Even small businesses are flooded with tons of tasks and responsibilities day by day. Unfortunately, most of these are repetitive and manual, which wastes their time and energy. That’s why it’s important to automate your marketing strategy.
Marketing automation helps businesses reduce and eliminate repetitive manual tasks, such as data entry, email sending, manual dialing, etc. These tasks not only consume your time but also makes your business prone to human errors, costing thousands of dollars.
With an automated marketing strategy, you’ll be able to set your campaigns on autopilot for continuous operation, even if you’re not available. By doing so, your productivity will improve, the output will increase, and the return on investment (ROI) will skyrocket.
On top of that, marketing automation will help your business achieve and ensure a positive and relevant customer experience. However, automating your marketing strategy may not be as easy as you think.
If you have no idea where to begin, here are some tips and tricks to automate your marketing operations successfully:
1. Use Voice Mailing Software
Voicemails are an efficient way to communicate and connect with your prospects automatically. These are prerecorded voice messages that contain marketing campaigns promoting your products and services.
Also, most voicemail software offers a ringless feature. This feature prevents you from disturbing your contacts, especially in their busiest times. Nevertheless, it leaves a notification and a call log to inform them about your voicemails, which they can open whenever they want.
Most importantly, using voicemails is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies. With just a few cents, you’ll be able to send voicemails to hundreds of people within a couple of minutes.
Here are other features of voicemail software:
- It can reach multiple leads in minutes.
- It’s compatible with any device, whether landline or mobile.
- It sends reports that show which campaigns need improvements.
- It automatically sends a voicemail when it’s scheduled.
- It works on the cloud, which ensures a secure and seamless workflow.
If you’re planning on implementing a voicemail marketing campaign, you can search online for voicemail service providers within your location, such as Unlimited Ringless Voicemail to help you. They have a superb voicemail system paired with a short message service (SMS) marketing tool for an automated and effective marketing strategy.
You may also visit your local service providers to help you decide what’s better for your company and which will help you reach your goals in less time.
2. Establish An Email List
For successful marketing automation, you’d need to establish a list that contains the emails of your prospects. One of the most effective ways is by providing opt-in forms, which your visitors can fill in once they visit your website, landing pages, blogs, etc.
You may also grow your opt-ins using subscriptions, email newsletters, whitepapers, and free consultations promoted on your platform and social media sites. These are also known as lead magnets, which aim to acquire personal details in exchange for free services.
Other than that, you may conduct online conferences and webinars to create your subscription list together with your existing customers.
Once your visitors fill out the opt-in forms and other virtual forms, their information will be automatically added to your customer relationship management (CRM) software. This will provide you with the complete list of prospects you need to interact with for a higher chance of making sales.
3. Perform Audience Segmentation
Segmentation is the process of categorizing leads into different parameters that’ll determine their purchasing behavior. The following parameters include geolocation, interest, customer lifecycle, purchase activity, industry, lead source, etc.
Through audience segmentation, you’ll be able to produce personalized campaigns, pricing models, and an understanding of customer behavior.
Here are other tips for an effective audience segmentation:
- Create buyer personas of your target audience to attract qualified prospects, understand their behavior, and produce content based on their personality.
- Use social media targeting tools to communicate and interact with different audiences.
- Create a community using social media platforms to identify and learn more about your customers and audiences.
- Post at different times of the day to interact with your audience across different geographic regions.
By segmenting your audience, you’ll be able to automate your operations seamlessly by sending the right marketing campaign to the right person at the right time. After all, sending the same messages to your prospects is not a good idea because it only promotes unreliability.
4. Create High-Quality Content
If you’re not producing great content, marketing automation won’t work the way you want it to. Sending high-quality content will help you attract interest and encourage your leads to take the necessary actions.
Here are some techniques that’ll guide you in making content that pierces through the hearts of your prospects:
- Write A Compelling Headline: Headlines are a huge factor for people to consider opening marketing content. Start with a headline that contains 65 characters or around 11 words. However, you should also consider the words you’re going to use. Make sure they contain keywords, such as ‘you should know’ for maximum engagement.
- Create Engaging Content: No matter how great your headlines are, if your content sounds boring and less engaging, people won’t take the right actions you need. All you need to do is write content in a language that fits your audience. Avoid complex or plain sentences that may question your credibility.
- Add Actionable Tips: To help people understand what you’re discussing or promoting, include some tips that would allow them to execute what they have just read. So, be an expert and write what you know. You may also add references to make your content more reliable and worthy of reading.
Furthermore, always ensure that your content is 100% original to avoid being flagged as plagiarized. This will lead to better conversions, reliability, and improved web traffic.
5. Produce Personalized Marketing Content
Nowadays, most people look for content created only for their eyes alone. They’re not concerned about what others may have received. Instead, they look for messages, sales, promotions, and discounts perfectly tailored to their needs.
