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What Is a Content Marketing Workflow?

A workflow is a series of steps that must be completed before something else can happen.

For example, if you want to publish an e-book on Amazon Kindle or Apple iBooks, you need to create it first. You might have several people involved in this task—a writer who creates the book’s text; a graphic designer who makes sure everything looks good; someone who tests the finished product for errors; and so forth.

Each person has their own role in creating the final product.

In short, content marketing is about producing quality content assets regularly and consistently over time. It's also about distributing those assets through multiple channels — including social media, email, search engines, etc. — where they'll live long enough to get found by your target audience. And finally, it's about measuring what works best with each channel to help inform future decisions.

A content workflow is a bunch of steps you take to plan, develop, and manage the content you or your team creates.

By empowering your creatives and marketers to take ownership of your team's process and content, you can create a pattern and process for you or your team.

Why Do You Need to Define Your Content Workflow?

The first step towards building a successful content marketing strategy is defining what success looks like.

A good content workflow will allow you to measure progress against key metrics such as time spent on tasks, number of assets created or published, etc. It also helps you identify bottlenecks, so you can make changes before things get out of hand.

It's difficult to keep track of numerous projects if your workflows are not defined. The people on the content team may not know how much effort is required to complete the content.

When the content workflow is defined, it will be a lot easier for the content creation process. Content writers can take and make a content process manageable.

Marketing teams will be more productive in a collaborative environment when it comes to working together on content projects. Everyone knows exactly who is responsible for each step in the process.

It's important for people in all roles to understand what they need to do to deliver when it's needed, and that's what a defined content workflow tells them.

In the end, a proper content marketing process will improve productivity and reduce any costs involved.

Defining your content workflow should be done at the beginning stages of any new content strategy initiative.

Here are 5 easy steps for your content marketing workflow. You can use this as your content marketing workflow template.

1. Define your audience

When it comes to content creation, the first thing that should come to mind is how the potential readers will find the content and consume it.

93% of internet traffic comes from search. Knowing that billions of people flock to the internet, it should be easy to drive them to our content.

Unfortunately, we compete with billions of content as well. In the internet era, we're fighting for visitors' interest and attention. Knowing their intent is a must if we want to win.

But, first, how can we know the intent if we do not know who our potential visitors or prospects are?

One way to figure this out is to create a customer avatar. A persona to represent our potential customers.

Customer personas are an essential part of any marketing strategy. They allow you to better understand your audience and create content that resonates with their needs.

But creating a persona isn’t always easy. It requires a lot of research and data gathering.

Fortunately, there are now many tools, both free and paid applications, that can be used to gather such data, and support the research.

Is the customer persona the same as the customer segment?

While they may be interchanged, customer personas are different from the customer segments.

We often do segmentation based on demographics, job titles, and the like. While persona is more about personalizing our ideal customer, based on their personality, interests, skills, techsaviness, and, last but not least, their behavior in retrieving information.

Some of you may ask, how can we gather data to know all the above-required information prior to creating the customer persona?

Google Marketing Platform may be the best free tool available to gather all the data. It's a unified platform that combines 9 Google's tools into one: Data Studio, Analytics, Optimize, Survey, Tag Manager, Campaign Manager 360, Display & Video 360, and Search Ads 360.

Barbara McHugh, Senior Vice President of Marketing at MLB (Major League Baseball) shares how operating as one team with one platform is a victory for the league, its teams, and its fans. Most importantly, it helps them focus more on the customer.

The path to purchase is constantly changing, and we’ve discovered that the only way we can keep up is to be more customer-focused than ever. Whether that means content creation or ticket sales, we’ve been using technology to focus on our fans and do it at scale.

A simple example: We used to run very long video ads to squeeze in all the information we wanted our fans to know. But thanks to the data we’re gleaning from Google Marketing Platform, we are able to see that this isn't the type of content our customers really want to engage with. When we began to cut the length of our video ads and focus on one message, such as a winning streak or a specific player, the performance metrics showed an immediate rise in engagement. Now we’re doing a similar analysis for all our digital video ads.

