Marketing Automation. Two words that are currently heard by anyone and everywhere in the marketing world. As Marketing Automation has gained momentum, marketers are quickly looking for the best and easiest way to pull off a successful Marketing Automation strategy.
As marketers are faced with so much choice and information, the key question on every marketer’s mind, is how do you deploy a successful Marketing Automation strategy?
We’ve broken down 6 key steps to help you plan a Marketing Automation strategy for Success:
- Define your Goal
Understanding what you want to achieve from your Marketing Automation strategy is the number one step that leads to success. Defining your goal is essential to understanding what you want to accomplish, and how to do this. To use Marketing Automation effectively, you need to know what elements of the platform to focus upon, and how this will efficiently help you achieve your goal.
- Create Personas and Understand your Buyer’s Journey
The key element to success is understanding who your buyer is and how you are going to address their buyer journey. Personas are an important and extremely effective Marketing Automation tactic, as they allow you to focus in on your target audience and define who they are. For example, are they always looking to try a new thing? A fan of technology, or against change? By creating and knowing your personas, you will be able to use Marketing Automation more effectively to help them through the buyer journey.
By defining a persona to target, you are now more aware of what their potential pain points are, and can more accurately define the help they need. Important parts of the buyer’s journey, such as how many items of content will you need and how and when will they be delivered; can be defined by specific personas, allowing you the opportunity for greater success.
But personas are not enough. You must also ensure you truly understand your buyer’s problems and the perfect solution to them. Throughout the buyer’s journey, your target audience is looking for a specific solution, and with the help of Marketing Automation it is up to you to provide them with the perfect answer to their problem.
- Provide the Right Content at the Right Time
Content is essential to your Marketing Automation strategy as it provides the opportunity to deliver the information your buyer will be looking for. However, it is important to recognise that different content will be needed for each stage of the buyer journey. For example, top of the funnel content includes blogs, online ads, video marketing and social media. Ideal content for the Awareness stage. Yet when the buyer reaches the decision stage they need bottom of the funnel content that will make them commit to the product. This could include case studies, an offer of a free trial, and a free audit or assessment.
It is crucial to have the right content in place before you deploy your Marketing Automation strategy. Without planning ahead and having the content written, your Marketing Automation campaign will have gaps, affecting your success.
- Amplify your Reach
Marketing Automation if used right, is a great tool to ensure you are contacting everyone you are targeting. It is important to expand your reach as far as possible through blog posts, social media – including LinkedIn and Twitter updates, and even press releases. The more platforms you use, results in a greater number of people seeing your content, creating bigger and more opportunities to contact and form relationships with potential prospects.
- Start Off Small
It is important to not try and automate 100% of your marketing process straight away. Marketing Automation can be daunting and you will want to get comfortable with all its features over time. A quick way to get up to speed is to work with an agency who can provide the Marketing Automation support you really need and help you introduce the right platform capabilities within your company.
Your Marketing Automation platform is equally as important as it is what brings your strategy together. Each platform has its unique capabilities and although there is no ‘right’ one, research and even potentially tests should take place to help decide what one is best for your company.
- Test and Refine
A Marketing Automation strategy can always be improved. Regularly check if you are achieving your defined goals, or if you can be more ambitious because it was so successful. Update your buyer persona if they turned out a bit different than you thought, and review what content pieces were the most successful and if they weren’t, why?
Refining your Marketing Automation strategy will continue to add to your success, as by continually improving your strategy you are maintaining positive results from your use of Marketing Automation.