Guide: Getting Started with Marketing Automation

What is marketing automation? When and how can I use it effectively? What tools are appropriate for my business? How do I get started and how do I know whether I’m doing this right?

These are the frequently asked questions that this article sets out to address. We clearly define this commonly misunderstood activity and describe how best to plan and implement marketing automation, taking into account the differing budgets and desired outcomes of businesses.

We discuss how to set your objectives, understand your audience(s) and their customer journey(s), and build a list of opted-in contacts. We’ll discuss the key factors around deciding what to automate, how and when, and the various tools and technologies available and why they may be a good fit for your business. Lastly, we’ll give you some ideas of what you need to measure - so you can know whether your efforts are working and where things can be improved.

Watch on demand our first webinar on Marketing Automation

What is Marketing Automation?

Firstly, let’s deal with what Marketing Automation isn’t. 

Marketing Automation (hereinafter we’ll use the abbreviation MA) does not allow you to sit back and have your marketing done for you! Neither will it encourage you to reduce the size of your marketing team, or stop investing in the skills needed to market your services and products in an increasingly complex and competitive world. If you previously thought these were accurate definitions, you’ll be very glad you stopped by to read this. And so will your business.

So what is Marketing Automation?

MA is a method; a process and a technology solution that, if implemented well, can make your marketing activities more efficient and effective without your customers and prospects feeling like they’re being targeted by technology.

In a nutshell, marketing automation is the process of defining appropriate and automatable marketing communications and utilising the software to deliver these communications for you - irrespective of the stage, size or nature of your business.

MA can help you prioritise and execute certain marketing activities in a more streamlined and efficient way. It can help to free up some of your time to focus on your creativity, your measurement and analysis of results, or to develop new ideas for your business, without compromising the authenticity of your communications. Done well, MA will help you reach your goals faster, help convert prospects into leads and leads into customers. Typically, MA can have the most impact in the conversion of leads to customers - at the bottom of the marketing funnel - and perhaps even more importantly, in keeping your customers, well, customers!

We outline below the 6 key areas of a successful marketing automation programme;

1. Set your objectives

Your first step is to be clear about what you want to achieve by implementing MA in your business. It’s often helpful to pick one outcome and focus on that. Over time you can expand and mature your marketing automation efforts to include multiple objectives.

A good starting point is to build your own (first party) list of prospects and customers, their contact details (an email address is essential) and a way of identifying at what stage in the buyer process they are. For example, are they a contact you’ve previously met at a networking event, or are they a contact that’s made an enquiry to your business? You can keep this list in a spreadsheet or you can use CRM software - but the overall objective is to develop your own, reliable and informative contact list. 

TOP TIP! Don’t ever be tempted to buy lists of contacts from companies that sell them. Instead make the effort to build your own list, from scratch if necessary. The rewards are incalculably greater, and the risks infinitely smaller.

TOP TIP! Don’t ignore your GDPR responsibilities. Building a list of verifiably opted-in contacts is critical to the success of your marketing and automation efforts. Ensure your list accurately reflects the opt-in/out status of your contacts and never, ever, share your customers’ details with other customers, or with other businesses without a GDPR-compliant Data Processing Agreement.

If you’ve already got a compliant contact list or CRM system, then another good objective for an MA campaign is to help you cleanse and validate your customer data; is it accurate, up-to-date and relevant? Are your leads qualified and have you recently engaged with them? It can be an ideal opportunity to ask your contacts to confirm the details you hold for them.

2. Define the high-level journey and touchpoints

Now that you have defined your objectives, think about how you want to engage with customers and how would you like them to respond?

For example, and using our example objective above (validating your customer data), you don’t necessarily want your leads to phone you to update their details - although this itself isn’t a bad outcome! Perhaps, instead, you want them to be able to update their details online? This would certainly be a more efficient method for all concerned. To achieve this, you will need your communications to send them to an online form where they can update their details - with data ideally going straight into your CRM or database. This also provides an excellent opportunity for you to allow them to explore your website further, ask any questions they may have, or to promote a recent product or offer. You may even want to offer an incentive for them to update their details - perhaps with a discount voucher or other offer.

The point is to consider what opportunities are presented by an engaged recipient, and what events you can utilise as triggers for the next steps in your MA plan. Reflect on how each stage in the customer journey will look and feel to the customer, and how each step helps you to achieve your stated objectives.

It can often be helpful to visualise each touchpoint that you have to use, or that you need to develop, to get a clear picture of the journey.