Here are the simple steps to define your customer persona:

1. Divide your audience into segments. 3-5 segments are ideal.

2. Pick one from each segment as the most ideal representative. This one will become the persona of the segment. Let's say you're providing a home entertainment service. Your segments will at least consist of Father, Mother, Kids, and Single.

3. Give each persona a name and list all of his or her professional attributes.

4. List the personalities and interests of each persona. This will be useful when you address him or her in your marketing messages. Your types of content should relate to this.

5. List all the reasons why he or she should use your products or services.

6. List all the reasons why he or she should buy your products or services.

7. List all his or her skills and tech savviness.

There are many tools out there that you can use to create your customer persona. You may try the one that is provided by Vbout, a marketing automation provider. Even though it's a bit more complex than what I have outlined above, you will find it a lot easier to do, since you're guided by a wizard. You can access the buyer or customer persona generator here.

2. Start building your content with the customer's persona in mind

Before starting with content ideas and/or content type to create, it's good to remember that the majority of internet visitors are finding our content through search.

Content marketers should also remember to understand that each search has its own intent.

There are 3 types of search intent that content creators should know about. Informational, commercial, navigational, and transactional.

With your customer's persona in hand, it is quite easier to predict their search intent. Therefore, you or your content marketing team can feed the content according to your audience's needs.

It is good practice for content marketers to create a common template for their content creation. This will ensure consistency between the content piece and content format.

Here is an example.

Your company is launching a new product. The content strategy is set for each segment as previously defined. To achieve an optimum result, product briefs and information are created in many formats and pieces. There will be a blog post for each persona, a content piece for each on social media platforms, and pieces of content for promotions.

Now, let's imagine what will happen if the advertising team took the wrong piece of content to drive traffic to the intended information. From the cost perspective, the CPC (Cost Per Click) can be higher because of the irrelevance between the search query and the information provided.

Let's dive further into other examples.

When a visitor searches for "how to use Canon camera", it is obvious that he or she is seeking information. So, a detailed explanation of how-tos and tips & tricks on using the camera would be a perfect match.

However, if the query is "Canon camera", then the intent is most likely a commercial one. It would be better to match this query with the camera product list, camera specification, comparison with other brands, and the pricing.

Google loves high-quality content. Regardless of whether we create content for organic search (via Search Engine Optimization or SEO), or for paid search, high-quality content is considered as a ranking factor and, in the case of paid advertising, it increases the quality score. In return, the cost per click will decline if the quality score improved.

3. Select and use the best tool for multichannel deployment

There are some content marketing softwares we can use for content deployment. But, before we take a look at them further, first we need to understand that this kind of software or application is a must if we need to be more productive.

When it comes to content creation, most of the time it is rewarding to come up with a content topic that can become evergreen content.

With that said, the content manager or social media manager can easily reuse the content as social media posts or redistribute it to other marketing channels. With the help of the proper application, all the tasks can be set automatically in the content calendar.

Here are criteria that you can use to select content automation software:

1. At a minimum, it allows you to automate posting to major social media: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest. It would be great if it could also allow automated posting to Google My Business.
2. The tool should have a schedule and re-schedule post feature.
3. It allows you to add the minimum number of social profiles you have or will have in the future.
4. There should be a curation feature that allows you to curate content and schedule them for automated posting.
5. You can syndicate your content for others to pick and post on their social media networks.
6. You can post or schedule content in bulk.
7. It does not cost you your arms and legs.

4. Publish your content for others to curate

Each social media tool has its own advantages and disadvantages. You may end up using more than one tool to achieve an optimum content marketing ROI.

For example, Vbout is more about marketing automation as a whole, but it allows us to schedule and post to unlimited social media profiles. It also provides bulk submission. While Missinglettr with its Curate feature, allows us to do social media promotion through its Curate syndication.

Content curation and syndication is a great way to broaden the reach of our content without spending much on advertising.

5. Repurpose your content in different formats

It's quite common to have content that becomes a hit, while the others have no or little engagement. To reach a new audience, you may choose this proven content to be reused or recycled. That's what we call repurposing content.

