Why marketing automation is important varies from business to business. Even so, there are certain functions and reporting that are relevant to all businesses that are available through marketing automation that are not with traditional marketing. Once you understand the benefits that marketing automation offers, you will have all the answers you require when wanting to understand why marketing automation is important.

Marketing Automation CRM

Marketing automation offers a platform (Customer Relationship Manager – CRM) on which you can store enormous amounts of data about your target audience(s). With this information, you are able to micro-target segments in your database sending them the right information at the right time. Why marketing automation is important #1 – So that you can successfully move your leads smoothly along their buying journey, answering the right questions at the right time and by covering off objections before they are raised. This is done by micro-targeting your audience and message. Without a marketing automation CRM platform, this is not possible. Adding on to this, as your prospects interact with your marketing, using marketing automation, you can see what is working, what is not working and which leads are showing “buying behaviour”. In the marketing automation CRM and software, we use Infusionsoft, this is called “lead scoring”. When a lead is scored as “warm” or “hot”, this information is automatically relayed to a salesperson, who is given a task to contact a highly qualified lead. Why marketing automation is important #2 – you can see what is working, what is not working and which leads are showing buying behaviour. This saves a lot of time, as your sales team is only dealing with highly qualified leads, not cold ones.

Marketing automation doesn’t replace traditional marketing principles, it magnifies them!

While marketing automation provides these tremendous benefits, it is important to remember that having a marketing automation CRM platform such as Infusionsoft (to provide this information and marketing automation experience), it doesn’t replace solid marketing fundamentals.                     

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Why Marketing Automation Is Important – Fundamentals

We know why marketing automation is essential, however, these benefits will not be realised unless you have properly scoped out what you are selling, who are you selling it to and how you are different to your competition.

Now when you are looking at what you are selling, you must look at what the “benefits” of what you are selling are.

Let’s say you sell gym memberships, you’re not really selling gym memberships, are you? What you are really selling is health and wellbeing; perhaps weight loss, and maybe self-esteem.

Now what you are selling must also marry up with who you are selling it to. For example, if you are selling gym memberships to young men who want six-pack abs, selling them weight loss is probably not going to hit the mark is it?

This is why marketing automation is important and will only work when you have what you are selling matched up perfectly with who you are selling it to.

On top of this, your marketing must include messages that differentiate you from your competition.

Let’s look at the gym example. Every gym has exercise equipment so bragging about how good your new equipment is, is not an ideal differentiator.

However, if you are a gym that specialises in helping middle-aged people lose weight, your message is clear.

This means those who are fearful of going to a gym because they are overweight will be more attracted to your messaging than a “six-pack gym”.

You know why marketing automation should be used in your business.. You know that it will help you to micro-target your audience with the right messaging at the right time. It will help you to know what is working and not working. It will also help you identify those most likely to buy when they are ready to buy.

Marketing automation has the potential to increase your bottom line and make your internal processes more efficient, however…

Even though you understand why marketing automation is essential, never forget that it can only be as good as the solid marketing principles it is built on.

Rohan James is a Director at Journey Point. He is a Marketing Wizard, but when it comes to surfing his favourite breaks, the word “wizard” is nowhere to be found!

How marketing automation works, is one of the most popular questions that I’m asked. This question arises because I’ve seen many cases in which small business owners blame the technology for their marketing automation not working.

However, when we dig a little deeper we find that nine times out of ten, it’s the strategy that was either non-existent or flawed to begin with.

This means that before you undertake any automated marketing, you must first understand how marketing automation works.

Having powerful marketing automation software at hand without the correct underlying strategy is similar to putting a high-powered car in the hands of an inexperienced driver, i.e. you’re asking for trouble.

Don’t just automate what you already have. This will result in magnifying what you already have. If it’s already great, good, you’re lucky; but if it is flawed… well, I don’t need to tell you what will happen.

