Marketing automation encompasses practically all aspects of a digital marketing campaign, and it’s a practice often utilized by enterprise websites. However, no matter the size of your website, the addition of marketing automation can bring your campaigns to the next level.
At its core, marketing automation is a technique where software is used to automate repetitive marketing tasks. Some examples of this include delivering and answering emails or collecting user data. This cuts down the need to perform time-consuming tasks manually, which can help to improve your overall marketing approach.
There are a wide range of processes that can be automated. In addition to the two mentioned above, marketing software can even enable you to automate lead targeting, content delivery and management, as well as social media campaigns.
Automating your marketing campaigns can enable you to target your audience more effectively, reduce task repetition and save time and improve the overall customer experience.
When you spend less time on repetitive tasks, you can focus more on operations that will increase profits. This can include tasks such as customer interactions and improving brand awareness, including outreach.
Now you have a greater understanding of marketing automation and its benefits, let’s look at how you can use it yourself. Here are three ways you can implement it effectively in your next campaign.
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Target Your Key Audience Members for a Personalized Experience
This is an important part of any campaign. The more specifically you can target your audience members, the more of a personalized experience you can provide. This will make your audience feel as if their needs and wants are being better met, which will increase the odds of them becoming customers.
You can use automation to your advantage by:
- Collecting customer demographics. This will provide you with basic information about your audience (such as age, location, gender), giving you a general understanding of the type of people you’re targeting. You can begin the process using Google Analytics, or open-source software such as Open Web Analytics, both of which will automatically collect data as users visit your website.
- Segmenting your audience. Audience segmentation is a process that involves dividing your target audience into groups. You can then target each group according to their specific needs. This process can be automated using tools such as Klayvio.
One of the greatest things about automation is that the results will improve over time as you (and the applications you use) get a better understanding of your audience. This will lead to greater results over a longer period of time.
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Track User Interactions for Improved Marketing
While understanding your user demographics is important, it’s arguably just as vital to track user interactions—how visitors interact with your website, blog, and social media accounts. For example, how do they find your site, which links do they click, and which pages do they visit? By answering these questions, you can optimize your marketing accordingly.
There are a few tools that help you automate the process of tracking user interactions on your site. For instance, you can use these to:
- Implement link tracking. Open-source programs, such as OpenEMM, enable you to track link click rates and email opens automatically. This can help you determine how your users are interacting with your current marketing campaigns.
- Utilize heatmap tracking. Heatmap tools like MockingFish will show you how users interact with your website. It does this by using automated software that tracks mouse clicks and movements, which give you an idea of which parts of your site users are focusing on.
With these automated systems in place, you can then use the information collected to improve where you place your advertisements, your Call to Action (CTA), and more.
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Upgrade Your Social Media Marketing Campaigns for an Improved ROI
Social media marketing campaigns often include the display of sponsored advertisements to users who match the brand’s user demographics. This can cost a pretty penny, which is why it’s important to make them as effective as possible to improve your Return On Investment (ROI). The thing that makes social media campaigns so important is that the best ones can drive qualified traffic to your website and lead to even more customer conversions.
To improve the odds of your campaign succeeding, we suggest you do the following:
- Implement A/B testing. You can use split testing across your website and social media platforms to determine the best marketing practices. This is also a great way to see which approach your target audience prefers.
- Use social monitoring. Social monitoring, such as that offered by the open-source program Mautic, enables you to track mentions of your business or website. It can also automatically add contacts that interact with your brand, which can help improve lead generation.
While you can implement both of these techniques manually, it’s best to automate them so to both save time and improve the final results. This will enable you to collect a wider range of data, as an automated system can run continuously without manual oversight.
Marketing automation can open a lot of doors, but its wide array of applications can also make it overwhelming to implement effectively. Fortunately, by focusing on the most important tasks (i.e. audience segmentation, user interactions, and social media campaigns) you can cover a lot of ground and get your automated campaigns off to a solid start.
Do you have any questions about marketing automation or how to implement it in your next campaign? Let us know in the comments section below!