Repurposing content is a great way to save time and money on creating new pieces of writing or video, while still reaching an audience that may not have found it otherwise.

Repurpose your content in order to increase the number of people who see it. This can be done by creating new posts that are similar or related to existing ones on your site.

It’s also possible to create or transform existing content into a new format. For example, create standalone pieces of content like an infographic based on existing content. The key here is to make sure you have enough unique valuable information so that readers will want to share it with their friends.

Here are other examples:

1. You or your company have an hour informational podcast that gathers a huge audience. You can repurpose that podcast content into an informational video and post it to YouTube or other video platforms.
2. Imagine you or your company conducted a Zoom webinar. Since you recorded the session, you can repurpose it into YouTube video or make small clips out of it to post on other social media as well. A tool like Piktostory can easily turn a long video into digestible clips that can beautifully fit into any social media format. It even does automatic transcription.
3. You or your company have a successful article. You can repurpose it into audio for podcast sessions. Meanwhile, at the same time, you can also convert the audio into video content and clips for social media posting as well.

In conclusion, there are many ways to use content marketing to promote your business online. But if you don't know how to start, then I suggest starting from these 5 simple steps. They're easy to follow, and they'll help you get started right away!

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Labels: content management, content marketing, entrepreneurship, SOP, workflow

# posted by Unknown @ 8:22 AM 0 comments

Why is business growth important, especially for a small business?

Businesses need to grow because it helps them achieve success. Growth allows companies to expand into new markets, develop products and services, hire staff and invest in technology. All of which leads to greater profits and better customer service.

Growth also gives you options when planning your future.

If you're starting out with little capital, then you may have to focus on building up your client base before investing heavily in marketing campaigns. But as your business grows, so too does its potential.

Businesses are always looking for ways to increase their profits. One way to achieve this is to expand into new markets. However, there are many challenges involved in expanding your business.

Furthermore, if you don't know how to market yourself effectively, then the chances of growing your company will be limited.

This article looks at some effective methods that can help businesses accelerate their growth through viral marketing.

What Is Viral Marketing?

Viral marketing refers to any type of advertising or promotion technique where customers share information about your product or brand with others who they think would benefit from using it. The more people use these techniques, the more successful your campaign becomes.

Now, here's a short brief of viral marketing history:

In 1994, American direct marketer Joe Pulizzi coined the phrase "viral marketing" when he was working at JWT's Direct Marketing Group. He defined it as: "the process whereby your message gets passed around within a group until everyone knows about you."

In his book Content Rules!, Pulizzi wrote that this type of marketing could work because "people love talking about themselves; they're always telling each other what they do and where they go."

The term viral strategy was first used in marketing in 1995, in the pre-digital marketing era, by a strategy team at Chiat/Day advertising in LA, led by Lorraine Ketch and Fred Satler, for the launch of the first PlayStation Sony Computer Entertainment.

Born from a need to combat huge target cynicism, the insight was that people reject things pushed at them but seek out things that elude them. Chiat/Day created a stealth campaign to go after influencers and opinion leaders, using street teams for the first time in brand marketing, and layered an intricate omnichannel web of info and intrigue.

Insiders picked up on it and spread the word. Within 6 months, PlayStation was number one in its category Sony's most successful launch in history. The term was later popularized by Rayport in the 1996 Fast Company article "The Virus of Marketing", and Tim Draper and Steve Jurvetson of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in 1997 to describe Hotmail's practice of appending advertising to outgoing mail from their users.

In 2014, the Oxford English Dictionary included the definition: "the use of social media to increase awareness of products or services".

What makes things go viral?

There are six key factors that drive virality, according to a book called Contagious: Why Things Catch On. They are organized by an acronym called STEPPS, which stands for:

• Social Currency — The more people look at it, the more likely they will be to share it.
• Triggers — It's more likely that things that are top of mind are tipped off.
• Emotion — when we care, we share.
• Public — People are more likely to imitate something that is easier to see. "Monkey see, monkey do".
• Practical Value — People help each other by sharing useful information.
• Stories — People don’t just share information, they tell stories.

The goal of a viral marketing campaign is to widely distribute marketing or viral content through sharing & liking.

