Marketing Automation is using automated software to perform marketing activities. Many marketing departments automate tasks like email marketing, social media posting, newsletter, virtual events, and advertisement campaigns. This way they are well organized in their posting as well as provide a more personalized experience for customers.
Since digitization plays an important role in building your social presence and connecting with your audience. Your being consistent helps in customer engagement across your social media pages. Your organization needs to monitor and measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Since there is so much data and prospective leads to work on, marketing automation can help simplify the process.
While choosing your marketing automation software make sure to pick the one that helps you achieve all your goals. There is no such thing as one fits all. You need to pick a vendor that caters to all your business requirements. It all varies on the budget, but there are ways to navigate the choice process as you can ask for proposals to shortlist vendors to examine demos.
Checklist: A lot of options will be available for you, but it is crucial to segregate as to what you are looking for. Consider making a list of the requirement of what are the must-have features you are looking for. Make a list of must-have, key, and nice to have features on the software.
Compare: Since you will come across so many vendors, you may want to compare. Make sure to keep in mind all the key points and features that you are looking for go for the one best suitable for you. Do you base work and ask them to provide a presentation to you and your team.
Ask For Demonstration: You can ask for demos after you have narrowed them down to two or three vendors. You can run the software based on scenarios or difficulties you have faced in the past. This will help in speeding up making a decision and will help you select the software best suitable for you.
Service: After-sales service also plays an important role. Implementation, software training, setup are an important part of after-sales. Make sure to set an implementation program with the internal resources too so that you have a smooth transaction process.
Few key features that are a must in your marketing automation software:
- Visitor or page tracking to keep a track of the number of people who visited your website.
- Detailed report of analytics to evaluate performances of the campaign.
- Multi-channel marketing campaigns for different stages of the customer’s journey.
- Segregated departments to evaluate clients’ behavior and interest.
- Lead management techniques like lead generation and lead nurturing.
- Testing options for customers’ journey that will help choose the best option based on performance.
Dos and Don’ts of Marketing Automation;
- Keep revisiting your goals even with automation as customer needs keep changing over time and so do companies’ requirements.
- Don’t forget inbound marketing. Inbound marketing aligns content personalization to that of the customer. Make sure with the software your content reaches the customer on time that they need it.
- Do not go about sending general or broadcast messages. It will only add to spam and junk mail.
- Make sure to send highly targeted content to prospective clients who have stepped further in your marketing strategy. Marketing automation helps you exactly in this.
- Send segmented customer-only content to your already existing customers. This will help your existing customers feel valued. Nurturing them over time might bring you more business in the future.
