A business owner or an entrepreneur is a person who consistently comes up with solutions to meet one very crux challenge – how to reach markets and audiences on a constant basis. This requires much strategic thought and many steps as well as tools that would propel you straight into the audience consciousness so that you remain there when a purchase choice has to be made. Now, if 2020 has taught us anything – it has taught us to remain prepared for the most uncertain happenings, which include entire markets crashing due to a pandemic. This is where higher reach and richer engagement come into the play in order to keep your business standing and to revive those markets. Marketing automation may be the answer – but how?
Yet, there is hope. Marketing automation can take you to your A game, and how! With the right marketing automation software, you will be able to do the following:
- Organize your resources in a better manner: When we talk about the resources of a business, we are basically talking about the capital, the assets, the human resources or the employees – and now, we even refer to information as resources. This information would pertain to the big data that can be crunched in order to show you the exact parameters to be used in order to shape buyer intent. The data regarding prospects and leads, as well as their choices and preferences as well as the solutions that they routinely look for online is a major resource that can be a major drain on your time if you sit down to make one data entry after another. With marketing automation software that has a CRM running in the background, you will be able to capture the data and store it in relevant fields to be called up for the right functions at the right time. That is how the technology drives reach and engagement in an automated and efficient manner.
- More Emphasis Core Activities: If you read the above carefully, you will understand that you and your team will have enough of time, energy and overall bandwidth to deal with more pressing matters like personalized attention to and engagement with your core client or prospect so as to take your conversion rate and your brand loyalty that much higher. With the data driven operations and the automation of the same, you will be able to concentrate more fully and more fruitfully, on the actual skill of selling what you have made and keeping those customers interested in what you are busy making next.
- Better Team Play: Needless to say, marketing automation will help your teams perform in a far better manner than they ever did before. And this is all down to the right marketing automation software that can create automated notifications that would alert team members about the next step once the previous step has been completed. This notification would also come with the exact action required as well as the information required for that action. This would eliminate any time wastage and any needless chaotic communication which can lead to confusion as well. The duplication and missing out of tasks would also be prevented thanks to this marketing automation software which would simply create the right alerts for the steps in the workflow, depending on your role, designation and skill sets. All in all, there would be better team collaboration once you have the right marketing automation software within your business.
Now that we have understood and absorbed the key benefits of marketing automation, let us cast a glance on the 6 crucial steps with which we can begin the marketing automation software:
- Identification of the right software: When you are shopping for the right marketing automation software, you should take into account your exact needs and how the software would meet them as well as the budget that you have allocated to this resource. When all of these elements match, you would know that you have found the right marketing automation software. You should also check reviews and go with various recommendations before you make your choice so that it is a well informed one.
- Integrations are key: One of the main things to find out is whether or not the CRM can be integrated with the marketing automation software. This can make or break the efficiency of the software as well as your team since all the information would have to be in one centralized location from where the marketing functions can access the same for the sales and marketing teams to do their job efficiently.
- The On boarding process: This process should be a seamless one that will take you through every step required for seamless installation and execution of the marketing automation software. If you have to call support ten times a day, then the on boarding has not happened properly. This is a crucial step that should be filled with meaningful training and milestones.
- Templates and Structures: One of the things that you would necessarily need for your marketing automation software are templates and frameworks that can make your deliverables shine through with every ounce of creativity that you can afford. This applies to emails and even social media posts. You would have to ensure that the rep loaded templates can also be tweaked for your own personalized themes and structures.
- Importing of Details: Whether it is the contact information of your leads, prospects and clients or any other information that has to do with the interactions you have had with the customers – you should be able to import all of it into the right marketing automation software for ease of access during crucial calls and actions.
- Measurement of Results: You should be able to measure the results of your efforts with proper insights and analytics on a timely basis. This will help you better your functions with the help of the tools available with marketing automation.