Propagation of the content is one of the main factors that drive virality. This includes the effort required to share it, the network size and type of the chosen distribution medium, and the proximity of the content with its means of redistribution.

What constitutes successful viral marketing?

David Skok wrote on his blog that there are two key parameters that drive how viral growth happens, the Viral Coefficient, and the Viral Cycle Time.

— The Viral Coefficient is the number of people who have to see or hear something before they decide to pass it along.

— The Viral Cycle Time is the amount of time it takes for someone to decide to pass along something.

— If the Viral Coefficient is high enough, then the Viral Cycle Time will be short enough, and the spread of information will happen quickly.

David went further with an equation to explain the science behind virality. How it drives successful viral campaigns.

Even though it seems a simple process, in reality, only a few businesses can achieve true viral marketing, despite the many businesses that talk about it.

In the meantime, since the inception of the internet, we have been witnessing many ventures that have successfully leveraged the power of virality to gain their exponential growth.

The internet is a great platform for viral marketing as ideas can be spread quickly through email, instant messaging, and social messaging platforms. The effect of marketing through the internet is that a company is able to acquire customers without spending a lot of money.

The most used platform to spread viral content is no doubt YouTube, followed by Instagram and many other social media platforms.

YouTube is ideal for viral videos. Dollar Shave Club is often cited as the most successful viral campaign on YouTube. With a budget of less than $5000, the video gained traction that eventually led to Unilever's acquisition worth $1 billion dollars.

Looking back to the theory that David Skok described, we understand that a viral marketing campaign is not merely about creating viral content. Many people believe that cases like Dollar Shave Club were more about luck. It's quite reasonable since for years we can only witness a few businesses with such success.

However, many other enterprises have successfully leveraged viral marketing strategies without the hassle of creating viral content. This can also be traced back to the success of Hotmail in its early days of inception. Then, followed by Gmail from Google.

Hotmail's viral success was just as simple as putting in an invitation to join the free service at the end of every email sent. Gmail leveraged it further by utilizing the power of curiosity and exclusivity. Gmail at that was only available through an invitation. 10 years later (2014) Google went even further when introducing the Google inbox. The invitation was only for 3 people per round. Because of that, some people could even make a fortune by selling the invitations on eBay!

Incentivized viral campaign

Considering that it's been a long time ago (in the internet age, even 3 years is considered a long time), Hotmail or Gmail style of a viral campaign is no longer powerful. People are getting accustomed to the drill and not so enthusiastically following their fear of missing out!

Dropbox, AirBnB, Loom, Mint, and even Uber did a different approach when they sent out marketing messages to their audiences. They have one thing in common. Audiences who were invited were incentivized to participate and even given a chance to win big prizes.

A viral campaign with incentives is leveraging David Skok's formula.

David argues that the intended viral message won't truly go viral unless the viral coefficient is more than 1. The multiplying effect happens when the viral cycle time is the fastest.

K = i * conv%

K is the viral coefficient. i is the number of initial invites and conv% is the invitees who convert to the offer.

Let's take a look at the following calculator to see the differences when we play around with all variables.

Viral Calculator

There are two key parameters that drive how viral growth happens, the Viral Coefficient, and the Viral Cycle Time. Here's how it works with the formula intact!

xperd.calculators.cx

Since K is the first leveraging factor, we need to lure active participation by providing incentives. The most effective way to shorten the cycle time is to provide top prizes as irresistible as possible.

Dropbox successfully doubled its user base every three months. Its users sent 2.8M invites in April 2010!

Drew Houston, the co-founder, said that he used the lean startup concept to drive 3900% growth in only 15 months! Below is his presentation.

How to craft a viral marketing plan for rapid growth

After knowing the basics, let's deep dive into the way we deploy an effective viral campaign.

This exercise is not rocket science. We've studied viral marketing examples. If that's not enough, we still have Google to help us research the subject.

Here's the list of what we need to do to deploy an effective viral campaign for exponential growth.

