Automate What You Hate | Marketing Automation Explained

Marketing automation isn’t necessarily a new thing, but have you actually looked into it and explored how awesome it can be!?

In larger markets and for larger organizations, marketers have been using marketing automation for many years, but now small and mid-sized businesses can also set it and forget it. Watch the leads pour in the door and know exactly where they came from, your cost per acquisition, the life time value of your customers and which products/services they’re most interested in. Does your business have a long sales cycle? Do you need to garner, nurture, then close your sales over a 6, 9, 12 or even 18 month period?  If yes, then you need marketing automation. You need to know who people are, where they came from, what content of yours they’re interested in, and how they interact with your content. Did they go to the landing page and fill out the form? Have they downloaded the eBook yet? Marketing Automation will give you invaluable insights for increasing your marketing ROI.

You likely have been and currently are in a sales funnel for some company — you just might not know it. You searched for a solution on Google, found a blog post that seemed to hold all the answers, found that the rest of the story lays waiting for you in this amazing eBook of answers, but first, give us your name, email, phone, etc., then we’ll send you the book. You hesitated, but the site is legit and you crave more info, so you bite and fill out the form. You were just entered into “the funnel.” This isn’t necessarily a terrible place to be though.

Get ahead of the competition. Only 3% of B2B companies are currently using marketing automation. * Source: The Annuitas Group

Now that you’ve shown interest in what this company has to say, this company can start to learn your behaviors, tailor their content to your liking and deliver more meaningful information to you through the buying cycle. This lead nurturing step of the process is automated. It didn’t happen automatically though, here’s a difference. The company spent months planning a highly customized, targeted campaign. Personas were built, copy was written, graphics designed and redesigned, emails drafted, videos produced, landing pages built, blog posts optimized, and social media posts generated, scheduled and agonized over to stay within character limits.   The funnel was engineered in a way to draw you in, capture your info, softly nurture your soul and eventually either seal the deal or lose you to the Unsubscribe button.

So much work for a slim chance at acquisition. Yes, but also no. Consider how much work goes into the traditional model of sales. In-person networking, you attend an event. First there’s drive time, the cost of lunch, schmoozing with randos that may or may not be your target audience, and travel back to the office. Then you check emails, phone messages, try to get back into the groove, slip into food coma, and repeat. Or, imagine the cold calling cycle. Buy a list, dial, get hung up on, dial again, hang up… you get the idea. Now, consider this. Inbound, automated marketing. You generate content (or we generate content for you as your new marketing agency) that is specific to your industry. These are the the lead magnets (ie. eBooks, white papers, etc.). We write blogs, social content, and produce informative and entertaining videos that establish you as the expert in your field. All of this content now lives in the interwebs ecosystem for potential customers to find, indulge in and react to. You may even land that customer right off the bat.   But, in the case where this doesn’t happen overnight, you’ll need to stay in touch with that interested, somewhat warm lead. You need to nurture them, caress them, stroke them until they’re ready to buy. But you don’t have time to send

Marketing automation drives a 451% increase in qualified leads for businesses.

personalized emails to thousands of people one at a time. And you don’t have time to track and assess who likes your social, your digital ads, your emails, your landing pages, etc., one at a time. You need to know if Joe Blow Potential Customer is engaging with your content across all platforms. You need to be able to attach metrics to that individual customer. How much and how long did it take to acquire that new customer? What content was most intriguing to them?   Once you create all of that content and establish your marketing machine, you can recline back and put on part time auto-pilot. You can’t ever go full auto. There are always more things to tweak, but essentially by creating your own Field of Dreams, if you build it AND nurture it, they will come.    

Learn more about how we can help you build and nurture your own Marketing Automation System. Get the rest of the story in our marketing automation eBook, Give Me Freedom, Give Me Comfort, Nurture My Leads