To be successful in business, it’s vital to stand out from the crowd and building a recognizable brand is an integral step in this process. However, like many others, you may be experiencing marketing pain points that are hindering your path to success. Automation can help alleviate some of these problems but it can also be a daunting and time-consuming process. What if there was another way?
A Hybrid Approach
Adopting a holistic approach to marketing automation could give you an invaluable advantage over your competitors. According to a report by Salesforce’s State of Marketing, upwards of 67% of business leaders surveyed admitted to using a marketing automation platform to overcome many of the roadblocks you’re likely experiencing at the moment.
While some businesses opt for a ‘pure automation’ approach to achieve this goal, others search for a system that can be tailored to their needs, big or small. In other words, if your company isn’t interested in a major overhaul of its marketing operations or isn’t in a position to invest in expensive onboarding, then opting for a user-friendly system that empowers your staff may be exactly what you’re looking for.
A versatile hybrid platform that can automate your business’ specific marketing processes without upending your entire business model is invaluable. Wrk’s novel system is an example of this hybrid approach. Wrk automatically determines whether tasks need to be executed on its platform either via automation or through its roster of skilled workers, essentially freeing up your marketing team to concentrate on more pressing projects.
Understanding Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is a practice that has grown in popularity in recent years and has, quite frankly, become indispensable to businesses of all sizes as they look to grow to the next level. Marketing automation technology has steadily become part and parcel of growth hacking strategies for ambitious start-ups who recognize the value of inbound marketing and sales. The uses of marketing automation are endless.
Popular growth hacks that marketing automation can assist with range from social media posting to streamlining repetitive tasks across different online channels. Delivering attentive and personalized experiences tailored to your unique customer segments can be done much more efficiently with the assistance of automation. The end results? Saving time and labor on repetitive tasks, optimizing your marketing efforts to reach a wider audience, and generating better quality leads in a shorter amount of time.
Read on to learn more about some of the top marketing automation hacks to help you achieve scalable growth.
Rewarding Your Clientele: Incentivize Consumer Engagement
Let’s face it, most users are wary of giving away their personal information to eager online businesses without some promise of return. Usually, consumers perceive requests for their email or demographic information as a nuisance or invasion of privacy. In response, many brands frame their requests as an exchange with potential customers, in which they offer something in return such as a discount code or promotional offer. Incentivizing your customers’ engagement through automated lead scoring is a promising strategy to reward their interest in your brand. Here’s how:
Automated Lead Scoring
There are several tried-and-true tactics your marketing team can employ to retain customers through marketing automation. One such tactic is to establish partnerships with social media brand advocates – these are the people who engage the most with your posts through likes, shares, or tweets. Start by tapping into the many potentials of lead scoring by exploring these functionalities:
Identify micro-influencers with web scraping
Employ web scraping to identify your brand’s most vocal fans. Through web scraping, you can tease out your followers’ level of engagement and discover the ones who would be best suited to grow into enthusiastic “micro-influencers” to amplify your brand.
Reach out with personalized messages
Once you’ve discerned your list of prospects, you can start reaching out by sending them carefully-crafted personalized emails. In this stage, you’ll get to express your appreciation for their loyalty through offers of discounts or merchandise to review, for example. This is an excellent opportunity for ambitious start-ups to kickstart their growth by starting an affiliate program and inviting select followers to join.
Incentivising an existing or potential customer for their engagement doesn’t only lend your brand credibility and foster loyalty, it also bolsters their interest in your business and increases their likelihood of recommending you to their extended circle.
Create Targeted Content
Creating content that speaks directly to your target audience is one of the most essential marketing growth hacks – it truly marks the difference between a company that’s merely surviving to one that’s thriving. In fact, a robust content marketing strategy plays a vital role in lead generation and increased sales.
Why? Start by putting yourself in the shoes of the average consumer – until you realize that there is no “average” consumer, is there? As you’ve likely gleaned from the insights drawn from your consumer data, your target customer base is diverse and will anticipate messaging that speaks to their unique traits and resonates with their experiences and needs.
The steps leading up to the creation of targeted content will require a detailed sketch of your target personas as well as thorough customer segmentation. Given how labor and time-intensive traditional methods of customer segmentation tend to be, savvy marketers can leverage automation to develop personas using data from an existing or target customer base.
With the help of automation, comb through this data to determine key categories that differentiate your customers from one another, including age group, profession, gender, geographic location, etc. Then, automate the distribution of the targeted content you produced for each persona. Ultimately, successful targeted content depends on how deeply you understand both existing and prospective customers.
