Marketing automation is the technology to connect with your leads and customers digitally. With marketing automation, businesses can target customers with automated messages across email, web, social, and SMS. You can track, generate more leads from social channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Partner channels and track their effectiveness.

Marketing automation platform automates a lot of marketing tasks freeing up time for marketing teams to focus on strategic work. Analytics driven marketing automation platforms like zigihub, ensure that you are doing focused campaigns with high ROI.

Some of the key components of a marketing automation platform are as below:

Marketing Automation is undoubtedly the engine that will drive your business faster in this digital era to reach your desired goals.

Startups, SMBs, B2B and B2C businesses in the $5million – $500 million revenue segment, are the latest and fastest adopters of Marketing Automation platforms.

And, how easy is it to start with Marketing Automation?

It may look daunting to start with marketing automation and to decide where to begin with, but with a little planning, it can be achieved very efficiently.

Before implementing marketing automation, one needs to clearly define the objectives of implementation. Some of the objectives can be:

• I want to increase the website traffic.
• Need to increase the number of leads from digital channels.
• I want to understand how the prospects are responding to my emails – are they opening/reading or taking any actions.
• Need to understand the ROI of the various channel spend like Facebook, LinkedIn.
• I want to leverage external expertise in running marketing campaigns.

Here are 7 quick tips to help you get started with Marketing Automation:

1. Have your lists ready in place

One of the first things to be ready with, is your contact list. Make sure that all your contact lists are in place. A state-of-the-art CRM which can gel easily with your contact lists will further simplify the process.

For example, zigihub’s intelligent CRM platform provides a 360° view of your contacts in a single dashboard. It can

• Import and export contacts,
• Create and view all the related deals, notes, appointments and tasks,
• Integrate perfectly with your existing contact list,
• Syncs your contacts from desktop to mobile,
• Send email or call your contacts through zigihub mobile app,
• Track progress of relation with contact over a period of time,
• Know the complete set of interactions with a contact in chronological order, and
• Use advanced filter tab to help you easily sort through all the contacts.

Get your Free CRM trial and experience it for yourself and for your sales team!

2. Develop an attractive website

Your website is the gateway to your business. Try to recall the best website you have ever visited, and know why you felt the website was so good and attractive.

Incorporate all those positive things you found there in your website, and develop an amazing one for your business.

Some of the key ingredients for developing a good website include:

• Simplicity
• Ease of navigation
• Clarity
• Brevity
• User friendly interface
• Relevant and attractive images
• Vibrant yet moderate look

3. Create meaningful content

Content management is one of the key aspects of marketing automation. You need to provide thought leadership to clients in the area of your expertise. This develops confidence in prospective customers about you capabilities and help you greatly in generating leads.

Content that is helpful, relevant and meaningful is always sought after. You can create your own content in the form of

• Blogs
• White papers
• Thought leadership articles.

It adds immense value to your website and builds your brand persona.

Your content and resources may include

• long reads
• Short reads
• Templates
• Videos
• Podcasts, etc.

The resources should link or connect to your business and at the same time, create value for your readers, subscribers, leads and customers.

4. Prepare workflows

Preparing clear workflows showing critical jobs are integral to any marketing platform

Here a workflow is a process by which you will engage a customer and make them interested enough in your product or service for him to fill a form in your landing page. A typical workflow can be –

• Week 1 – Send introduction email of your company/ products
• Week 2 – Send specific email detailing a particular business problem you are solving
• Week 3 – Send a special offer to all people who have opened/clicked on the campaign
• Week 4 – Send monthly blog/ newsletter

One has to measure effectiveness of each workflow based on the total number of leads generated and make modifications necessary.

5. Micro-segment customers

Campaigns are the cornerstones of your marketing efforts. To make your marketing campaigns effective, target micro-segments. This ensures that you are catering to:

• Specific recipient requirements.
• Matching micro-patterns in demography
• Pitching products and services to the right person at the right time
• Aligning your campaign to customer’s purchasing pattern based on geographical, demographical or behavioral patterns.

It also enables you to design and run multi-channel campaigns without much effort.

6. Run campaigns

Once you have created these micro-segments of your customer, you can run targeted campaign either through email or on social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn etc.

Email campaigns are counted among the most effective ways of marketing. A good email campaign must

• Have a consistent style aligned to the brand image
• Direct message to the specific needs of the individual
• Have a personal touch in the subject line and for addressing the individual
• Have a layout that brings attention to the core message
• Steer clear of any irrelevant or unwanted content in the text.

zigihub’s email campaign management software enables you to design and run new campaigns successfully. Its widget-based design allows import and reuse of selective components of a campaign built in other tools.

7. Measure campaign effectiveness

After running your campaigns, it becomes imperative to measure the effectiveness your campaigns:

• To improve your marketing efforts, and
• To spend your money on the channels which give the highest returns.

With zigihub, you can measure your campaign effectiveness by

• Tracking actions like delivered, failed, opened, read or deleted,
• Measuring ROI of your campaign in campaign management CRM,
• Identifying which campaign has given the best results , and
• Rating your campaigns for future references.

zigihub helps you find which campaign channel, Facebook, LinkedIn, Email or Twitter is more effective. It also enables you to measure campaign ROI across various parameters like

• Success rate of delivery
• Leads generated
• Visitors / Website traffic

It will help you arrive at important conclusions regarding campaigns

• That give higher number of leads,
• That result in more website traffic,
• That give higher ROI, etc.

Conclusion

It is much easier starting up with Marketing Automation right away, than trying to know more about what it can do for you.

Once you have got with it, you will notice a stark difference in the ease of performing your regular tasks which becomes so simpler, much akin to a walk in the park.

So get with it right away, starting with a free trial and experience it for yourself and for your entire team!