested in a company in some way, you are more likely to buy. It is thought that BMW get around 30,000 likes per post and in one year they have increased their Facebook following from 13.4m to 17.2m through the photo posting alone. 

4) Teamwork

Working closely with the sales team is important. Marketing automation tools help you set up automated workflows which help give the team all the knowledge they need to develop content that they can use in their sales process. You can also help the sales team out further by setting up automated alerts that get sent through to specific sales representatives when a specific customer or lead returns to the website.

5) Monitoring

Another important factor when creating the ultimate marketing automation strategy is monitoring performances. You can use the automation tool to help track how your campaigns are working and alter if necessary.

It is important when thinking about all of this to remember to keep it fun. The stats and business side of it are very important but make sure not to lose sight of who you are doing it for, the customers. Implementing quality, well thought out, engaging content to help nurture and preserve leads, while working as a team to evolve and adapt the blueprint will help you develop the ultimate marketing automation strategy.