At its core, digital marketing has a simple goal: get more customers. The whole marketing process can be boiled down to three steps. Step one is to attract and interest people in your products and services. Step two is to turn interested people into customers by making sales. And step three is to retain existing customers by keeping them happy. If you're lucky, the mythical step four occurs when extremely satisfied customers refer their friends and family (you should do the happy dance if and when this starts to happen because it means you've made it).
I make it sound pretty straightforward, but we all know digital marketing isn't as easy as 1-2-3. The good news is digital marketing can be made a little easier. There's a fast-growing segment of the industry focused on marketing automation, and with each new tool, it's becoming a more popular choice for businesses of all sizes. To show you how to streamline your campaigns, we created a short video on Growing Leads and Sales With Marketing Automation:
1. Wise Up to What Customers Want
Your site's analytics and the feedback you get via comments and social media make up a cornucopia of data and insight that's waiting for you to dig into like Thanksgiving dinner. This abundance of information you have on your customers allows you to profile, qualify and segment the people who show interest in your products and services. Once you know exactly who your customers are, you can create targeted messages and campaigns that will increase your conversion rates across the board.
2. Practice Powerful Email Marketing
Marketing automation's use of email isn't your father's email marketing. We're not talking about a single email blast to hundreds of customers because let's be serious, that kind of impersonal outreach doesn't do much good in this day and age. These days, it's all about personalization. And I know what you're thinking: how does automation = personalization? And the simple answer is it allows you to do things that are manually impossible (or at least difficult).
For example, when a customer gives you their email address in exchange for a downloaded resource, you can set your marketing automation software to automatically send them an email, perhaps with a link to another resource or even your main call to action now that the lead is qualified. This is something you just don't have the time to do multiple times a day, so in the end, yes it's "automated" but it's undoubtedly more personal too.
3. Improve Landing Page Personalization
Marketing automation helps you tap into the benefits of 1:1 marketing, and it all starts on your landing pages (which are the pages your visitors generally arrive on). Matching offers, products, and information to the interests and digital behavior of incoming visitors is a great way to personalize your marketing, not to mention increase your conversion rates!
4. Be Ready for Further Relationships
One of the greatest aspects of marketing automation is you'll still be privy to everything that's going on with your campaigns. In fact, you'll have a bird's-eye-view of the whole shebang, which in our opinion, is the best view you can have. You'll get updates as to how your content is performing and alerts when people digitally engage with you in any way. What this means is that instead of focusing on what gets published when or who you have to email next, you can focus on developing relationships with customers in real-time. It seems counter-intuitive, but automatically receiving information about your marketing campaigns allows you to be more personal with your customers.
5. Consider Using Curated Content
Writing and sharing your own great content is necessary, but curation is a fantastic way to further immerse yourself in an industry, with the hopes of being viewed as an authority. When you show a willingness and ability to add your opinion to existing content, it proves you know what you're talking about and that you don't operate in a bubble. Curation is also a concrete example to your customers that your main interest is finding answers and solving problems for them, which fosters a trusting, and hopefully long-lasting, relationship.