Imagine your favorite brand notifying you about their special promotions based on what you recently viewed on their platform. You’d probably click it as soon as you see their notification because it’s genuinely crafted according to your interests.
Here are some tips for personalizing your content:
- Make sure your content sounds like a human, not a robot. Write sentences like you’re talking to them. You may also use their first names to grab their attention.
- Include call-to-action (CTA) keywords to encourage them to make purchases.
- Create marketing content based on customers’ current experiences. For example, if they’ve left some items in their cart, notify them about it or send some trendy items.
Creating personalized marketing content is one of the best ways to make your automation work and produce better outcomes. Your marketing automation will flow effectively if there’s a smooth interaction between you and your prospects.
It’d be best to use the data based on the results of your segmentation. From there, you’ll be able to determine what kind of content you’d need to offer to each of them.
6. Use Chatbots
Chatbots are automated communication AI systems designed to provide answers to customer queries and questions in real-time. With this, you’ll be able to give your prospects what they want to know 24/7, even if you’re not there to offer replies.
Nowadays, most businesses are using chatbots to improve customer interaction and communication. You can see them on the lower right area of the screen, trying to start a conversation.
Here are some benefits of using chatbots:
- Chatbots may help automate different processes, such as handling payment, emailing customers and leads, answering frequently asked questions (FAQs), etc.
- Chatbots can be programmed to speak in different languages to communicate with customers across the world.
- Chatbots don’t experience mood swings when talking to an irritated and mad customer. They always remain pleasant and understanding.
- Chatbots help collect data based on their interaction with previous prospects and customers.
Furthermore, when using chatbots, always keep a friendly tone, provide key information based on specific keywords, offer quick answer buttons, and avoid slang to remain professional.
7. Use A CRM Tool
A CRM tool will take your automation to the next level. It automatically keeps your consumer data updated, tracks their interactions with your company, and handles their accounts. It has one primary goal, which is to improve customer experience, relationships, and lifetime value.
Here are some features of CRM software you wouldn’t want to miss:
- Workflow Automation: As mentioned earlier, CRM tools help automate processes from updating client data to tracking past engagements and managing their sales account.
- Personalized Services: CRM software allows you to customize your account based on your marketing needs, so you’ll only pay for what you need. It also allows you to include add-ons and customize your extensions and plug-ins.
- Integration: CRM software can be connected to other software solutions for streamlined and smooth operations. But make sure they’re compatible with each other and easy to execute.
- Analytics: This offers insights based on the data it collects so that you can provide better products and services to your customers and prospects.
With this smart software, you’ll be able to reduce and eliminate tedious tasks you need to execute over time, boosting your productivity and providing relevant customer experiences.
8. Automatically Nurture Your Leads
Lead nurturing is the process of engaging with your audience by providing relevant content to support them throughout the sales funnel. It’s an essential element to your business success because it’ll help your prospects decide if they’ll move forward or not.
Moreover, it’s best to automate your lead nurturing processes not only to save time and valuable resources but also to prevent losing potential customers in the process.
Here are some tips for effective lead nurturing:
- Produce targeted content that meets every prospect’s needs based on your understanding of their characteristics, such as interests, preferences, goals, and triggers.
- Use multiple sales and marketing channels to better engage with your prospects and customers.
- Address concerns and questions by providing content throughout the buyer’s journey.
- Follow up leads if they’re not doing any activities in the past few days.
- Deliver customized emails. You can include triggers that automatically download content after a response or allow them to visit your site.
With these tips, your automated lead nurturing will be effective. So, try and experiment with these strategies with your team to determine which works the best.
9. Ensure Automated Campaigns Don’t Sound Automated
Automating your marketing strategy shouldn’t prevent you from fostering new relationships and building bridges with customers and prospects. Of course, it’s an important step toward success, but it doesn’t mean that it should sound automated.
Always make sure that your marketing campaigns sound and feel personal and human. After all, you’re engaging with people, not with robots and software.
Automation should help you improve your productivity and work output. Remember, your goal is to build relationships, not just make sales.
Here are some tips to make your campaigns human and not robotic:
- Use conversational words to make it sound like you’re talking to your friend decently and respectfully.
- Give simple and consistent instructions regarding how they can message you back.
- Use words that evoke emotions to show your human side even better, such as love, sorry, happy, etc.
- Use personal pronouns, such as us, we, you, etc. This makes your messages and content sound personal.
- Be casual at all times. Avoid using formal sentences and words that make you sound intimidating.
Final Words
Automating your marketing strategy is an important step that’ll help your small business grow. Its primary intent is to reduce and eliminate repetitive manual tasks that slow down the productivity of your business. Once done correctly, you’ll be able to improve your workflow and create marketing campaigns your customers and prospects would engage with.
However, marketing automation may seem daunting, especially for first-timers. Aside from following the tips mentioned above, it’d be best to start small and grow. With this, you’ll be able to learn the process thoroughly and avoid making mistakes when automating.