What to Automate

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Marketing automation is key to success in today’s digital landscape. By automating your marketing processes, you are able to do more with less, gaining more consistency in your marketing efforts and allowing you to scale up your company’s growth.

Around now most marketers and small business owners are shaking their heads yes. You agree, but don’t know where to start. You’re asking, “what should I automate?”

It’s not enough to decide to automate your marketing efforts. You need to know what to prioritize, what gets automated and what does not, what will have the most impact.

Here’s where your marketing automation process should start:

  1. Lead Nurturing – if your company is in the lead generation business, then your lead nurturing program is ripe for automation. An email campaign can be planned, with different emails going out at different times after someone becomes a lead. Physical mail and outbound phone calls can also be added to the follow up process at points strategically identified to increase sales.
     
  2. User Onboarding – new customers should be treated as an important audience, one you want to stay in touch with and make sure they get the best service possible. And so an onboarding campaign for anyone that signs up for your service or purchases your product for the first time is crucial. Create a series of actions that happen automatically after a new customer is identified.
     
  3. Content Marketing – to automate your content marketing is to develop an editorial calendar and program a consistent approach to broadcasting and publishing your content to various social outlets. New content can be written and added to a queue, scheduled to be published at a predetermined time. That then triggers an email to your subscribers, a post on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
     
  4. Remarketing – retargeting, now more commonly referred to as remarketing, is a simple marketing automation technique aimed at converting more prospects into customers. When people visit your site and don’t convert, you can target them with specific ads as they browse other sites.
     
  5. Cross Sells/Up Sells – automate your marketing efforts to existing customers in order to keep them coming back for more. Emails and physical mailings with special offers on products you think they would be interested in based on their purchase history can be personalized, even while it all happens behind the scenes.