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August 31, 2020Marketing Automation: The Basics
Marketers today can automate emails in bulk and manage marketing campaigns. This article will help you understand the objective and the best practices of automation. Let’s discuss the types of marketing automation with the marketing funnel to engage audiences, generate leads, and acquire customers.
This process utilizes technology to optimize human resources to scale your business. It’s like you have 200 more hands working, other than your own.
What Does it Do?
Digging deeper into how this process helps you scale your business, we identify three primary functions:
Lead Generation
Generating leads is the stage in the process where we turn strangers into interested leads. Some businesses see this process as time-consuming. Automation changed the landscape by enabling autopilot in lead generation.
Engagement
One of your goals after generating leads is turning them into customers. This process also facilitates keeping your current ones and nudging them for a service or product upgrade.
Closing
Closing is where the money-product exchange happens. It is known as the most important among the three.
These functions need to use different tools to ensure that they are working efficiently. It is essential to have a fully automated system working across all tools in your business. And for that, here is an analogy of how these things come together.
How Does It Work?
If your business uses marketing automation, take an automobile. The parts have their independent function, but together they work with the same goal of moving the machine forward.
The same goes for your business. You will be the vehicle, and the passengers are your customers ready to take on a journey. And to make the transport, you need the following resources:
The Driver
In this case, you are the driver who initiates visions for your business. Start by asking yourself what you want to serve. What can you offer? How can your business help the world, in general?
Given that you are the visionary, you bear the responsibility to navigate and position your business forward. Give space for change since adjustments along the way are inevitable.
The Motor
You need a motor for transport. It is the central unit of the entire system. Here, your automation acts as the motor of your vehicle. The other parts working on your car communicates through automation to accomplish your desired output.
The Oil Of Your Vehicle
Think of the oil as the processes in your business. Now, you cannot run your car without oil. The automation requires clear process definitions in your business to operate. Because when the oil/processes are ineffective, you risk damaging your motor/automation. Hence, an outdated process/oil can crash your car.
The Vehicle Frame
The car frame is your business’ framework, the structure of your business’ entire system. The framework enables the standard processes to happen, creating a movement from your motor/automation. In other words, this is how you get things done in your business.
The Fuel
Your marketing strategy will serve as the car’s fuel to move forward. It helps you determine the right tools that best fit the journey ahead. Without any plan, your business will have no direction.
These days, you need to use technology to make your marketing strategy better. With this process, you have the option of using less or more human interaction. You can now shift your marketing efforts individually or too many. In grocery stores, they have these checkout lanes. Out was the old process where a cashier needed to assist each of their customers at checkout. Then came automation and changed the game by bringing self-checkout stations into the table. Now, a cashier can easily oversee multiple stations at the same time resulting in an increased checkout bandwidth.
The ultimate goal of automation is to improve your business seamlessly. The strong points we get in this system are finding the leads, filtering engagements, and closing a deal.
What can marketing automation improve in your business?