Are you at a fork in the road contemplating a marketing automation tool? Are you worried about losing the personal touch with your valued customers and prospects with marketing automation? No need to furrow that brow of yours! Marketing automation has flourished on the premise of helping marketers deliver automated, yet personalised communication.All marketing automation tools are built to help you conduct effective inbound marketing. When used correctly, it can become your powerful inbound marketing machine, nurturing your leads silently in the background. In this blog we discuss how a marketing automation tool allows you to personalise your marketing efforts:
1. Emails
A marketing automation tool typically has a built-in email engine, which is integrated to your database, that lets you:
- Personalise every email by addressing each lead by their first name rather than “sir’, ‘madam’ or ‘hey you’. You can also personalise the subject line of the emails to take it further.
- Schedule emails to be sent at a time that suits your buyer persona.
- Display the email recipient as a real person in your organization instead of a ‘noreply@yourcompany.com’ email address. It can also come with a personalised signature to include your dedicated salesperson’s contact details.
2. Blogging
Blogging is absolutely central for successful inbound marketing as a highly effective lead generation tactic. A marketing automation tool will enable you to tailor your blogs using the keywords relevant to your buyers in your meta descriptions, tags, etc. Some tools, like HubSpot, enables a link between blogging and social media allowing you to automatically post new blogs on selected social channels.
3. Distribution
A good marketing automation tool will allow you to link your social media profiles. Your content can be posted to groups and profiles that are relevant to your buyers. It will also allow you to schedule posts and updates for when your buyer persona are most likely online. More importantly, you can control every message that goes out from one central point to ensure everything remains consistent across all social media platforms.
4. Lead Nurturing
You know your buyers go through a journey when buying a product / service. At each stage of the journey your buyers look for something different. For instance, at the initial stages of the journey, they would be interested to see your tweets and your blogs as well as some top of funnel whitepapers. When they are more interested, they will be looking to read more about how they can solve the problem they are facing and will be open to receiving emails about specific / technical topics you cover. As they move down the funnel, they may be interested to hear from you about an offer that you can make for their organisation as well as some testimonials that prove your credibility.
A marketing automation tool essentially lets you build campaigns that map out the content you need to send out to your prospects at each stage of their buying journey. By having an array of functions in your marketing automation from blogging, to social engagement, to emails and landing pages, you can talk to them at the right time and offer the content relevant to that particular stage in the journey.
5. Lead Scoring
Lead scoring will help your sales team categorise leads based on their position in the buying journey. This will allow your salespeople to prioritise sales-ready leads and approach them with the right supporting resources (testimonials, references, case studies, etc). Salespeople can be more efficient, as they can focus on sales-ready leads instead of wasting their time pushing on leads who are still early in the journey.
6. Tracking
This is the icing on the cake. Your marketing automation tool should have analytics built into it so you can easily track and measure all of the above listed efforts. Here you can analyse your campaigns to see what worked well and what didn’t. This insight will enable you to decide on the appropriate next steps to improve results for your business.
The best use of marketing automation is not just one of the above tools, it is a combination of all of them. A marketing automation tool is the most efficient and effective way to deliver a personalised buying experience for your targets.
If you’re still not convinced about marketing automation read our blog on the questions to ask yourself about your marketing.
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