The 6 Phases of Effective Marketing Automation Strategy

Marketing automation strategy is quite intricate. To do it effectively, it includes content marketing, database marketing, analytics and more.

There are six important phases in building an automation strategy that’s right for your audience. Attracting and retaining your audience means engaging them at every touchpoint.

We’ll walk you through what’s included in each step of creating an automation strategy. Then we’ll explain why each step matters.

1. Audience Management

To be able to tailor content to meet your audience’s needs, you must know your customer well. This means creating a target audience and segmenting that target based on their interests, pain points or actions they take while visiting your website.

Some people skip over this step thinking they know who their product appeals to. But don’t be too hasty because each segment of your audience likely has its own challenges.

Create personas to get into the minds of your customers so that your content speaks directly to their wants, needs and struggles. Most customers visit websites in search of answers to a query. Learning what those queries are can help you tailor an experience for that segment of your audience.

2. Content Strategy

Once you know your customer and their needs, you can create content that educates those customers. This content should convince the customer that you’re the expert and the right company to buy from.

Regardless of whether your market products or services, it’s important to create a content strategy that showcases why customers might need your offering.

3. CRM Integration

Marketing automation needs to connect to your CRM. This will keep your sales and marketing teams informed.

By integrating your efforts into a CRM, you’ll also be able to see important information about leads, sales and more.

Seeing data on your efforts will help inform future marketing campaigns and decisions. It will also guide you in making changes to your marketing automation to make it even more beneficial.

4. Lead Capturing

Lead generation is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. Make sure you’re prepared to capture leads before you start a marketing automation campaign.

Consider how you’ll entice visitors to share contact information with you. Then consider how you’ll capture these leads and funnel them to the appropriate team members for follow-up.

Leads should go directly into your CRM from all marketing sources, such as social media ads and website leads. That way, it’s easy to track and monitor these leads.

5. Lead Nurturing

Marketing automation can play an important role in helping to close sales. Lead nurturing is a crucial aspect of any online marketing plan. Plan for how you’ll nurture leads once you’ve generated them on your website.

Lead nurturing is about providing important information to prospects to guide them in a purchasing decision. It’s less about selling and more about being helpful. Consider what content you already have that could be part of this lead nurturing process and what content you need to generate.

6. Web Analytics

No marketing plan is complete without setting goals. Analytics will guide you in understanding whether you met your goals or have more work to do on this front. Be sure that you have analytics set up and ready to provide details about the effectiveness of your campaigns.

You might need to make adjustments to your marketing automation strategy as you go. Analytics can help inform those decisions.

If you’re looking for a marketing resource who can do more than just set up marketing automation for your organization, New Light Digital is the resource for you. We use this six-step process to make sure you see high ROI from marketing automation and constantly monitor analytics to look for opportunities.

Get a quote to learn more about our marketing automation services.