How to Implement an Effective Marketing Automation Strategy

Marketing automation has acquired such a bad rap.

Yet at a time when consumers are highly discriminative and discerning about brands, it’s impossible not to talk about an automation strategy for inbound campaigns.

There is more to a marketing automaton strategy than just choosing the most complex software. Integrating sales efforts with marketing goals is what makes automation much more effective.

Removing the marketer’s hat

Silly as it may sound: what is the purpose of implementing a marketing automation strategy? Is it to simplify and take the fuss out of your marketing efforts? Or is automation supposed to help you interact with your audience at different touch points? It is best to approach your automation strategy from a user point of view; there’s no way you can effectively engage consumers without understanding where they belong on the conversion channel.

Consumers typically undergo a similar buying cycle:

Overlooking the intricacies of the buying channel could lead you to sending the wrong message, to the wrong market segment at the wrong time.  This is a sure way to annoy your potential and existing customers. In fact, not knowing when to target the consumer during the decision process is one of the reasons why most marketing automation systems fail.

Having An Effective Lead Generation Technique

Marketing automaton cannot do the lead generation job for you. You need to develop a plan that caters to the unique needs and idiosyncrasies of top of the funnel consumers. The fact is that marketing automation does not work for 85% of marketers because they simply turn over leads to the sales force without nurturing these leads with the appropriate content. Certainly, creating content on an ongoing basis is a tough cookie. No wonder so many marketers rely on the automation technology itself to blast unpersonalized messages to people who may be at different levels of the conversion channel.  To create content that will nurture your leads, you first must identify any content gaps and reconcile these with consumers’ needs and their personas.

Adopting A Multichannel Approach

Email is the most popular marketing channel used in most automation strategies. When used effectively, email communication can help to nurture leads into customers and customers to really happy and loyal customers. But consumers are increasingly becoming averse to marketing emails. To obtain higher ROI, automation should be guided by a multichannel approach. Different consumer segments can be accessed at different touch points including your website, social media platforms, review sites, and from organic search as well. Ignoring these diverse touch points by focusing on a single marketing channel is in essence, ignoring 90% of your customers.

Deviating from Traditional Marketing Automation

Traditional automation relies on limited metrics such as email clicks to engage and nurture audiences. However, such metrics offer vague behavioural data about your target audience, what their needs are, and the best marketing channel to reach them. In effect, traditional marketing automation is ineffective in managing top-funnel efforts to build a database of promising leads.

A great alternative is automation with a focus on inbound marketing through multiple channels. Inbound marketing automation utilizes behavioural data from various interaction points to really understand the target audience. Traditional marketing automation may solely use email click through rates to understand consumer behaviour. Inbound automation uses metrics such as social media engagement, email open, engagement with content etc., to assess consumer needs. This modern approach to automation enables marketers to build a strong foundation of leads that can support middle channel conversions.

When done properly, automation can improve the bottom line of an inbound marketing campaign. However, it takes a lot of reverse engineering, or looking at things from the consumers’ point of view to really get automation right. Developing a relevant content strategy and adopting a multichannel approach is a step in the right direction.