The term “marketing automation” refers to software platforms and technologies designed to effectively market products, services or brands on multiple online channels such as website, social media and email, and automate repetitive tasks in order to achieve a specific goal.
In simple words:
- It shares content that’s relevant and valuable.
- It answers questions or offers more information.
- It sends targeted emails based on industry, role, and stage in the buying process, previous interactions or even content the audience has previously engaged with.
According to an article published on Autopilot, more than 60% of marketers use mass email blasts only, whereas 13% of marketers use marketing automation software. Interestingly, the latter group is able to generate 2X the number of leads and are 2X as effective.
Marketing automation helps in prioritizing and executing pre-defined tasks in a more structured manner. It enables marketers to achieve their goals faster and save time, without comprising the authenticity of the content being generated.
Marketing automation is often perceived to be “robotic”, but the truth is it isn’t. Yes, this technology has completely transformed how companies interact with consumers and prospects, but the mastermind behind those successfully executed campaigns are the “marketers” themselves – or in this case “you”.
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Marketing Automation Tips To Sound More Human” quote=”Marketing Automation Tips To Sound More Human”]
Adding to this thought, here are 5 best tips to make your marketing automation less robotic and more human:
Best Tips to make your Marketing Automation
1. Build your own marketing database
B2B marketers often fall in the trap of data vendors who lure them into buying cost-effective but invalidated email marketing lists. Such an action not only has major repercussions such as being blacklisted by email service providers (ESPs) but also causes loss of time, money and energy that go into planning and executing the campaigns.
Even if you are able to grab your hands on a relatively useful marketing list and improve your unsubscribe rates, you can’t stop people from changing their email addresses. This causes database decay. Your automation efforts will only be successful if you consistently generate your own set of qualified leads and consistently restock it.
2. Organize your segmentation and how
What is the point of automating your marketing efforts when you are not sure about your targeted audience? Sending the right content is important but reaching out to the right set of people even more so. Before that is fixed – to whom will you market your product or service?
The first rule is to identify the segment conditions and goal drivers before you jump into the “content” bit. Smart strategies and creative content will flow automatically once you have mapped out the prospects you wish to nurture and convert.
3. Always remember content is king
Content is being churned out at a much higher rate than ever, without any proper plan of action. And all you see around you is ordinary content that adds value to no one. For the content to be truly engaging, the efforts must be strategically guided, so that the written word is valuable and targeted towards the end goal.
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And this is not just restricted to emails or website but also social media and other content resources. By continuously creating quality content that appeals to your audience, you can ensure that your marketing automation strategy will yield results.
4. Keep the sales team in the loop
One of the biggest mistakes that marketers often make is not interacting with the sales team while using automation. This leads to prospects getting nurtured by both your marketing team and sales team simultaneously.
The efforts get divided and lots of time is wasted. Therefore, whatever you decide should be properly intimated to the sales team as well – so that the strategy can be built with a single focus and to achieve a collective goal by optimizing all resources in hand.
5. Experiment to scale up
Even if your marketing automation efforts begin with an email, please remember that your audience is interacting with your brand across all platforms. Therefore, build a plan that delivers relevant and smart content on the most-used channels.
For instance: if you run a webinar registration campaign, then try to identify possible decisions your prospect could make. Make a note of all the potential responses you hope to get – good or bad. Imagine how you would take your audience through the process. Once you map all that out, your campaign will perform exceptionally well.
How can Wigzo help?
Wigzo, a marketing automation suite offers solutions that create personalized experiences across all customer touch points from a single, integrated digital marketing platform. It helps your brand to forge an interactive relationship with the customers based on real-time, bespoke communication, spurring them to convert their purchasing intent into action.
It leverages Big Data technology to bring relevance to the customer data, and empower it with predictive insights and intelligence to communicate the relevant and the right message to the customers.
So…it is okay to experiment with the goal drivers, pre-decided audience or content tone. Otherwise, you will never know what works best for your brand. Just make sure you strive to deliver the right message at the right time to the right audience. Marketing automation is here to stay! Schedule your DEMO with us right now!
