Before we dive into our three-step strategy, let’s start with one question:
Why bother with marketing automation in the first place?
Well, here are a few reasons why.
You can…
- Improve targeting of your marketing messages
- Deliver an improved customer experience
- Get more warm leads and customers
- Achieve a bigger return on investment
- Reduce your costs
- Increase traffic to your website
- Enjoy MORE sales and more money!
Sound good? Well here are our three steps to getting there.
Step one: Planning
The real power is in the planning. Here at Airbase, we love a good, thorough plan; usually in the form of our Flightpath process.
A carefully thought out plan will provide a view of what you already have in place. It’s an overview of the size of the challenge, how you manage processes and how much it costs. This can be in terms of both time and money. As well as the existing process, a good plan will include some clear, time-sensitive and achievable objectives, too. Your plan will also highlight key milestones along the way, so you know how you’re getting on!
Step two: The set-up
Marketing automation excellence requires the expertise of a human to manage it. It is very risky building an automation strategy without the right people on board. Skilled marketers should be ready to jump in when changes to strategy need to be made.
A simple example: imagine you are a coach and you schedule a social media post to promote a session for tomorrow afternoon. Then you become ill and are unable to hold the session. You can step in and cancel the scheduled post. Automated technology cannot foresee the unforeseen – not yet anyway…
Step three: Reporting and analysis
To steer successful future automation processes, you need good, juicy analysis to draw on. There is a range of ways to measure and it’s up to you to determine what your key success indicators are. Think back to the step one planning stage. What went right? What could’ve gone a little better? And where can you optimise in future?
What will you automate?
Now you know the three steps involved in automating your sales and marketing efforts, choose a process in your organisation and start planning. Need help? Enquire today for a free consultation session with the Airbase team.