1. Understand the objective

This objective is, of course, the one that relates to our business objectives. To generate more sales is obviously the one. But, we may also need to establish other objectives as well. For example, gathering feedback (by launching surveys along the way), increasing FB pages like, increasing IG and Twitter followers, increasing YouTube subscribers, etc.

2. Craft marketing message

Your message will become the center of the campaign. What's the campaign about? Why should the audience participate? What's the catch? Etc.

3. Get the social networks ready

Social media can become your marketing channel. Before the campaign, make sure that all of them are set and ready.

4. Prepare additional actions for participants to take

let's take a look at this scenario. You invite your audience to participate. The message is compelling enough, so they participate right away. Then, to give them more chances to win the prizes, you ask them to do several things online (each with points rewards):

— Provide name and email address

— Follow all your social media

— Visit your website(s)

— Participate in your surveys

— Comment on your blog post(s)

— Provide testimonial(s)

— anything that you can think of to improve your presence in the internet

5. Choose the type of viral campaign

Viral marketing techniques come in many forms. We can choose between photo contests, video contests, sweepstakes, giveaways, etc.

Each of them has pros and cons. The best approach is to try each of them and choose the most effective one. Each industry has its own characteristics So there's no good or bad in this selection.

6. Choose deployment software or outsource it to an agency

Now, here comes the most important part of the plan. The deployment. It is almost impossible to deploy a viral campaign on the internet, especially the social media networks, without the help of a tool or an agency. Unless you or your company have the coding capability, this step is a must to ensure the fastest growth possible.

7. Deploy and monitor the progress

When deploying the campaign for the first time, sometimes it is necessary to gather initial participants through paid advertising. Later on, if the marketing message is good, and the awards are also irresistible, we can expect word-of-mouth marketing to take place.

8. Evaluate and repeat

Always remember to evaluate and repeat the process. Fine-tune the offer to increase conversion rates.

9. BONUS STEP. Always make an offer!

Remember that the first action that participants have to take is to give up their name and email address. This one is useful for us to always make an offer to them. For example, while waiting for the campaign to end, the participants can choose to get the award by buying it at a special discount. Do this frequently and sooner or later you'll get more loyal customers!

In summary, I hope this article you understand how to accelerate business growth using viral marketing. If you want me to elaborate further on any point, please let me know.

Good luck! :)

Labels: busines growth, growth hacking, internet marketing, viral content, viral growth

# posted by Unknown @ 11:35 PM 0 comments

Believe it or not, marketing automation will be more important in the future.

Why is it so important?

Before answering that basic question, we must first understand what marketing automation really is.

What Is Marketing Automation, and How Does It Help Marketers?

Try to search Google for the definition of marketing automation, and you will find lots of meanings and definitions from many resources.

The good news is that you don't need to read further beyond this point. However, there will be a lot of confusion when choosing which tools to use for your marketing automation endeavor.

Marketing automation is a combination of the words "marketing" and "automation."

It refers to software, systems, or platforms designed for automating various aspects of your business' marketing efforts.

Businesses use automated tools to manage their entire customer lifecycle, from lead generation to sales conversion.

They can be as simple as an email campaign builder or as complex as a full-blown CRM platform.

Certain marketing tasks such as email marketing, posting to social media, and launching ad campaigns can be time-consuming to perform by hand.

In addition to being inefficient, these tasks take an impersonal, one-size-fits-all approach to outreach. This limits the effectiveness of these efforts, resulting in lower marketing ROI and reduced customer engagement.

Marketing automation software is designed to resolve these challenges. Automating these tasks across channels leads to happier, more satisfied customers and increases marketing effectiveness and return on investment.

Marketing automation eliminates the need for you to send a one-off email every time you wish to talk with your contacts or clients, and it also eliminates the need to hand tag your clients when they show an interest in your products and/or services.

If you want to execute your approach the way you want, you can set up an automation to do it, which will run in the background of your company.

It gives you a way to be there for your customers, even when you are on a trip, exercising, or taking care of yourself.

The best marketing automation software helps you create personalized campaigns that are based on customer data. It allows you to send a message at the right time with relevant content.

You also have the ability to track how well these emails perform, so you know which ones work and which don't.

