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For more information like this article about how to properly use marketing automation in your inbound marketing, see our Marketing Automation Information page.
The term 'marketing automation' is most commonly used to describe the suite of tools marketers use to manage leads from their point of conversion to their point of purchase. For example, marketing automation tools can be used to trigger a series of introductory emails to educate leads about what you offer. They can also help you segment your leads and deliver intelligence about your leads to your sales team.
In the coming weeks, we'll be talking more about marketing automation: its uses, limitations, and how it fits into an overall inbound marketing approach. Here are a few tips to start off your inbound marketer's guide to marketing automation.
Marketing Automation Should Be One Part of a Larger Inbound Strategy
In a MarketingProfs article last week, Marketing Strategist Jen Evans hit the nail on the head. She wrote, "One of those reassuring little white lies we tell ourselves as marketers is this: people make linear decisions. It's simpler to draw straight lines about people's behavior, so to date we have typically pushed people through carefully scripted marketing processes."
Inbound marketing is based on the premise that people will seek you out and research their purchase decision in any number of ways. Some of that research happens on your website, but a lot of it can happen outside of your site. Marketing automation, if done well, can streamline your process for communicating with leads. In fact, HubSpot has an alternative to traditional marketing automation that triggers communications based on your leads' entire experience with your company across channels, sending communications designed to benefit them, not interrupt them.
But as a warning, if you have not properly drawn those leads in with useful content, understood their complete experience with your company across channels, and provided a relevant, customized experience -- all of that automation can start to feel like spam.
Marketing Automation Takes Work
Don't let the name fool you. To do marketing automation right, you have to put work into the strategy and content behind it. Filing leads into a pre-determined marketing schedule and process without putting thought into how to make that content useful for them is just wrong. It makes our sprockets shutter.
Marketing automation is about nurturing leads over time -- creating incremental steps that will educate your leads about the choice in front of them.
Here are a few pieces of groundwork that should be part of any automated marketing campaign:
1. Do Your Research: Make sure that the messages triggered for customers reflect their interactions with your company at that particular point. If they became a lead after downloading a particular type of content, the follow-up messages should align with that field of interest.
2. Set Goals: The point of sending an email series is to not push your customers to make a decision before they are ready to make one. Masking the same call-to-action under three different emails will do you no good. The goal of each email should be a distinct step in the decision-making process. Below is an example of a goal-setting document from one of our customers.
3. Evaluate and Test: Put the work into understanding the impact of your campaigns. Specifically for emails, test different relevant content, subject lines, and calls-to-action. Make sure your campaigns don't run on autopilot without the necessary evaluation.
4. Integrate Social media into Your Strategy: Peter Johnson said it well in his recent post on mycustomer.com: "Social media transformed the way buyers use the internet. Buyers seek to engage with vendors interactively, clarifying, sharing ideas, and asking questions rather than simply being an audience for sales and marketing messages." Make sure you are listening to your leads across social media channels and tailoring communications based on those experiences as well.
HubSpot has an alternative to traditional marketing automation that triggers communications based on your leads' entire experience with your company across channels, sending communications designed to benefit them, not interrupt them.
The Cardinal Rule Holds True: Be Useful
As a tool for helping companies scale personalized communications, marketing automation has a lot of potential. But its success will always be dependent on how marketers put it to use. Are you providing useful content that reflects leads' individual needs and experiences with your company? Or are you just interrupting leads' decision-making processes with three times the number of sales emails? To a lead, the difference is night and day.
How are you using marketing automation as a tactic in your inbound marketing strategy?
Image Credit: Sebastian Lund
