Marketing Automation: Four Approaches

Posted by Craig Maloney | October 20, 2017 | Filed under: Marketing

There’s a lot of talk about marketing automation—but what is it, exactly? And more to the point, how can it help you grow your small or mid-sized business? In this post, we’ll consider the topic of marketing automation from a few different angles, ultimately offering you four basic considerations for your own automation efforts.

Before We Begin…

Before we get into our four marketing automation approaches, here’s some preliminary work you should do. Take the time to set up a good initial campaign on both the channel and ad side of things. Being multi-channel is important, so think about where your audience can be found—whether on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, the Google search page, YouTube, or wherever else. Think not just about where your audience spends their time, but also what kind of content they want to see.

Having great content—and knowing where to deploy it—is really what comes first, so attend to that before we get into automation.

Four Examples of Marketing Automation

With that out of the way, here are our four quick approaches to marketing automation.

Automate the Ad Funnel

Once you get that initial campaign set up, consider automating the ad funnel. Think about it this way: Someone comes to your website, perhaps finding it on Google. Automatically, they are added to a retargeting campaign. From there, you have a funnel that’s automatically showing them ads—maybe a certain promotion that runs for a week, followed by different ad displays depending on which actions they take. Essentially what we’re talking about is automating ad displays to match where your leads are in the consumer journey—shepherding them, ultimately, to a point of conversion.

Automate Your Social Media

Something else we recommend is automating your social media. Again, we’ll offer an example: You run a video ad on Facebook. Within the Facebook Ads Manager, you can set it up so that anyone who watches more than half of the video—anyone who shows a real interest, in other words—is funneled into a campaign that targets a different ad to them, ushering them further down the sales funnel. This ensures that they are seeing different content all the time, and that each new piece of content whisks them to the next stage on their buyer’s journey—and again, all of this is automated.

Automate Email

A lot of the time, when people think of marketing automation, they’re thinking about email. That’s reductive, but at the same time, email automation is beneficial. Email automation applies to those who may subscribe to your email list before they actually buy a product. For these people, you should send automated emails that lead them through the sales funnel—emails that change in their messaging every few days. Maybe you send emails on one subject for a week, then a different subject for the following 10 days, etc. This is completely automated so that anyone who signs up for your email list is given a steady stream of content that eases them toward the conversion point.

Automate Texts

We’d also recommend automating your text messaging—something that most business owners don’t really take advantage of. Consider that texts have almost a 100 percent open rate—far higher than email! But how do you automate your marketing texts, exactly? The best way to use this technology is to offer discounts or promos in exchange for website visits or sign-ups. Remember that most texts are opened in real time, so offering a discount code, available for a limited time only, can be really effective.

Rethinking Automation

Automation is one of those buzzwords that people bandy about without ever fully understanding its implications—but as you can see, there are a lot of practical opportunities to automate your marketing.

Of course, we’re painting in broad strokes here—and if you need help implementing these approaches more pragmatically, we’re happy to help. Our OC Digital Marleting agency has the experience and the technology to help you automate effectively. Learn more by reaching out to EverythingOnline today!