Are you ready for the next big marketing move for your company? The cool thing is this marketing move will save you time, in the long run, and help cultivate more opportunities for your business. Your next marketing move should be marketing automation!
Marketing automation is a great way to help marketers capture leads, nurture them, retargeting, and SEO. This blog will give you a quick overview of how automation helps you accomplish these things and how to get started.
Reading tip: 9 Skills to land that hot market automation job
Capturing leads
The best way to capture leads is by having opt-in opportunities pop-up when someone new arrives at your site. These opt-ins allow you to add them to an email list. And based on their demographics, add them to tailored emails.
Having a clear CTA is essential when having pop-ups or sending out an e-book when they have entered their details. Giving something away for free like the e-book, a set of templates or a guide are great ways to peak interest and gain new leads.
The best part is, once you set it up, you don’t have to worry about it anymore, allow those leads to funnel right in.
Pro tip: read also our blog on how to increase your website traffic.
Lead Nurturing
Once you have leads, wither through pop-ups, calls, demos, web-chats, or previous purchases, you can continue to nurture them through the buying process with minimal effort passed the initial set-up. Lead nurturing is critical for almost any industry, and has been proven to drive 20% more sales opportunities.
To do this, you would use a drip-email campaign, which means that instead of manually sending emails to each new contact, drip campaigns will automatically send automatic emails on your behalf. The best thing is that with many automation tools, you can segment each prospect based on the action they took on your website. This way, you can send them through a specifically tailored drip-campaign.
And if an action, such as a purchase, it will automatically take them out of the campaign, as to not annoy them. And you could then, automatically, add prospects to another drip campaign that updates them on new offering and the such. By continuously having a touchpoint to customers and potential customers, you are at an advantage of always converting sales.
Reading tip: Top 5 Things Every Marketer Needs to Work on
Retargeting
Retargeting is a great way to stay on top of mind with your website visitors. Several ways to do this, one being sitting up an audience via Google Analytics and Google Ads, to collect the information of visitors automatically. You can segment this by which page they went on, how long they have been in the system and other demographics such as location, gender, and age. See our other blog about how you can get more insights on your website traffic.
Once you have this set-up, all you have to do is upload ads, the best ones for this are display ads. They are cheap, and you only pay when clicked. Meaning, that 1 million people could see your ad, but you only pay for the 100 clicks, not the views.
When this is set-up, you don’t have to do anything else other than updating you display ads accordingly. See the blog about the new Google Analytics 4 Property which has a more indepth connection with Google Ads.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is essential for organic (non-paid) leads. By setting up automation, you increase traffic and conversation to and about your website, that helps you rank higher on search engines.
These are mainly boosted by links and shares that your automated marketing effort put out and bring in. So make sure that your content is sharable and valuable. This also drives in more traffic and leads, to then be put through your automated marketing efforts.
Most importantly, make sure that you fine-tune your landing pages to have string keywords, easy to navigate, and give some call to action.
When you need help with your SEO; check out our services.
Pro tip: Intent Driven Content: Marketing Strategy to Boost your Brand and Sales
Best Marketing Automation Software tools
To help you get started on marketing automation, here are four automation software tools that you can look at and decide which is best for you.
- Active Campaign
- Hubspot
- EngageBay
- FreshMarketer
- Mautic
- SharpSpring
- Autopilot
ActiveCampaign
Marketing Automation tool plus CRM for small & medium sized businesses. It will help you to get easily started with marketing automation and set it up quickly. The costs will grow with you which makes it easy to start out with marketing automation for SMB. It might not be as sophisticated as the systems below, hence when it is ideal for when you are in SMB.
HubSpot
Great tool for any size of business as it is very scalable, mostly used though by bigger organisations as the prices can increase quickly. If you’re looking for an “all-in-one” tool that gives you the features of several different marketing methods, HubSpot is a good option for you. With their free CRM you can get your sales and marketing departments working from one tool, to create more alignment.
Sharpspring
It is a complete sales & marketing platform and a lot less pricy than other tools when you want all the features and have require a large amount of contacts. They claim that SharpSpring is typically a fraction of the cost of other marketing automation alternatives.
FreshMarketer
The new kid on the block. FreshMarketer is a part of the suite of Freshworks and they can help you basically on a type of software your business needs. Are you looking for a company / tool which integrates easily with others than FreshMarketer is your way to go, especially if you are already using other FreshWorks software. Friendly pricing plus they offer a free version for small companies.
EngageBay
Engagebay offers also free-forever CRM system (same as Hubspot), this will help you to keep all the information in one place and get a better sales & marketing alignment. With EngageBay you know you will have insights and are able to support prospects through the entire funnel. It may be not as known as most of the others but definitely worth a look.
Mautic
This tool is not for everyone for sure, Mautic is an open source Marketing Automation tool. It means that you can customize the tools as you want and a lot of other companies are doing the same and sharing their code. For more tech-savy companies this can be a good choice, this won’t be our choice when you are just starting off with marketing automation.
Autopilot
Autopilot is the complete opposite of Mautic in ease of use. They have built a tool which is really easy to setup and will make marketing automation possible for beginners. It might not have all the analytical options as some of the bigger tools above, however this is a great to get started with automating your marketing funnel.
Summary
Automating some of your marketing efforts allows you to spend time on all other aspects of your company. It helps nurture leads without having a salesperson calling and emailing, and helps your website rank higher organically.
To start, head to one of the sites listed above or dig in and do some of your research based on what you wish to accomplish. And as always, we are here to help any way we can.
