5 ways you can be automating your Marketing processes today!
Ever get tired and bored of running the same old marketing processes manually over and over again when you could be networking with customers? Working smart, not hard, is the secret to success here. The reason that many bigger companies can grow is because of automating their processes, including their marketing processes.
Doing this will allow you to spend more time on activities that actively make you money and allow you to expand your business faster and more efficiently. Not only will it allow for short term growth, setting up these automation processes properly will allow you to future-proof your business for long term growth!
Getting started can be the tricky part, so allow us to suggest a couple of areas in which you can get started on automating today…
Cleaning Up Data
As a marketing team, we’re almost constantly on clean-up duty. Keeping data clean will make your job so much easier, not just because you won’t need to deal with the clutter of data all the time, but because your marketing campaigns will go so much smoother when you don’t need to be in “problem-solving mode” all the time.
One way of maintaining a clean data stack is to automate alerts for any new data coming in. This will allow you to catch the problem and solve it before it even becomes an issue. This forward-thinking, with an element of reactivity, means that less time is spent fixing things that should’ve been right in the first place.
Another way of cleaning your data is by automatically formatting data as it comes in. This can be especially helpful if you often find yourself reformatting dates, names or other types of information. Again, less playing about with data to get it to work for you will increase the amount of time you get to work on the more important tasks.
Lead Management
If you’re not already automating your lead management, you know that it could be a full-time job in itself. You’re managing multiple channels to attract new prospects to your business, and you’re cleaning up tonnes of lead information so you can store it all in one place and nurture those leads into brand new customers. I could go on, but I think this is reason enough to automate your lead management!
Lead Generation
Most customers will see the same marketing message from your business across multiple channels before they will finally take a bite and convert into a lead. If you’re leveraging multiple channels, you’re likely to be using multiple tool stacks to run your lead generation campaigns. By leveraging marketing automation, you can automatically add these customers’ information to one centralised list for retargeting or nurturing.
Lead Tracking
Tracking your leads and the customer journeys that your eventual customers take can be extremely useful in helping you make informed decisions about your marketing campaigns. This includes if they’re working, if they’re not, and how you can improve them overall. With these benefits in mind, it’s pretty obvious that automating your lead tracking will dramatically improve your future marketing campaigns if you put in the work to analyse your results.
Lead Nurturing
As mentioned previously, most customers will have seen and interacted with your content more than once during their customer journey. This makes nurturing leads very successful in converting them into customers. Nurturing can be automated relatively easily (see how you can automate your nurture sequences here) and saves you so much time that you could spend working on your next campaign.
Segmentation
In today’s world of over-saturated marketing by so many different companies, all wanting the attention of your potential customers, hyper-personalisation is the key to truly resonating with your prospects. The way of doing this is segmentation. If you’re familiar with marketing common practices then you’ll know that segmentation is the process of dividing up your audience into smaller groups that all relate to each other through a similar interest. This is like a fashion outlet dividing its audience into “male” and “female” segments so they can market to them accordingly.
Automating the processes involved in segmenting your audience will save you an unimaginable amount of time, and improve the personalisation of your targeted marketing campaigns ten-fold.
Customer Communication
If you work in a team of 5 or more people who all share a Microsoft Teams channel or have even just been in a group chat with all your friends at the one time, you know that communication can be difficult. And these examples don’t even include your customers! While co-workers might not care if you leave their message on read (or at least they’ll pretend not to care…), your leads will not be anywhere near as forgiving.
Automating your customer communication processes as much as possible here can save you a whole world of grief.
Notifying your team of new leads
This is a bit of a no-brainer, especially if your business’ sales process works by manually following up with leads. Timely follow-ups are part of a much larger universal business etiquette, particularly in marketing and sales where leads expect to be treated like priority number 1 every time. Failing to do so can be a really bad look for your company. Automating notifications of new leads and form submissions by both new and historical leads, can help your team keep on top of things.
Automatically message new leads
If your team is small or very busy most of the time, you might not have the bandwidth to send custom messages to leads all the time. Personalisation is important so generic messages are a no-go. However, this doesn’t mean that automated messages can’t be useful at all, quite the contrary! With tools such as dynamic content, you can send personalised messages to leads without needing to give up your bandwidth to do so.
Aftersales automations
Even when the customer has finally purchased from your company, their customer journey isn’t necessarily over. After the first sale, there is always the chance for upsells and cross-sells. Maybe their purchase was a lower-cost lead magnet and now is the time to drive them towards what you want to sell them. Using automation allows you to follow up with customers and keep your business at the top of their minds without having to take time out of your day to personally message every single customer. This also allows you to collect feedback on the service/product you sold them so you can minimise issues the customer has with your business and improve it at the same time.
Data reporting and analytics
Data is the bread and butter of marketing. Whether it’s demographics, engagement rates, or sales numbers, data is what drives the constant improvement of modern marketing practices. While critical to the success of marketing campaigns, pulling together all the data is a historically herculean task because it requires the streamlining and cleaning up of data.
Using automation here can massively reduce the time it takes you to pull together this information and carry out and start planning your next marketing campaign.
Streamlining data between apps
If you work in marketing or have read our blog on the current State of MarTech, you’ll know that most marketers deal with the struggle of having too many apps that they use regularly. Pulling information from more than one place is already a struggle, now try 3 or 4, maybe even 10! Introducing automation into this process just makes it all go so much smoother. Putting in the time to get it all working together and pulling in data to one system with all the consolidated data is well worth the initial time and effort required. Zapier‘s different integration tools make it a lot easier to do this! Afterwards, you’ll have a much easier way of tracking the data from all your marketing campaigns.
Generating reports
Now the boring bit. As if harvesting data wasn’t boring enough, now we need to present it in a logical way for our team and supervisors to be able to read and understand. Luckily this boring process can also be automated. After doing this, no more boring, time-consuming reports to do manually!
Marketing automation isn’t easy. While you can build each of these automations with help from Zapier‘s extensive library of integration tools, sometimes just outsourcing the time-consuming work to someone else is the real answer. As you might be able to tell, at Autus, we’re marketing and sales automation experts. If you like the idea of spending less time on learning how to build these automations yourself and spending more time growing your business, book a discovery call with us today.
Let’s get your business processes moving faster using the power of automation!
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About Autus
Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.
Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.
Find out more here.
Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.
Let’s keep in touch!
If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.
