Marketing automation is worth more than a process that advances analytics capability. It has a growing important value in a business strategic plan. Businesses struggle to organize their marketing, typically due to running separate social media, email, and platforms. The effort yields individual results to each platform, but can overlook multichannel opportunities or personalization which more customers crave.
Marketing automation addresses that need by consolidates marketing planning and reduces "clutter" from managing separate media. Planning how to automate can highlight where a message may not need to be repeated as well as how to repeat other messages that are valuable for the customer. The planning with marketing automation as a core function saves time and, when done right, improve marketing results.
Automation has a particular value for small businesses. Small business owners and their employees are busy, leaving a limited time to analyze analytics reports repeated. Marketing automation can streamline resources by automating marketing tasks.
There are three tips small and medium sized businesses can follow to prepare for adding marketing automation features.
- Get a lay of the initial data on the land. Establish the best data possible in the systems that will match up to your analytics. This means eliminating duplicate entries in sources such as CRM systems. Use advanced databases tools where possible to find consistent duplicates and errors.
- Roadmap how data will flow through the organization. Roadmap how an automation program will be implemented. Addressing all digital platforms at once can overlook needed steps. Set a six-month goal for full implementation, with milestones along the way. Use features like an annotation in Google Analytics to journal technical changes - some marketing decisions will trigger other analytics-related decisions such as adjusting tags, setting up remarketing campaigns for certain site visitors, changing filters, or adding custom variables.
- Align your sales and marketing teams to sync promotion communication. Plan the marketing and supporting automation system based on the buying cycle and lead nurturing stages. The sales team's insight can ensure that your marketing efforts to brand and convert potential customers align with the sales team's capabilities to execute. This can also indicate how alerts in analytics solutions should be distributed to the teams involved.