The key here is finding a tool that lets you personalize every aspect of your campaign from start to finish.

Good marketing automation reaches its full potential when it helps move leads through the inbound marketing funnel.

Your strategy should be dedicated to one central focus: your customers.

The best way to nurture leads is by using a lead nurturing program that will help you identify and qualify them as they progress down the sales process, from awareness of your product or service all the way through the close.

This requires setting up an automated email campaign for every step along their journey so that you can engage with them at each stage.

Marketing automation will become a marketing beast when it is already in the meta stage. It will automate almost everything.

What are those? You may ask.

Let's take a look at it in all its related fields.

What does a typical automated marketing workflow look like?

The marketing automation workflows reflect the customer journeys throughout the sales funnel.

With the automation tools, we can set up either simple workflows or complex workflows.

The typical workflow consists of the following tasks:

1. Lead Generation - The first task is generating new leads. This can be done by giving a lead magnet for the exchange of lead's data, such as email address or WhatsApp's phone number.

2. Qualification & Filtering - After capturing details of a prospect or potential customer. You'll need to filter out those who aren’t qualified enough to receive further communication.

3. Content Creation - Once you've identified qualified leads and filtered or segmented them, you start creating content according to each segment's needs.

4. Content distribution & promotion - Sending informational content and promotional content using automated IF/THEN features of marketing automation.

5. Follow-up — (automated message sequences, churn prevention, cart abandonment, etc.)

Let's imagine the below simple example.

Say, you're a writer who would like to promote your book.

You've been having many social media channels with significant followers in each one.

Now, talking about automation, what's the possible workflow?

There will be many scenarios. One of them could be like the following:

1. You create a teaser chapter.

2. You fire up your automation tool to create your lead capture page. You use your teaser chapter as the lead magnet.

3. You put the campaign tracking code on the lead capture page to know which campaign gives the best conversion.

4. You set up another similar lead capture page, with a different angle or point of view, for the purpose of A/B testing.

5. You set up automated filters for the campaigns, based on the lead behavior and/or intent.

6. You set up an automated email sequence for each campaign. It's from the welcoming email to the after-sales emails.

7. You set up a schedule to automatically publish your lead capture pages to all your social media channels.

8. You run the campaigns and monitor their progress.

9. You tweak the winning campaign and let the tool redo the process.

Now, whenever a visitor to your lead capture page grabs your teaser chapter, you will get his or her email address. The automation tool then sends out a welcome email with a thank-you note in it.

2 or 3 days later (depends on your set-up), the automation tool sends another email. This time, ask if the lead is enjoying the chapter. This time, the email is also promoting the book purchase with a special discount.

Now, this is the interesting part.

When the lead agrees to purchase, the automation tool will tag him or her and move his or her email to the buyers' group. For this group, you may set another email sequence to promote your workshop, mastermind, coaching program, or anything that is related to the book subject. You can charge more for these kinds of follow-up programs.

Now, imagine if all those repetitive tasks should be done manually.

You get the point, right?

Automation simplifies our marketing efforts.

If you have marketing teams, be it big or small, you can shift their concentration to other areas that need human interactions.

What does marketing automation mean for the customer experience?

Your marketing strategy may include automated emails and postcards, as well as other tools to help automate your marketing and ensure you're connecting with customers at every stage of their journey with your business.

Customers will trust your brand more if they feel like you've created every marketing message just for them.

A lot of companies use a method of email called a drip campaign, sending out pre-written emails at regular intervals. Many companies are now providing this kind of email marketing campaign.

Marketing automation allows you to send out custom messages to different groups of people based on customer interest and customer behavior. This kind of segmentation makes online marketing campaigns more complex because it's possible to reach better-quality contacts.

Automating how you interact with prospects and existing clients is what it's all about. Companies like Salesforce or Vbout have built their own suite of products specifically designed to make selling easier.

Automated marketing means more personalization than ever before.

Even if they don't know who the consumers are, marketers can deliver highly targeted messages to them using marketing automation.

Companies are able to send a message to everyone, regardless of where they are located, thanks to automation. And because these messages are triggered by specific events, they tend to be shorter and less overwhelming than traditional broadcast advertising.

