Reaching your audience takes time, effort and understanding. Digital marketing gives companies powerful tools to do just that, allowing them to track analytics and develop a data-driven strategy. If you implement it manually, you could lose valuable time that you could be spending on your business and customers. Instead, you should focus your efforts on the power of marketing automation.
If you’re unsure how to leverage automation to maximize your marketing efforts, you can opt to partner with cutting-edge marketing companies in San Diego. Our team at InnoVision can help you find your footing.
Marketing Automation and You
While automation might feel complicated and conjure up images of high-tech supercomputers, it’s fairly simple in concept. All it entails is taking some of the more repetitive and time-consuming aspects of your marketing and assigning the task to software. Its usage can vary in complexity, depending on how you choose to implement it.
For a simple example, automation can be used to schedule posts across your social media channels so they’re automatically published at a predetermined time. That way, no one has to post manually across each platform. For a more complex task, automation can be used to analyze leads and manage email marketing efforts based on the customer profiles you build.
Generally speaking, marketing automation can help optimize the time and energy you dedicate to marketing. As the top marketing companies in San Diego will tell you, optimization comes down to hammering out a specific plan of action.
Aligning Automation With Your Goals
Setting goals is the first step in any digital marketing campaign. Without a clear, measurable objective, you can’t track your successes or identify areas that need improvement. Since a goal is crucial to your overall strategy, any automation you implement must be aligned.
Let’s say you want to launch a campaign to encourage people who add things to their online shopping cart but never actually complete the sale to return and purchase. You could use automation to send follow-up emails, encouraging them to return to your site and finish the transaction.
Or let’s imagine you’re trying to get more people who follow you on social media to subscribe to your newsletter. Automated systems can tell you when your audience will most likely engage with you on a platform and then post during those times. When you have an objective in mind, it becomes easy to identify which parts of your plan stand to gain the most from automation.
Identify the Ideal Customer
Digital marketing analytics provide a bevy of data points for your customers. Depending on how they interact with you online, you can learn their ages, occupations, locations, interests, messaging preferences and even the times of day they’re most likely to engage with your campaigns. The hard part is translating all this raw data into identifiable buyer personas.
A buyer persona helps you understand your audience or various segments of your audience so you can better personalize and target your marketing efforts. While sifting through all the disparate information can be onerous for a single person to manage, automation makes the process much easier. Once you’ve generated a profile, you can use that information to target customers with more personalized content and anticipate what they’ll need along their journey.
Plan Out the Customer’s Journey
Your customer’s journey is an overview of each point of contact a person has with your company. Broadly, the journey goes from becoming aware of your company to considering your offer to converting (whether that means a sale or just taking your suggested action) and finally, to retention. Once you understand your customer, you can understand their journey.
By using automation, you can clearly detect any problem areas along the path and then further automate solutions to the problem. If people are stalling out between awareness and conversion, you can ensure they receive emails encouraging them to continue. If they convert but rarely return for anything more, you can send follow-ups to let them know of any special offers or news you might have to keep them engaged.
Experienced marketing companies know that, ultimately, your campaigns come down to the relationship between you and your customers. With automation, you can understand them better and give them what they need.
Measuring Success and Iterating
Once you’ve run a campaign, you’re ready to step into the next and most crucial phase of your marketing strategy: learning from your mistakes. At the end of your campaign, you’ll have a large amount of data to parse through. Utilize the analytics your marketing platforms give you to distill all that data into a more digestible format. Instead of having to go through item by item, you’ll be able to see at a glance how your campaign performed.
Open rates, click-through rates, conversions and other statistics can paint a picture of how your audience responded to your campaign and what areas of improvement you want to address. Even the best marketing companies rarely hit it out of the park when they first launch a campaign, so if certain aspects underperform, don’t be discouraged. Instead, see it as an opportunity to learn and grow for your next campaign.
Harnessing the Technology
Marketing automation gives your business powerful technology that can boost your sales, engagement, retention and so much more to previously unknown heights. The tricky part is determining how to implement it as effectively as possible. As one of the premier marketing companies in San Diego, the team at InnoVision is positioned to help you realize your full marketing potential.
When you’re ready, reach out to our team and let us know what you need. Whether you need help developing a strategy from the ground up or are looking for insight on how to best integrate automation into an existing campaign, we’re here to provide all the support and guidance we can.
