When you take the time to create a strategic marketing plan and commit to it long-term, you want to leverage it for all its worth. That means putting scale behind your strategy, and that requires automation. While the shift to automated martech tools has significantly increased within the last three years, so often I see the wrong things being automated and missed opportunities for scaling the things that matter.
So what matters when it comes to automation? First, capturing leads from your website. If you aren’t capturing prospects as they hit your website and funneling them straight into your CRM system to move them further along the sales funnel, you’re missing a big opportunity. We invest significant amounts of time and training in our sales team and the CRM databases that house our prospects and leads, but so often these CRMs aren’t being used to their full potential. This problem can be solved with automation.
We developed and use an email integration tool called RECOVER to mine your email mailbox for prospects that should be in your CRM, but aren’t.
Once prospects are in your CRM database, the next thing you want to automate is a nurturing email campaign that states who you are, what you do, and why you do what you do. In essence, telling your unique story and sharing the expertise your company offers. This nurturing campaign should kick-off once a prospect enters that database, and then, you stay top-of-mind with regular, consistent content that’s automated to get sent out at least twice a month. Finally, you want automated analytics that show you a cross-channel view of your customer’s journey – otherwise, how will you know what’s working and what’s not?
Frequently, where I’ve seen most businesses put focus on automation is in their social media presence with tools like Hootsuite or Buffer. Ironically, while a myriad of these tools exist, leaning on them will actually reduce engagement. Why? Because social platforms like Facebook and Instagram are actively resisting automated tools that have gotten them into a lot of hot water as of late. Moreover, you can’t automate posts to personal profiles, which is where you’re going to see the most engagement, particularly on LinkedIn. When it comes to social, your best bet is to dedicate a resource to organically posting content to your personal and business pages. Great content is key to making this work, so your strategy should be to put 90% of your energy into developing the content that goes onto your website and email, and then leverage that content for your social feeds, utilizing only 10% of your time toward distribution.
At boomtime, we developed our fuse platform to help us solve the problem of putting scale behind our marketing efforts.
With fuse, you get an entire marketing team comprised of strategists, engineers, web developers and designers, for less than the cost of a single marketing professional on staff. We created a video to show you just how it works:
All the best,
Bill Bice
CEO