What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

When using a marketing automation platform, you need to research your target audience and create a buyer persona to tailor your campaigns to them.

Let's take a closer look at what marketing automation isn't.

It can reduce customer loyalty if you use the wrong marketing form. It's rewarding when you use marketing automation to send personalized, relevant content to your contacts, not spammy emails.

This includes features like landing page builder, built-in CRM, reporting capabilities, social media management, and so much more.

Marketing automation can help you stay in touch with your customers. You can use it to create automated messages that are triggered by specific actions.

For example, if someone signs up for your email list, you could send them a welcome message. If they click a link in that email, you could send them an offer. If they purchase something from you, you could automatically follow up with them to see if they have any questions about their purchase.

Automated emails are a great way to stay in touch with your customers.

Moreover, this type of communication doesn’t require human interaction or approval, making it easy to scale quickly as your business grows.

The interesting part is, automated emails are just beginning. It's in the early stage of marketing automation. Meanwhile, most of us now are in the mature stage.

While marketing automation is an incredible tool that often helps businesses achieve real results, those results don't occur without the right processes, strategies, and efforts set in place.

Marketing automation objectives are meant to enhance and support marketing and sales, NOT completely replace the human factor Don't sit back and expect marketing automation to reach your business goals without you implementing a marketing automation strategy and sticking with it.

If you follow the trends, you can see the number of companies advancing to the mature stage of marketing automation is growing. It will continue to grow and evolve over time, especially since there are now more ways to optimize it than ever before.

The best way to stay ahead of the curve is to keep learning new things and stay current on industry news.

How Can You Use Marketing Automation tool Effectively?

Now, after knowing the what and the why of automated marketing, it's time to look at the how.

Just a reminder, automated marketing is not only about email marketing automation, but you must be aware that most of the tools are indeed provided by email service providers. Thus, they take the role of marketing automation providers as well.

Marketing automation is built around digital marketing strategy. Its main purpose is to gather leads and put them into the sales pipeline. The intention is to convert leads into customers.

The key features include the tracking of online behavior, studying customer profiles, qualifying leads, building personalized customer experiences, converting hot leads into quality leads, etc.

To be able to use marketing automation technology effectively, marketing departments or marketing leaders must understand their marketing plan and marketing processes first prior to migrating to the automation tools. It is to ensure marketing productivity.

The next step is to follow the onboarding process provided by the tool provider.

Since different businesses have different processes, it is best practice to craft an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) to prevent human error and to ensure a seamless customer journey.

How Do I Choose the Right Platform?

Understanding what type of company you run is the first step in choosing a marketing automation solution. There are many organizations, from small local shops to large global corporations. Each has its unique needs and requirements.

It's a good idea to find out if you want to focus on email marketing, webinars series, or other areas.

Next, choose between cloud-based solutions or software-as-a-service. Cloud-based platforms offer flexibility while being cost-effective for smaller operations. On the contrary, SaaS offers better control and customization options.

Lastly, consider whether you need one platform or multiple ones. A single platform may work fine for some businesses, but others might require several platforms working together. For example, HubSpot provides both CRM and CMS capabilities.

Remember that whatever tool is chosen, it should represent all the marketing activities of the marketing team. Each team has to have and understand its key performance indicators. They also need to know how to use the tool effectively.

Effective marketing automation will also include social media marketing capabilities. It also has marketing analytics that can be used to track marketing performance or campaign performance.

Conclusion

Forrester predicts that marketing automation will be one of the fastest-growing innovations over the next five years. Marketing automation tools have come a long way from being used by large enterprises to being used by small as well as mid-sized companies. No wonder marketing automation is no longer a nice-to-have, it's a must-have!

Talking about innovation, we can expect that it also needs to include strategies, processes, workflows, and supporting technologies such as customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning. And of course, it should be able to automate all of those strategies, processes, and workflows.

All in all, if you're looking for a solution that's going to make your life easier while helping you grow your business, then look no further than marketing automation.

Labels: digital marketing, email marketing, internet marketing

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