If you’re limited in manpower, it’s crucial to efficiently and successfully straddle the delicate line between personalizing content tailored to each customer segment without dispensing the limited amount of time you have to produce an unnecessary volume of material. Many automation tools allow for more sophisticated lead scoring, allowing you to go beyond the more fundamental scoring criteria and include other important characteristics to establish a broader scoring system, including (but not limited to): your web visitors and the pages they viewed, the assets they downloaded or requested, and the emails they’ve opened.
Once your library is replete with relevant quality content, other marketing automation hacks (listed below) can help you with the distribution process. You can leverage marketing automation to assess the results of your content efforts and determine what’s resonating with your audience and what isn’t. This will help you answer questions like: Which social media channel is getting your blog post the most clicks? Do your morning tweets generate more engagement than your afternoon tweets?
Boost Your Ratio of Qualified Leads
Simply put, marketing automation can help businesses generate more leads. Here’s how:
Automate email campaigns
Email services are one of the best channels to reach your audience. Fine-tuned email marketing is a top automation hack for successful B2B lead generation, where automating emails has shown to result in increased open rates. There is, however, a catch: your automated emails can’t sound like a template. So remember to directly address each recipient by their name and soften the language so that your email text sounds conversational and succinct, with a simple and clear call to action at the end.
Automate your nurturing
Marketing automation can help you nurture leads to high-quality prospects that have immense potential for sales conversion. The first step to adopting marketing automation for lead nurturing is to align your marketing and sales team on what an optimal lead would look like, followed by a clear-cut conception as to how this lead’s customer journey throughout the sales funnel would unravel as they evolve from curious visitor to eager buyer. Marketing automation can help you understand how your audiences react to your marketing content, including email open rates, CTA clicks, bounce rates, and other key metrics all collected in real-time. This can help you quickly understand and adjust future content to better engage your prospects.
Scale Your Communication Process
Marketing has come a long way since the days of cold calls and mobile salespeople. Although the human factor is a crucial component of good customer experience, personalized one-on-one interactions are forms of communication that are generally difficult to be scaled, especially for start-ups and SMEs. To respond to this fundamental business challenge, marketing automation platforms like Wrk can help businesses streamline their communications process for a growing audience, without compromising on the “human touch”.
Contrary to the common misconception, marketing automation isn’t built to replace an existing workforce but rather, to free up their time and allow them to devote it towards more meaningful, complex work. At its crux, marketing automation is revolutionary for its ability to facilitate communication effectively and efficiently, on a larger scale.
Targeted inbound marketing is a strategy that acknowledges and responds to the unique needs of your customer segments. This post by Marketing Automation Insider perfectly encapsulates this point:
“Your contacts want relevant and useful information. When you send bulk email newsletters you are not providing that. You are, ironically, providing an impersonal experience by treating all of your contacts as if they want the same thing at the same time.
Marketing automation, when used correctly, is actually more personable because messages are only sent to people that the message is relevant to.”
Maximize Your Use of Push Technology
So you’ve applied the above steps and have successfully gained a steady stream of fresh leads. Great! You’ve covered many of the major growth hacks to maximize the potential of marketing automation, right? Not quite.
Take it a step further and leverage the potential of push notifications! Consumers increasingly value the speed of service and relevance of content – why wouldn’t they when they can readily find other options to meet their product or service needs in the vast web? A tool with a hybrid human + automation composition like Wrk can help you reach this goal thanks to the flexibility it offers users. Push notification technology allows marketers to send notifications to their subscribers in real-time without having them actively browsing your website or mobile app, so all you need to do is tailor the message you want to be received. Tailored notifications refer to alerts or triggers informing users of new messages (email as an example) they receive.
Once you’ve secured your customers’ consent to subscribe and receive notifications, it’s time to let your marketing automation software do the work and inform your followers of the latest content release, offers, and reminders. Push notifications encourage instant engagement from interested subscribers who appreciate highly personalized updates.
Marketing Automation is a Win-Win for Your Business
The power of marketing automation technology can be game-changing for start-ups and SMEs. As you uncover strategies to scale your company’s growth, consider how the right marketing automation platform, like Wrk’s, could empower your team members to generate even more return on their hard work, from effective lead scoring to scaling the reach of your content assets.
If you want to learn more about how Wrk could help you then get in touch with the team today.
