In 2023, digital marketing teams have inevitably heard about marketing automation. This marketing method is increasingly used by companies to automate their sales and marketing processes. To understand it all, discover here the five pillars you need to know before getting started and choosing your solution. Let’s go!
Pillar 1: define your marketing automation strategy
What strategy and which communication channels should be implemented to convert my prospects? Hold on, before getting started, it is important to define your objectives, your targets, and your action plan. This will allow you to implement a marketing automation strategy tailored to your company and effective from your very first campaign. Want to generate leads? Retain your customers? These are the big questions you need to ask yourself before choosing your communication channel.
The choice of communication channels depends on the target audience you want to reach and your company’s objectives. Still a bit unclear? Here are five examples of communication channels that can be effective for attracting customers:
- Social media: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter are ideal levers for reaching an extra-large audience, sharing content, interacting with your audience, and promoting your products or services. (reviews, recommendations, word of mouth, and your presence on these networks are powerful levers that contribute to conversion or at least to your brand awareness.)
- Natural search (SEO): using Google’s algorithm to your advantage. Natural search is an effective way to attract customers via search engines. By optimizing your website with relevant keywords and creating quality content, you can improve your ranking in search results and attract qualified visitors.
- Online ads: banners, display ads, pop-ups… online ads can be used to target specific prospects based on their age, gender, location, interests, etc. Platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, or LinkedIn Ads exist to promote your products or services to your target audience.
- Online or in-person events: webinars or virtual conferences are the best way to showcase your expertise to your audience. At relatively low cost, they allow you to highlight your company and your products or services. Google Meet, Livestorm, Zoom, or GoToWebinar are all well-known platforms for organizing these events.
- Email marketing: newsletters and promotional emails remain the best way to get your message across. The priority to spark their curiosity? Send them relevant information and encourage them to take action. To do this, a tool such as Webmecanik Automation supports you in creating automated and personalized marketing campaigns.
Pro tip: by using a combination of these channels, you can reach a wide audience and improve your conversion rate.
Pillar 2: segment your database
Obtaining your prospect’s contact details (email, at a minimum) is the sine qua non condition for starting your marketing automation strategy. In your CRM, a pool of prospects is available and must be activated by your sales team, but first shaped and segmented by the marketing team. Who are these prospects? What is their profile? Why might they be interested in your offer?
You need to collect information about your prospects and customers, such as their behavior on your website, their interactions with your emails, and their purchase history. This will allow you to personalize your communication and better meet their needs.
Segmentation involves dividing your database into groups based on different criteria such as interests, behavior, location, etc. This will allow you to personalize your communication and send relevant messages to each group.
Pillar 3: create content
To attract customers, it is important to offer content that responds to their needs and concerns. Here are some examples of content that can be effective for attracting customers:
Also read: How to get started with marketing automation
Blog articles: news, opinion pieces, new features… To provide added value and convince readers of your expertise, it is essential to share useful and relevant information for your target audience. You can write about current topics related to your business, your products or services, or related topics that interest your audience. Then distribute them on your social media and in your newsletter for greater impact.
Videos: shorts, reels, webinar replays, tutorials… Videos are very popular and can be used to present your company, your products or services, or to explain more complex concepts. Share them on your website, your social media (Instagram and TikTok), or on your YouTube channel.
White papers: these in-depth documents present research, analysis, or surveys on a specific topic. They demonstrate your expertise and authority in your field. To make them easier to digest, think of original formats such as checklists, benchmarks, or playbooks.
Infographics: this is a visual way to communicate complex or large volumes of information. They can be shared on your website, on social media, or on websites specializing in infographic distribution, or via, of course, a landing page that will allow curious visitors to leave their emails to download this resource. This simple visitor then becomes a rather interested prospect that you should bring into a marketing automation campaign.
Webinars: these online presentations are part of content marketing and allow you to share information in real time with an audience and grow your reach.
Customer testimonials are an excellent way to demonstrate your customers’ satisfaction and loyalty. You can use them on your website, on social media, or in ads to reassure prospects and encourage them to take action.
Pro tip: create or recycle content that is relevant, informative, and useful for your target audience. By using different content formats, you can diversify your strategy and reach different types of prospects.
Pillar 4: set up automated campaigns
Automation is at the heart of marketing automation. You can automate different processes such as sending emails, creating workflows, and lead management. Beyond automating the time and date, it is above all the automation of the right moment defined by your criteria that will help you gain relevance and therefore performance. An engaged contact who visits specific pages on your site may receive additional information on that precise topic along with a sales proposal. Imagine your sales appointments filling up or your sales accelerating that easily! This will also allow you to save time and better manage your sales pipeline.
Find out how to create your first marketing automation campaigns. Spoiler: everything starts with your objective!
> Download my template to create my first campaign
Pillar 5: analyze your data
Finally, analysis is essential to measure the effectiveness of your marketing automation strategy. You need to track the results of your campaigns and adjust your strategy based on the data. This will allow you to optimize your sales and marketing process to achieve better results.
It’s up to you to use the reports in your marketing automation software and KPI Excel dashboards, which allow you to closely track your marketing actions and constantly challenge yourself to perform better.
Don’t forget, a good marketing automation software vendor is supposed to support you throughout this work: from setting up your objectives to monitoring your performance.
> Contact an expert right now to learn more
In short, the 5 pillars of marketing automation begin with defining a strategy and its objectives, segmenting your database, automating your campaigns, and carrying out precise analysis. But what if there were more than that? Indeed, as a bonus, you should know that you can also enhance the work of your marketing and sales teams.
Bonus: the alliance of sales and marketing teams
Getting started with marketing automation also means unifying the strengths of teams and their tools. Linking your CRM to your marketing automation solution notably makes it possible to:
- Gain a better understanding of the market and customers: by working together, sales and marketing teams share information about the market and customers, which can help better understand their needs, preferences, and purchasing behaviors, so they can be approached at the right time, according to their maturity and their place in the sales funnel.
- Ensure more consistent communication that helps improve the relevance of sales teams’ actions in the field. By working together, teams use consistent sales messages and respond quickly to prospects’ questions by providing relevant information throughout the customer journey.
- Increase the number of qualified leads: sales and marketing teams can work together to define lead qualification criteria, which can make it possible to generate a greater number of qualified leads for sales teams, ultimately leading to better lead-to-customer conversion!
