How to use Automation to Improve your Online Marketing

In the last four to five years, small businesses have been following the online marketing trend by paying for online advertising. Unfortunately, most businesses have dismissed setting up their online business for long term growth because they are only focused on instant results.

We have all heard about numerous companies making double, triple or more with paid online advertising which peaks our interest.

What we aren’t told is how many years, time and preparing they did before they ever experienced a return on investment.

Not long ago, marketers had to design huge campaigns to launch messages that would lead potential buyers to action, thus generating sales or conversions.

Now we have alternative solutions in the industry, such as social media marketing, which seems like less work with better results.

Why This May Harm Your Business

Due to online trends and success stories, we may be missing out on future benefits for our businesses. Instead of focusing on long term organic growth and building our brand, many business owners have tried their luck with social media marketing hoping for quick results.

From our experience, we’ve noticed two possible outcomes:

• Many times, we see the first outcome to provide little to no results from marketing efforts which are due to not having a process in place. Many marketers have started ad campaigns before ever considering where they will be sending new leads thus resulting in leads that won’t be followed up with and potentially never hearing from again.
• The second outcome would be a successful campaign with instant results but no follow up sequence to ensure sales. The issue is that these results don’t last long due to unprepared follow up with new leads resulting in lower sales to pay for ads.

We encourage every business we work with to prepare their system and process before ever setting up a marketing campaign.

Most owners we speak with have no knowledge that only two percent of online visitors sign up within the first month they visit your website, while over 30 percent of customers were followed up within a four to five-month time period.

You accomplish a four to five-month follow up by effectively creating an automated online business that not only captures new leads information but will effectively follow up for over five months by using online automation techniques.

What is Automation?

Marketing automation involves scheduling a series of automation actions to direct person-to-person communication. To make this process possible, it is necessary to use different software to measure and automate processes.

This concept started as an email marketing tool, but since then it has evolved into a solution capable of automating repetitive tasks, building online relationships, and following up with leads effectively using direct messages.

Online Automation:

In the market, we find a lot of software that helps us automate tasks. The most common tasks that they solve are:

• Automated Delivery of Emails and Messages
• Measurement and Pixel Tools
• Social Networking Automation
• Audience Analysis
• Customer Tracking (CRM)

Over 65 percent of all small businesses admit that they don’t have a process in place to follow up with online leads. By using software automation these small businesses can create an effective follow up process.

This will help the owner execute small repetitive tasks that distract us from the “big issues”: creating innovative campaigns, building better relationships, expand new sales markets, improve ROI rates, etc.

Integration must come once we understand perfectly how our potential and actual client behaves. What are the stages of the customer journey that define our business model? How do we get the leads, and what content should we create in each phase of the funnel? These issues are vital to then run the major marketing automation triggers.

Videos and Blogging: Perfect Solution for Content Marketing

Inbound Marketing is based on the Content Marketing or Content Marketing Strategy, which seeks the recognition and positioning of the brand through the creation of relevant content that truly bring value to potential customers.

There’s no denying that blogs and videos are the perfect tools for the publication of this content, mainly for the following reasons:

• The content you publish on the blog improves the positioning of the website
• Publishing new content brings new keywords for your business
• Creating videos creates relationships with online customers
• The brand can grow by building an online following
• Small businesses can show a potential customer value before asking for payment

It’s very hard to position the future of your online presence without creating consistent content. When creating your content, think of giving a potential customer a direction of where to go online. Give value to your customer by creating an educational message, tell the client where to go next after the message is given, and then direct them where to sign up and get started.

Social Networks have Become a Powerful Source of Online Traffic

We are investing more time in Social Networks through mobile devices, and that, therefore, we will find in these platforms an increasing source of traffic to our website and, probably, a more direct way of reach our potential clients. Point your efforts towards building relationships with potential leads through your social media channels.

Automate Content on Your Social Networks

Automating your social channels is key to focus efforts on tasks like selling to new leads. It’s key to set-up automation to your social media and different apps for attracting traffic from social networks to your sign-up page.

For example, we use Facebook videos to attract new leads which we then connect with on messenger so we can effectively follow up for five or more months.

Landing Pages + Integration with CRM to Automate Emails

Turning generated visits with the attraction phase and preparing them in leads for sale is key to recovering the effort made in creating content. Effective landing pages with email follow up is key when setting up future marketing. Use your landing page to give value to your leads and in return ask for their information.

Personalized Sending via Email

Sending personalized automated e-mails is an excellent tool to communicate with new leads, and you will then be able to continue bringing value to your user base and customers. Personalized e-mails are key to effectively follow up with leads for over five months.

Loyalty and Recommendations

Once we manage to turn the visit into a contact, and lead into a customer, we need to deploy new content capable of customer loyalty, increase our branding, and achieve word of mouth referrals effectively.

Customers are more likely to purchase more from your business than from a cold lead. By continuing to build value, you can promote other services, ask for testimonials, or have them refer a friend.

Advantages of Online Automation

• Online automation improves the quality of the traffic of your website and encourages users to become your brand’s prescribers. It also:
• Increases the average amount of your cart. It uses cross-selling and up-selling depending on the customer’s behavior.
• Helps you to recover your list of inactive customers and make them loyal.
• Allows you to customize your email campaigns, mass communications, messages and web offers.
• Reduces bounce and dropout rate of your site and cart abandonment rate with customized content and real-time adapted products.
• Turns traffic into recurring users by offering personalized information on each visit.

When to Use Online Automation

Good automation employs the tools available to scale your marketing efforts around real people. The problem with failed attempts is that potential buyers (leads) are not well segmented. Most of the time we do not respond to those emails or interact with the automation attempt because we are not interested in generalized content.

Automation succeeds when it is well segmented because then the content of the marketing campaign aligns effectively with the audience you are trying to convert.

So, to answer the question, you must use automation to create new leads that align with the marketing campaign you want to run, increase the scalability of potential leads, improve tracking, reduce human error, and add creativity to marketing directives.

Effective marketing campaigns that achieve conversions for sale are those that are aligned from start to finish. They are not winding roads that the consumer has to travel to reach the main objective, but they are easy to follow from the beginning to the end, as a straight road.

To ensure your ROI on future ad campaigns, make sure to test and prepare your entire client onboarding process. Spend your money on your online systems, and you’ll receive effective results for a long time.

[All percentage claims are referenced by hubspot.com]