Marketing Automation involves the integration of multiple business process tools for streamlining and simplifying some of the most time-consuming responsibilities of the marketing and sales roles, ultimately improving the productivity of an organization.
From automating the lead qualification process, campaign management to personalized communications, marketing automation is all about simplifying marketing and sales operations. Marketing Automation also helps in mapping customer journeys and triggering points for different personas. If used effectively it can help in creating Account-Based Marketing(ABM) strategies.
In a nutshell, marketing automation can help an organization in saving time and resources, ultimately driving revenue and ROI while marketing and sales teams can focus on growing business. Some popular marketing automation tools are Eloqua, Marketo, Hubspot, Pardot, ActiveCampaign, Customer.io, Act-on, Leadsquared, Zapier, WPMktgEngine, and Ascend.
Important components for setting up marketing automation
Define goals/objectives
What is your motivation to implement marketing automation in your organization? Is it sending personalized communications, tracking customer journey, enhancing productivity, or all of the above? Having a structured, well-defined plan with clear directions; helps in charting a roadmap to the success of marketing automation.
Clean database
Maintaining data hygiene is important for an organization, especially if you are planning to implement marketing automation in your organization. Even wrong entries and misspellings can lead to a campaign disaster. It's imperative to have clean data to create a seamless and personalized customer experience. Few quick steps to check data hygiene:
Create a standard data entry process with mandatory checks
Identify and remove duplicate entries
Reduce long-term inactive data
Check uniformity across the fields (convert fields to drop-downs if needed)
Eliminate all the junk entries
Integration
Marketing automation is not limited to one tool, it is a combination of tools talking to each other. Hence, integration plays a vital role. Collaboration of all marketing applications such as CRM, Social media scheduling, Web analytics, Google Ads, Card scanning, etc. helps to achieve your marketing goals. CRM being your "one source of truth" gets integrated into other applications through a marketing automation tool, ultimately helping you to map the customer journey. The integration also connects various departments of the organization and enhances collaboration.
Creating digital assets
Creating and modifying existing digital assets such as images, videos, content, tracking codes, etc. These digital assets will help users to connect with your brand. Digital assets are not limited to external assets (images, videos, or content) it also includes branded templates of forms, emails, landing pages, white papers, and other collateral. Even your database which is a replica of your master data is a part of digital assets and requires upkeep.
Staging environment A staging environment (stage) is a replica of a production environment for running tests without affecting the master data. Staging environments are made to create, test, build, and update any implementation and measure its impact without compromising the integrity of master data or digital assets before the final deployment. It is helpful especially if you are testing new integration and observing how it communicates.
Running a pilot project
Once you have set up the marketing automation ecosystem, tested it in a staging environment and all bugs are fixed; it is time to run a pilot project in a production environment. For this first, you need to define a target audience within the system to whom this test campaign will be targeted. Creating a test campaign and running it for a small audience gives you an idea of how your marketing automation process is performing. Since it is a scalable model, you are ready for the final rollout.
Developing governance model
Before rolling out the marketing automation process in the organization, it is critical to have a governance model in place. If you do not have a lead management process then it is the right time to create one. A governance model defines a responsibility matrix and policies within the organization. This includes process flow for administration, troubleshooting, roles, and responsibilities related to marketing automation. This reduces the possibility of wrong communications and GDPR compliance.
Reports and Dashboards
Dashboards are visual displays of the relevant KPIs, whereas reports are consolidated and arranged information based on specific filters to be monitored at a glance. While there will be specific users who can create customized reports and dashboards it is necessary to have a standard report and dashboard template for the whole organization to replicate.
Customer journey mapping
Customer journeys are the sum of actions/experiences of individuals with your business, captured during their interactions with various campaigns. A customer's journey from Awareness to Advocacy can be captured in the system for different personas based on triggers moving them to the next phase. With marketing automation, you can tailor these interactions/triggers to create a seamless customer journey and run experiments to capture customers' digital body language. Delivering relevant communication based on customers' preferences helps an organization in converting prospects to lifelong brand advocates.
Best practices of marketing automation
Conversational content
In the current world, a user is bombarded with thousands of promotional content every day. A human connection is all the more required in today's scenario. This can be achieved by developing your content to address the needs in words your target audience actually uses in their routine life. The messaging should lead the conversation in a meaningful way. Such content helps you to drive conversation and engagement with your target audience, while they're reading your content.
A/B testing
A/B testing, also known as split testing, is running a random experiment with 2 versions of a campaign (Control and variation) with a possible configuration of elements in your content (landing page, images, text, colors, heading, body, etc.). These versions are displayed to a specified percentage of the target audience from the campaign. It helps in determining the version driving higher engagement and assessing which version performs better in terms of your overall goal; the system uses it to send it to the rest of the target audience for optimizing the output.
Define a buyer persona
A buyer persona is a canvas to draw pictures of your ideal customer based on research and interviews with actual customers. representation of your target customer. It covers basic demographic information, triggers, business-related information, and personal preferences. The personas combined with the customer journey map become the guidebook for running your marketing automation campaigns.
Lead scoring model
Most of the time businesses base their scoring model on the Budget, Authority, Needs, and Timeline (BANT) model. this is not accurate enough as you are not capturing the behavior triggers of your target audience. The best lead scoring model captures business and behavioral interest to qualify a lead that can convert to tangible business over a period of time.
Well-thought marketing and communications plan combined with well-orchestrated marketing automation give you a competitive advantage.
Comments