Align your Business Goals with Marketing Automation
Many marketing departments have to automate numerous repetitive tasks, such as emails and social media posts. Thankfully, technology has made these tasks much easier. Technology like marketing automation, which refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions.
And this is not the only benefit of automation in marketing. When done correctly, it can determine the evolving needs of your leads, their behaviours and interactions across all of your marketing channels.
Marketing automation uses all the information that you have on a prospective client, in order to understand what their wants and needs are.
This enables you to deliver the information they need to make a purchase, exactly when they need it, in the place that they are looking for it.
What are the benefits of marketing automation?
The benefits of marketing automation software can be simplified to three key factors:
- It automates content to relevant platforms and buyer groups, thus giving the marketing team more time to focus on other tasks.
- By tracking the behaviour and actions of potential and existing clients, it can personalise their journey.
- Marketing automation software can determine which campaigns have had an influence on each and every sale. Therefore, it understands and maximises the return on investment.
If you are producing effective inbound marketing content, and you’re generating a steady flow of organic leads, consider focusing your efforts on a marketing automation strategy to scale your successful efforts. This will enable you to nurture good quality leads into satisfied, paying customers.
To optimise your marketing automation strategy, it is recommended that you create buyer personas in order to improve the bottom line and increase your conversion rates.
What are personas?
A persona is a detailed portrait of the needs, motivations, environment and characteristics of intended user segments.
A persona should include the buyer’s name, age, career, income, and any other relevant information such as their values and goals.
It is important to remember that personas should not be made up of the average customer, as there simply is no such thing as an average user. This is especially true when the personas are employed for design or creating a user experience.
How to create a persona
Regardless of how simple or complex you want your personas to be, it is crucial that you use the data that you hold on customers (interviews with customers, client surveys, social media profiles, etc) or prospects to build your personas.
Never assume that you already know who your customers are and what goals they have.
You can gather all the information on your customers and prospects, and group your findings in a spreadsheet. If you have a data analytics tool – such as Google Analytics – you will be able to identify customer segments using cohort analysis or reduction techniques.
Google Analytics has information on your customers’ demographics, interests, language and geographical location.
How can personas increase lead conversion?
When creating a detailed persona, you will not only gain a clear understanding of what it is that your customers want and expect from your product or service, but you will be able to target prospective clients directly.
This leads to prospective customers becoming existing customers, which in turn increases your conversion rates.
Why are personas important in Customer Relationship Management?
When you use a persona in your CRM system, every form of contact you make with your customer or prospective customers seem personalised. It gives the customer the idea that you know them and understand their needs.
This not only builds on your relationship with your customers, but it also inspires customer loyalty to your brand or business.
Additionally, CRM systems enable you to monitor the sales process by showing you every step of the process, from prospective to satisfied clients. It also allows your employers to keep track of their tasks related to individual clients.
This ensures that you and your team are constantly aware of what needs to be done for a client, as well as the last conversation had between your business and your client.
The key is to remember that personas can be used in marketing automation to enhance your marketing efforts. However, when considering a marketing automation provider, your decision should be based on the unique goals of your company.
Which marketing automation platform works best?
At ITM, we have found that the SharpSpring platform not only enables us to keep track of our marketing campaigns, it also allows us to keep track of the projects that we undertake for individual clients.
SharpSpring is more than just marketing automation software, it helps us to determine the pipeline for each individual project, while also allowing us to establish and build relationships with our clients.
For marketing automation that gives you the most added value, contact ITM. Using the SharpSpring platform, we have been able to free up a lot of time for marketing teams, allowing them to focus on their important tasks, while SharpSpring sends out all their emails and social media posts.
