There’s a lot of misinformation out there regarding Digital Marketing Automation. In this blog, we just want to clear the air and ensure you know what it is and what it isn’t to help you make an informed decision.
5 Things You Should Know About Digital Marketing Automation
- Marketing automation isn’t for generating leads
- Email marketing is alive and well
- Marketing automation is made possible by customer personas
- Marketing automation strategies are living documents
- Marketing automation doesn’t discriminate based on size
1. Marketing automation isn’t for generating leads
Although it’s often talked about in the context of online marketing, marketing automation isn’t for generating leads. Rather, it’s for communicating with those leads and advancing them in the sales funnel.
According to HubSpot, to get the most out of marketing automation, you need first to have a way of generating qualified leads:
“Recognizing that marketing automation does not do marketing and lead generation for you, but can help scale your successful efforts. The first step is building a pipeline of good fit leads by generating relevant, optimized content that speaks to your prospect’s needs and challenges. This is where inbound marketing becomes the building blocks of your marketing funnel.”
You use inbound marketing to generate qualified leads from your original content. When there are too many leads to deal with individually, you can use marketing automation to save time and money.
2. Email marketing is alive and well
Marketing automation and email are attached at the hip. Therefore, you should know that email marketing is alive and well. Despite what you may hear about its future prospects, it still has the best ROI in online marketing. If you’re considering marketing automation, then don’t let email marketing deter you.
3. Marketing automation is made possible by customer personas
Those who are suspicious of marketing automation often have the same question: “Just how exactly can you effectively communicate with hundreds of leads?” This implies, of course, that you talk to all prospects the same way.
But that’s just wrong. The reason why marketing automation is effective is that you can create customer personas, which give you reasonable flexibility in terms of communicating with leads, according to this Small Business Trends article:
“No, when we say you need to automate personality, we mean that you need to develop customer personas. These are templates that have a particular perspective on sales, customer needs, and that embrace a tone that’s limited to specific sales groups. Simply put, you can’t talk to all customers in the same way but you can’t write hundreds of individual emails either. These personas are the middle ground.”
With customer personas, you can craft messages based on someone’s demographics and behaviour. Thus, you can tailor your messages just enough to avoid sounding generic.
4. Marketing automation strategies are living documents
Marketing strategies should be two things: documented on paper and editable. Writing your goals down increases the chance that you’ll achieve them, and revising your strategy helps you improve upon your mistakes.
According to this Econsultancy article, you shouldn’t wait long to revise your marketing automation strategy if you do not see results:
“Finally, not all marketing automation projects will work and few will demonstrate ROI from day one. Experts said that when an automation project is not showing clear improvements, that efforts should be pivoted quickly toward another marketing automation initiative.”
You don’t need to wait six months to know if your strategy needs tweaking. In the case of marketing automation, the sooner you act, the better.
5. Marketing automation doesn’t discriminate based on size
Small businesses seem to think that every cool toy was designed exclusively for big corporations. Marketing automation is no exception.
Yet marketing automation can be just as effective for small businesses. As long as you generate qualified leads, you need a way to communicate with them. Hiring additional employees isn’t scalable, so almost every business could benefit from marketing automation.
To talk more about marketing automation, or anything else, contact us today.
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