Automation is taking over the business world faster than ever.
Today, businesses that automate their marketing processes are known to enjoy 25% higher revenue but, in the wise words of Bill Gates, automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency, but automation applied to an inefficient operation will only magnify the inefficiency.
Automation in marketing has grown over the past few years and companies are now enjoying increasingly sophisticated tools; that said, you still need to follow the right strategies if you’re to reap the complete benefits of automated marketing processes.
Without further ado, let’s dive into the fundamental marketing automation rules you need to follow to take your business from good to great.
Create a highly targeted strategy
Did you know that 56% of companies admit that they need their marketing strategy improved?
If you’re considering automation for the job, you still need a plan in place to guide your efforts to ensure you’re enjoying the most time and cost savings as well as amplifying the success of your efforts.
Start by understanding what you want your results to be and then set up practical and achievable goals to guide you towards your desired outcomes. Along the way, make sure you’re analysing and reviewing the success of your campaigns to ensure you’re making optimisations to your activities and processes.
A well-defined strategy, however, doesn’t just mean having a clear plan for each step; it can also include choosing an automation consultant who understands your businesses and picking the right tools to support your efforts.
Choose the best and the right tools
Once you have your budget planned and your goals are in place, the next step to streamlined marketing automation processes is to choose the right tools.
In the next few years, we can expect to see more and more automation platforms flooding the market, featuring exciting new benefits and capabilities.
For the right results, however, you can’t just use any kind of software, but one with capabilities that align with your marketing goals.
Whenever you’re choosing automation tools for your business, go beyond considering their features; it’s always a good idea to look at factors like ease of use, multi-platform integration, and even the level of user support that’s provided.
If you already have a system in place but feel like it’s not giving you the results you want, the next best step is to get it reviewed and optimised by a marketing automation expert.
A trained pair of eyes can help you identify the loopholes and inconsistencies in your current system and update it to ensure the results you enjoy are well worth the investment.
Integrate your marketing capabilities with your existing systems
By connecting automation tools to your existing systems, you can enjoy seamless data sharing, collaboration, and integrated results.
For instance, integrating the contacts in your customer relationship management system with your marketing and sales software can make it much easier to create detailed user profiles, nurture your leads more systematically, and provide them with highly personalised support.
This raises another point: The line between marketing and sales is becoming more blurred each day. With an integrated process that combines sales and marketing automation, you can enjoy improved productivity, unified data management and the perfect synchronisation of tasks.
Integrating automated marketing with a CRM system also helps users adapt more easily to your systems. Poor user adoption is one of the main reasons behind failed CRM projects but with the power of CRM and marketing automation combined, your team can enjoy a single source of truth they can leverage to deliver better results.
You can also integrate website pages and landing pages with your automation software and capture the leads and online inquiries coming through these points more efficiently and effectively.
Improve the quality of your data
Today, 54% of companies claim that the biggest challenge to designing data-driven marketing strategies is the lack of high-quality data.
And we get it—data management can be overwhelming. The problem is that high-quality data is essential for effective marketing strategies and an amazing ROI. Your automation software can only deliver the right results if it’s provided with the right data.
For this, you need clean and actionable data from your campaigns. That’s why your data management efforts need to include tasks such as de-duplication, cleansing, and appending your data.
You can achieve this by standardising your existing data, completing missing data, and removing bad data.
With the right data, you get the insights you need for planning and executing your marketing campaigns with finesses. Sure, automation makes marketing easier and more efficient but with high-quality data, you can elevate the performance of your system to the next level.
Provide marketing automation training to your teams
Unlike most industries, when it comes to marketing success, staying up to date and in line with the changing trends and market patterns is a necessity. This means familiarizing yourself with the latest marketing trends and expertise, including the use of automation software.
Unfortunately, even with the most powerful tools, many teams lack the skills and expertise they need to take full advantage of what marketing automation software can do.
Counter this challenge by facilitating tailor-made training programmes for your team. To ensure they’re gaining the practical knowledge they need to use your systems and optimise your campaigns in line with the latest best practices, choosing experienced consultants who have in-depth insight into automation platforms is key.
Stay competitive with the (awesome) power of marketing automation
Today, automation allows you to handle time-consuming, repetitive tasks with a greater level of skill and precision than ever before. By combining automation with human resources and intelligence, therefore, you can add greater value to your marketing efforts while optimising your resource usage.
It’s also much easier to achieve the results you’re after and enjoy exceptional ROI on your training and technology investments.
If you’d like to enjoy these outcomes across your marketing department, follow these fundamental rules and make your automation platforms work for you!