Once you understand how marketing automation works, investing in a new CRM and Automated Marketing Platform such as Infusionsoft, is an opportunity for you to re-evaluate.

This is a chance to determine what is working and not working in your business. It’s an opportunity to streamline and moving forward only use what is working and likely to work in the future.

How marketing automation works can be broken down into three categories:

1. People
2. Processes
3. Systems

People

Your organization must be culturally aligned. This means that those involved with Sales and Marketing must view marketing and sales as one integrated process. Any breakdown here will be reflected and magnified by your marketing automation.

We have encountered many businesses that have “sales” people and “marketing” people and they are run as individual silos. A business owner who allows this to continue after implementing marketing automation does not understand how marketing automation works.

So the first step in learning how marketing automation works is to ensure that your entire sales and your entire marketing team are familiar with the Ideal Customer Lifecycle.

This lifecycle begins with the first contact with your marketing effort and “ends” with asking for referrals from happy satisfied customers.

With this overall understanding, your team will be able to easily identify what stage a “lead” or a “customer” is at. They will also understand exactly what the next step ought to be, to have them continue through your marketing and sales funnel.

The next important aspect for your people is having someone who can absorb large amounts of data and complex concepts. This is imperative to be able to make decisions to solve problems or refine your marketing automation efforts.

You see, marketing is increasingly becoming a technical profession that includes high-proficiency with technological solutions.

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Today’s marketing automation platforms such as Infusionsoft are much easier to use than earlier systems, however marketers today must be comfortable using technology.

So if you don’t have the right skills on-staff already, you’ll need to train your current staff using external consultants, and/or look at hiring the right staff.

Processes

Prior to marketing automation, almost all marketing was simply about Lead Generation. This is not how marketing automation works.

Marketing automation is a highly organized, integrated, repeatable process.

It’s about understanding your customers’ buying process and moving from focussing on lead generation to lead education and nurturing in a logical, sequential manner.

You’ll also need to understand your Lead Flow.

Some businesses have too many leads that need to “scored” before handing over only the “hottest” leads to your salespeople.

You see, understanding how marketing automation works can help you guide leads through your funnel more efficiently, and when done well, it can nurture leads all the way to sales conversion.

Even so, if your business is new or if you have a small business, you may not have enough leads.

If you have nothing coming into the top of your funnel, you will have nothing to nurture!

If you don’t have enough leads, you’ll need to put a plan in place to get more leads using with content marketing, social media marketing, networking events, and so on.

You’ll need to do anything that will help to get prospects into the top of your funnel.

So how marketing automation works with your internal processes will be determined by answering the following questions:

• What defines a sales-ready lead for your business?
• How does your sales team prioritize their time?
• How will you implement lead nurturing for leads that are not ready to buy yet?
• How will you re-engage sales leads that don’t move forward?
• What key metrics do you report on a weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis?
• How do you measure a campaign ROI?
• Do you have missing or incomplete data?
• If so, how will your data get cleansed to ensure your marketing automation doesn’t suffer?

Now you understand the effect of people and your processes on how marketing automation works, it’s now time for…

Systems

Choosing the right system(s) for your business is paramount. Every business’ needs are unique. So do your research and select with care.

Whilst doing this, keep integration top of mind. The right marketing automation system for your business also needs to integrate seamlessly and completely with your accounting software, your website, and your other marketing tools and systems such as content management systems, and analytics platforms.

Ideally, you would use a complete CRM with Marketing Automation already built in such as Infusionsoft.

How Marketing Automation Works – Summary

All of the factors discussed here are paramount for marketing automation success, but don’t let not having all of them in place keep you from getting stuck into it.

The best marketing automation strategies I’ve seen have started small with what they have, they plan for the future and scale up only as success is achieved.

Success breeds success!

Start small; aim for small successes first and then scale up realistically and methodically by building on those successes.

How does marketing automation work?

Now you know!

