Automating work processes for marketing teams is a great idea to use resources more effectively and offload repetitive tasks to software. From light tasks such as sending emails to more complex measures to improve the Strengthen customer loyalty, many steps can be automated. We show you seven examples that can add value to your business.
How marketing automation works
After you have designed your promising marketing strategies, you naturally want to implement them as soon as possible. By Automated as many marketing tactics as possible to a high standard of quality employees save a lot of time. In addition, a lot of data is collected automatically. This can be used to provide data-driven, relevant insights into the requirements and wishes of customers on an ongoing basis.
The possibilities of the Marketing Automation are very advanced. Exactly what you want to automate within the marketing team depends on your company's priorities, your market or specific marketing plan. There are few limits. The following use cases are conceivable:
- The Content creation can be partially automated to meet customer demand for new information and improve customer base development.
- Target groups can be better narrowed down and target marketing campaigns more precisely, making the best possible use of the available budget.
- It is possible to create a Set up automatic follow-up actions for a specific customer action, such as sending an e-mail.
Through the collection, evaluation and use of data and the creation and adaptation of standardized Workflows marketing teams can automate what previously had to be painstakingly tailored by hand. You rarely have to rely on gut instinct, but leave it to your software to optimize sub-areas of marketing. In this way, you reduce a certain luck factor and rely instead on data and knowledge, which has been proven to be effective.
Experience has shown that these seven marketing tasks can be easily automated:
1. Email Automation
Emails are always a reliable target for automation. A well-known example is the generation of templates and designs that you can use over and over again to speed up the process of composing new emails. More complex methods include automatically sending emails to customers, who may then be contacted with interesting content be rewarded (e-books, videos and the like).
These systems can also be used to apply strong personalization ("Hello Julia" instead of "Hello customer from platform xy"). Many CRM systems offer you the possibility to send follow-up emails automatically when a certain event occurs or does not occur. A customer does not read received emails? Automatically set up a mail with a header that addresses him or her exactly.
2. Lead generation on websites
One useful measure that marketing teams can automate is individual Call-to-action-requests. On a web page, this would allow you to display only what is relevant to that group of people, depending on who is logged in. A B2B customer might prefer a webinar about the services offered in your company - but an end customer wants to learn about a new product.
Opt-in methods are also suitable for certain target groups. Offer e-books or PDFs that you link directly to a form that customers see when they take a specific action on the website. Do it this way simple and interesting as possible; you are distracting that person from his or her real task. Consequently, you should be brief.
3. Customer interaction in social media
Bots are a great way to automate certain tasks on social media channels. Facebook bots, for example, are smart enough to send people information about your products or services.
This is also popular on the customer side, as bots are always available and therefore save time.
They are also well suited as a replacement for human first-level support. A bot can often solve minor problems. If there is a problem, it can pass you on to human employees. Bots of this type can be used in a variety of ways, making them suitable for websites as well as Facebook, for example.
4. Reliable reporting
Writing reports to prove the effectiveness of marketing activities is necessary, but time-consuming at the same time. Many tools capture marketing-relevant data automatically (such as Google Data Studio). From this, reports are subsequently filed independently within this platform. This saves time and is often more accurate, as human error sources are eliminated.
These platforms prepare the desired data in a visually easy-to-understand way, which means that employees can skip reporting tasks and turn their attention to more important activities or the analysis of reports. Also, capturing across multiple apps so that no data is left out is possible with appropriate tools such as PieSync.
5. Advanced lead segmentation
In a large contact database, you create lists that automatically presort customers contained there according to certain criteria. These can be demographic characteristics, revenue generated, level of content interaction, and so on. Lead generation becomes more targeted and efficient, as content can be perfectly targeted to all prospects.
Leads can also be categorized by progress. In this way, you learn at which point within a Purchase process a customer has just arrived. The goods are already in the shopping cart, but she hasn't bought yet? A good time for an automatically sent reminder email!
6. information synchronization
A more technical matter that marketing teams can automate is the synchronization of customer data. Reconciling information between different apps and databases is still common and manually an underwhelming, error-prone activity.
Tools that provide a Two-way synchronization The data in several databases are aligned with each other - an important prerequisite for sending error-free e-mails to customers, for example.
7. SEO measures
Not every company has or needs SEO professionals. Regular audits help to keep the website up to date SEO-wise. Numerous tools for website audits show you after a short calculation phase how the search engine optimization on your website stands.
Successful optimization increases the frequency of customer interactions.
These tools show you everything that is (not) working for you, sorted by category. Perhaps certain keywords are underrepresented or the quality of the content does not meet the requirements. The right tools will tell you and lead to more interactions.
Conclusion
By automating these 7 tasks and processes of your marketing team, you can bring an increase in efficiency to your company. In addition, you will relieve your employees and allow more time for strategy development, analysis and personal contact with particularly important customers.
