3 Simple Tips for Using Marketing Automation to Get Ahead of Your Competition

Is your business inundated with the latest technology? Has your team tried navigating which marketing programs and platforms are worth the investment? Cutting through the noise and selecting the best processes for your organization can be a lot of work. Your business should invest in marketing automation to thrive in this ever-changing environment.

Marketing automation utilizes software to support digital marketing campaigns. The software allows organizations to streamline campaign management. Think of it as a program that can help your organization with reporting, analysis, audience segmentation, website monitoring, and even lead scoring. Inevitably, getting ahead of the competition by increasing leads and productivity.

Setting up marketing automation can be quite an undertaking, but here are some simple tips to get started.

Implement gradually

As companies tap into digital marketing and find tools to help them manage it, automation programs are enabling them to beat their competition. The process of onboarding automation processes can be intimidating, especially for those who are unfamiliar with technology. Depending on your company size, budget, and resources (including personnel), gradually implementing the technology might be the best choice.

Before purchasing any marketing automation tools, learn how your team spends their time. Then, find the tasks that take up the most time with little return on investment. This is a wonderful way to see where marketing automation can effectively fit in and how it should be implemented. If there are multiple areas where your team could use automation, start with one area. Let your team and the IT area get a feel for how to set up the automation. Then, if all goes well, you can begin to use automation in other areas.

Segment your audiences

No matter how you plan to use marketing automation, understanding your audience is key to success. It would help to segment your audience from the beginning to understand better who they are and what they like. Depending on your business’s service, you should break down your audience for what will most effectively work for you. Location, age, or where the customer is in the sales funnel are some examples. From here, your automation can be more targeted to each customer, increasing the likelihood that they will move through the funnel and become a strong lead.

Push users down the funnel

What happens when a customer opens an email from your business and clicks through to your website? Do you reach out to the consumer to remind them where they left off? Or do you count it as a page visit and move on to the next potential sale? If your business goes with the latter, marketing automation could help you keep those missing leads.

This would involve creating a point system to track engagement and prioritize leads. Also known as dynamic segmentation, this system will break down audience characteristics by user engagement. Each engagement with your site or content will mean something. Take the example previously mentioned. If the customer visits your page from your email, their new segmentation will push them to the level of the sales funnel. After signing up for emails, the customer took an additional step to learn more about your product. Each step the customer takes towards a sale will be recorded, and change the messaging to them moving forward.

Now, with these three simple tips for using marketing automation, you can begin the process of pushing your business ahead of the competition.