Rohan James is a Director at Journey Point. He is a Marketing Wizard, but when it comes to surfing his favourite breaks, the word “wizard” is nowhere to be found!

How to out market your competition is not difficult when you understand that few businesses market well.

Have you ever been sent an email that has absolutely nothing to do with your interests, or makes you an offer for something that you’ve already bought?

It’s annoying isn’t it?

Consumers not only want but these days, expect to be treated as individual human beings with unique needs and preferences.

What a nightmare for small business owners with a limited marketing budget right?

Well, before you go reaching for that bottle of scotch, the good news is that with the correct CRM and Automated Marketing platform, you can take advantage of this consumer trend and learn how to out marketed your competition in no time.

So listen up, here’s how to out market your competition:

1. Understand Who Your Customers Really Are

One of the most frustrating things for a business owner is not having all the information or data you need at your fingertips when you need it.

And asking leads or customers for the same information multiple times will hurt your retention rates, cost you referrals, and damage your standing in the marketplace.

Using a powerful CRM and Automated marketing platform like Infusionsoft, you can segment your database in any way you want to.

This means that you can create groups of people in your database according to demographics, psychographics, buying behaviours, product purchases and any other ways that would be useful for your business to know.

For example, it would be good to segment men and women, as their buying behaviours are often different.

You may have some offerings that are purely for women and if a man receives this marketing he will not be impressed. This means you’ll lose favour in his eyes and all the people he shares his disappointment with.

So if you want to know how to out market your competition, the first step is to understand intimately who your prospects and customers are and then segment them into smaller groups that have the same or similar identifiers.

Once done, you can routinely follow up conversations and if you have a sales pipeline, you can easily schedule automated reminders for someone in your business to complete a manual task, such as a follow-up call.

How To Out Market Your Completion Step 1: – Know who your customers really are and segment your database according to common identifiers.

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2. Create Highly Targeted Messages

Now that you have your database segmented correctly, the next step in knowing how to out market your competition is to target your messages to those segments correctly. There’s nothing worse than receiving an email from a company who sends you information about something you have no interest in. Let’s say you downloaded a guide on liver detoxing from a health and wellbeing website. Then the next day you receive an email with The Top Five Tips To Lose Weight Without Exercising. While this may be an interesting subject for some, if you don’t have a weight problem and you downloaded the information on liver detoxing simply because you want more energy, you are going to feel misunderstood by that business. There is no excuse for a poorly targeted message when such great technology is around that allows segmentation of a database, such as Infusionsoft. If someone expresses interest in your information for left-handed people who have green eyes and who love to cook vegetarian meals, your follow up messages ought to be written specifically for left-handed people with green eyes who love to cook vegetarian food, right? It’s so simple, but you can guarantee 99% percent of your competition is not doing this. And this is brilliant for you because you now know how to out market your competition… Segment your database as we looked at in the previous step, and provide highly-target messages and information to those segments. An example of this was a recent Blog post that I wrote. It was titled Marketing Automation Follow Up – The Top 6 Benefits For Small Business The people who subscribe to our Blogs are business owners who are interested in Marketing Automation and so this piece was written with them in mind. The result was that two people who read this information contacted us and one has become a client. This is the power of highly targeted messaging to the right audience. How To Out Market Your Competition Step 2: Create Highly-Targeted Messages for your correctly segmented database.

3. Track Your Campaign Performance

You have segmented your database and you are providing targeted information, what next? Using a campaign map inside your automated marketing platform you are able to keep tabs on the number of people who receive your marketing messages. From there you can also see at a glance what actions people are taking on your messages, what section of the campaign they are in, and who are the most engaged. Once people have responded in a certain manner to your marketing, they can have a “tag” automatically applied by your software, which in turn triggers and automated notification. This could be notifying a sales rep to call someone in your database that been identified as a “hot” prospect.

This level of automation means that you reps will not be wasting time talking with people who have no interest in your offering or who are nowhere near ready to make a buying decision.

