MARKETING AUTOMATION
Increase the effect and return of your marketing
efforts with Marketing Automation
The overall goal with your marketing is to generate higher turnover for your business. You need to generate and capture new leads and to turn them into customers. You then want to turn your customers into repeat customers, sell add on products and get great referrals. All while you constantly get brand new customers.
Most people that visits your website or shows interest in your business are not ready to buy straight away and even if someone was happy with your product they don't necessarily remember you when they want to buy again
.
So, how do you convince people to buy your product?
You need to deliver your potential buyers quality and tailored information at the right time. This is what we call lead nurturing and customer nurturing.
Marketing automation is the use of technology or software that allows you to automatically manage communication, email campaigns, social media operations, website activities and more in a highly data driven and targeted way. It reduces the need for you for manual work, and such allows you to reach more people, while you can focus your time elsewhere.
Here are a few examples:
You offer something for free on your website and get the interested parties contact information in return. You then automatically trigger a series of emails with targeted information (a nurturing campaign).
You increase add on sales by sending automated targeted information, e.g. information regarding available guided tours you offer 10 days before your customers arrive at your bed and breakfast.
You can make your sales team more efficient by automatically providing them with tasks or lists of leads that has shown significant interest in your products
LEAD GENERATION
You want to get new customer and increase your sales, but where do you start?
People can't buy if they do not know about your product. Lead generation is about finding potential buyers of your products or services. There are different methods and strategies you can use to increase the interest and knowledge about you and your product.
Inbound marketing is typically significantly more cost effective than outbound marketing strategies, and also generates higher quality leads. Inbound marketing includes (but not limited to) content marketing, search engine and website optimization (SEO), targeted social media posts and blogging. The aim is to attract customers by offering them something of value and get a chance to build a reputation and gain trust of your company and products (so called branding).
Outbound marketing, often called traditional marketing, is the type of marketing many of us grew up with, e.g. TV ads, radio ads, banners, spam (bought email lists) and billboards.
A like on Facebook or a visit to your website is however most often not sufficient. You have to capture the interested parties details to be able to communicate and nurture them into buyers. This is called lead capturing.
So how do you get their details?
When signing up for blog updates, a free trial or test or an e-book, people leave their contact details and you have successfully captured a new lead. Next you can send them more information, add them to your newsletter list and your nurturing campaign, and provide the hottest leads to your sales department to contact.
MEASURABLE MARKETING
To see the effects of your marketing you need to be able the measure the results.
If you have a blog, traditional measurable aspects would typically be number of readers, number of comments, number of new subscribers and/or number of shares. But don't you also want to know who became customers from reading your blog?
Statistics or data is essential for you to ensure that you put your time and money on marketing that yields the results you want.
Why advertise on Twitter if all your existing and future customers are more likely to interact with you on Instagram?
To be able to define if your marketing efforts has been successful, you need to set yourself a target, and it should be a realistic one (and of course based on the statistics you can gather). By setting targets and measuring your results, your marketing will get more targeted (duh) and a lot more interesting.