If you’re just starting off with your business, you may be thinking of how to promote your brand and gain customer loyalty. The most efficient way to do so is to automate your marketing activities, thus saving yourself time and effort.
Before we start talking about marketing automation, let’s define marketing as a whole and find out exactly which processes need to be automated. Marketing is a set of actions and measures aimed at promoting a specific brand, achieving customer satisfaction, and retaining customers.
To develop a marketing strategy that converts visitors into clients, marketers often have to repeat certain actions. Automation is the best way to save time on those actions.
There are the following types of marketing strategies:
A marketing funnel is a sequence of stages that leads a customer from being interested in a product to making a buying decision. Basically, the funnel consists of the following stages:
Marketing automation refers to the optimization of repetitive tasks with the help of technology. According to Emailmonday, 51% of companies are currently automating their marketing routine.
Here are the most common ways and tools to speed up your marketing-related tasks:
At the lead generation stage, you can write a series of social media posts and schedule them to be published within specific time intervals. Tools such as Buffer, SproutSocial, Hootsuite, etc. can help you to schedule and automatically publish posts across multiple social media accounts. As a result of such an automated process, your brand constantly remains in touch with its target audience. Moreover, regular updates of social media accounts drive more traffic to your website while you save time on repetitive actions.
If your lead is already interested in your product and you have their contact information, you can assist them with onboarding and bring them closer to the conversion stage. To achieve that, write a sequence of personalized emails, e.g. a set of instructions on how to use your product. You can create, schedule and personalize your email campaigns with specialized email automation tools such as MailChimp.
A survey by Business Insider reports that 80% of businesses would like to use the chatbots by 2020. Based on Facebook Messenger, such bots act like virtual consultants or customer support representatives and help shoppers to make buying decisions. Unlike humans, chatbots are available 24/7 and thus can quickly bridge the gap between a decision and a purchase.
However, AI solutions are not limited to only chatbots – for example, some software can help you to generate tweets based on blog posts.
You do not have to learn programming to automate your marketing. There are lots of specialized software products and marketing automation platforms which will do that for you. You can integrate this software with your CRM system or Google Analytics to convert new customers and retain existing ones.
Marketing automation is a great solution for small businesses that need to promote their products and grow their customer list. There are various types of marketing strategies, some of which require automation at each stage of the marketing funnel - for example, an automated funnel for a digital marketing campaign.
The most common areas for small business marketing automation are social media, email sequences, artificial intelligence, and integrated marketing automation software. There are many software-as-a-service apps available designed to do this. Another accessible and affordable option is to hire developers to customize your marketing automation and artificial intelligence apps.
Our guest author Anastasia Stefanuk is a passionate writer and a marketing manager at Mobilunity. The company provides professional staffing services, so she is always aware of technology news and wants to share her experience to help tech startups and companies stay up-to-date.