Tracking your campaign performances shows you how to out market your competition by giving you the feedback on what is working and not working. This is not based on you guessing what your leads and customers are thinking, but by giving you real data in real time based on real behaviours!

With this information at your fingertips how to out market your competition is no longer a mystery.

All you need do is make adjustments and tweaks based on the data and soon enough your will have your campaigns perfectly optimised.

How To Out Market Your Competition Step 3: Track Your Campaign Performance. Set the correct triggers and tweak and refine your campaigns until they are fully optimised. How to out market your completion is a relatively simple process in theory, but I don’t want to leave you with the impression that just anyone can do it well. First, you will need an excellent CRM and Automated Marketing Software such as Infusionsoft. This will allow you to segment your database to the level that suits your business, as well as provide the responsive automation you need. For example, if you sell specific screwdrivers to women who don’t have children and who love to build flat pack furniture, you will need to be able to easily identify these people in your database. You will then need to compose marketing material that specifically talks to these people as if you know their thoughts, problems and aspirations. Then you will need to be able to review your campaign performance and make changes and tweaks as identified by real data, in real time based on the actions of real people. Now you know how to out market your competition, it’s time to take action!

Rohan James is a Director at Journey Point. He is a Marketing Wizard, but when it comes to surfing his favourite breaks, the word “wizard” is nowhere to be found!

Marketing Automation follow up is one of the best ways to build closer relationships with your prospects and customers.

You see with marketing automation (even if at first glance it doesn’t seem so), you are able to provide more personalised attention to prospects and customers, for example:

When your marketing automation follow up is set up correctly you will segment your leads and customers into specific buying or behavior types.

This means you can follow up based on a person’s specific interests, which shows them that you have a deeper understanding of their needs and what is important to them.

With this in mind, let’s now look at the top 6 benefits of marketing automation follow up with prospects and customers…

1. Build Better Relationships

If you automate the repetitive follow-up processes that your business has, prospects will not slip through the cracks, they will never receive an irrelevant or untimely message or feel ignored by your business.

Those who complain that marketing automation follow up removes the human element from your business is clearly not doing it correctly.

2. Capture and Nurture Leads 24/7

If someone requests a Lead Magnet in the middle of the night, your delivery sequence ensures it’s delivered to that person’s inbox within minutes.

In other words, marketing automation doesn’t sleep, forget or take “smoko” breaks.

Having a system that works around the clock means your customers are getting the consistent and timely information they need when they want it.

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3. Give People What They Desire

The ability to automatically segment and target groups based on actions they take (or don’t take) allows you to personalize your follow up specifically to that person’s needs. Doing this makes them feel special and understood or in marketing tech language, “you give them lot’s of love and cuddles”.

4. Convert More Leads Into Customers

Without marketing automation follow up, it’s easy to get behind in your follow-up and let warm and hot leads slip through the cracks.

Having consistent fail-safe follow up ensures that no one ever slips through the cracks; the cracks that often occur due to human error.

5. More Sales

By converting more leads into customers, you make more money… simple!

And once a lead becomes a customer, it will be easier to sell to them again with (automated) new offers or new bundles. It becomes easier because you don’t have to build that initial trust from scratch all over again, you already have it.

Enjoy more sales with Marketing Automation follow up.

6. Scale Up

As your employ more marketing automation follow up in your customer lifecycle, you are able to spend more time on growing your business by working on The 7 Levers of Business that directly affect your profitability.

Using Marketing Automation follow up for repetitive tasks gives you your time back!

In addition, using a marketing automation platform gives you all your important data at your fingertips. With this data on hand, you can easily determine what works and what doesn’t.

And by doing more of what works, your business success is assured.

Start here…

Rohan James is a Director at Journey Point. He is a Marketing Wizard, but when it comes to surfing his favourite breaks, the word “master” is nowhere to be found!