Marketing can be highly challenging, especially for first-time business owners. It's also time- consuming, so the hours in one work day won't be enough for you to come up with effective marketing strategies for the long term. Because of that, some business owners prefer to use their time to look after their business operations or focus on hot prospects instead.
However, without leveling up your marketing activities, you may miss opportunities to increase your customer base and sales. That's why if you don’t have a lot of time on your hands, automating your marketing efforts would do you a world of good. Here are some ways to let automation empower your marketing strategies:
1. Automate Your Sales Funnel Using Funnel Building Tools
One of the many ways to make your marketing efforts efficient is to automate your sales funnel. The term ‘sales funnel’ came from the concept of how a traditional funnel quickly and cleanly transfers liquid into a bottle. The bottle represents your business, the funnel represents your marketing campaigns, and the liquid represents your potential customers.
To keep things smooth, you need funnel building tools in automating the sales funnel. With those pieces of software, you can:
• Create or build evergreen webinar funnel to increase your brand recognition
• Learn more about clients’ current buying status, intentions, and interests for better nurturing and segmentation
• Use sign-up forms to build potential customer profiles
Using automation tools, you don't have to spend so much time looking for prospects, filtering out unqualified leads, and generating more revenue manually. And even when your business hours end, such tools can make your marketing efforts work 24/7.
2. Provide CRM Software For Your Team
Another method you can try is streamlining your marketing tasks using customer relationship management (CRM). Instead of using multiple marketing platforms, CRM lets you do various tasks in one system. What's more, your marketing team and sales team can use the system together.
You can utilize CRM to store your leads' information. Then, your team can follow up on sales- ready leads or nurture the not-so-ready leads through your marketing content.
Your team can easily update information on leads via a CRM platform. As a result, all of your team members can access that data. They can personalize their communication or marketing efforts for the leads according to their needs.
3. Do Not Forget About Email Marketing
If you want to maximize your marketing potential, it’s advisable to do email marketing, and you have to make sure it’s automated. By implementing automated email marketing, you can send valuable information—which can be anything from discount coupons to evergreen content—to your leads in a hassle-free manner.
You can do so via specific triggers such as a webhook, email activity, an event, the creation of a new profile, and form submission. With trigger emails, you don't have to craft every single message meant for hundreds or even thousands of subscribers. Here are some examples of trigger emails you can have with automated email marketing:
• Milestone emails like join dates and birthdays
• Abandoned cart emails reminding your leads to check out your products or offers before they're gone
• Welcome emails for first-time subscribers
You can automatically send these emails to different people depending on the trigger you set. That way, all of your customers will feel valued without the need for you to exert more effort than you have to. Imagine if you manually send out emails to your prospects—automation will help you steer clear of that scenario.
4. Automate Your Social Media Marketing
This can boost your marketing strategy as well. From analytics to monitoring to content publishing, social media automation tools make many aspects of promoting your business on social media platforms easier for you to handle.
Instead of wasting hours figuring out what to share on social media, an automation tool decreases the time it takes for you to schedule and curate content. Hence, you can focus on engaging with your audience to increase your social media presence.
If you have numerous messages to attend to, chatbots can help you improve customer experience and provide customer support to your social media account followers. You can create instant replies when customers contact you through your account. Without chatbots, your potential customers may lose interest in your business as no one’s there to assist them.
Also, some social media automation tools can help you create content, depending on your niche. This is great if you're out of ideas or too swamped to do it on your own. The tool will then share and post the content after its creation.
Additional Ways To Improve Automated Marketing
- Pass Over Sales Automatically
- Ready Leads Using Lead Scoring
- Personalize Your Website
- Provide Sales Team with the Info They Need to Follow Up
- Segment Your Lead Nurturing
- Track Results & ROI
Marketing Automation Conclusion
Marketing your business online doesn’t have to be that hard thanks to automated programs. With the use of various automation tools, you can keep up with your target audience's demand and eventually either be at par with or even surpass your competitors.
No longer will your team waste time thinking of the best marketing strategy or how to gain leads. Instead, all of you can focus more on other vital aspects of the business. Try any of the above tips now and see the difference that automation can make to your business.