3. Decide what (and what not) to automate

Depending on your set objectives and individual customer journeys, there may be multiple candidate activities for automation. From website forms to social media, email responses and more. It’s recommended that you start small and then later expand to multiple channels or more complex automations. If you’ve decided that your first MA effort should be focused on compiling an effective first party prospect list and engaging with them, the best place to start will be your lead generation forms and a simple “nurture” email flow.

Deciding what not to automate is equally as important. For example, sending marketing communications (or worse, repeated marketing communications) to prospects that are not yet qualified or to those without GDPR-compliant opt-ins will, almost certainly, risk them ignoring - or worse still, opting out of - further communications from your business.

Perhaps the most important - and often-overlooked - method of assessing your plans is to put yourself in the shoes of one of your prospects.  Would you, if you were in the same position as them and in receipt of the same messaging, respond positively or negatively? Your answer is as instructive as anything else.

Let’s now look at some common marketing issues and how MA can help address them.

Problem: I don’t have any first party data for prospects that I can communicate with.
How MA can help:
Marketing automation tools can help you by establishing a central marketing database and streamlining the build of your first list of warm leads.

Problem: I need to do more with less (budget/people/time).
How MA can help: Start by looking at those marketing tasks that are repetitive or that you perform frequently but take a lot of time to complete. Social media posts or “welcome” emails can be a good example; planning in advance, understanding the triggers and scheduling the publishing/communications could save you time.

Problem: My leads aren’t (well) qualified.
How MA can help: Try to think about what criteria you would normally use to qualify your leads? Is it repeatable? Could automation help you to understand your prospect’s stage in the buyer journey? Are they researching you and your competitors? Are they trying to negotiate their internal budget? Are their contact details even valid?

Asking them for their current motivations is often the simplest, most direct and most effective way of improving your intelligence data.

Problem: My leads aren’t converting
How MA can help: Do you understand your target market accurately? Do you know the touchpoints they see when searching for your product or service? Do you know when they last engaged with your business? Do you know if your lead list is up to date or aged?

Marketing Automation can help by delivering your marketing communications when triggered by an appropriate event. For example, has a contact recently visited your website or downloaded a brochure or price list? These are both excellent events that you can use to trigger a timely email or remarketing advert that reaches your target prospect just as they are thinking about your business.

4. Choosing the right tools for your business

At its core Marketing automation tools have the following features and capabilities:

A central marketing database: A place for all your marketing data, such as detailed prospect and customer interactions and behaviors. You can segment and target the right message to each customer. Think of this as a “system of record” for all your marketing information.

An engagement marketing engine: An environment for the creation, management, and automation of marketing processes and conversations across online and offline channels. Think of this as the “orchestra conductor” for your customer interactions.

An analytics engine: A way to test, measure, and optimize marketing ROI and impact on revenue. Think of this as the place you go to understand what worked, what didn’t, and where you can improve.

There are many (many!) software tools out there that offer or claim to offer marketing automation capabilities. Some platforms only focus on the marketing database (CRM) and automations in relation to the sales process. Others may help with email campaigns, lead scoring, sales lead rotation, SMS, and more. A more niche product may be better for small businesses and B2C environments, but B2B and larger organisations may need a platform with wider capability. Here are some key areas to consider as you evaluate marketing automation software products to choose the one that's right for you:

Ease of Use

Automation isn't a simple thing to implement as it is, so make sure the interface of the software will work with you, not against you. See if you can find demos, videos or at least screenshots of the UX so you can determine if the tool is simple and easy to navigate.

Analytics and Reporting

You'll want to be able to measure the success of any MA campaigns, your automation software should be keeping track of the metrics that matter most to you. In B2B and enterprise environments with many stakeholders, you may also need advanced reporting abilities such as personalised dashboards or automatic reporting via email.

Support

As you explore the benefits of marketing automation, you may find the process too technical, so look for providers that have robust knowledge bases, tutorials, and other customer support options.

Limitations

Some automation software platforms may limit the number of actions in a month or the database size you're allowed. Going into any evaluation, know how many contacts you have, how many emails you would like to send on average, and what you want the software to accomplish. 

Pricing and Scalability

For small businesses and B2C organisations focusing primarily on email, a scaled-down system might be sufficient. However, with more advanced needs, enterprise (and thus higher ticket) software is more cost-efficient in the long run.

Be sure to choose a provider that's reasonably priced but can also grow with you as your needs change. 

Integrations

How well does the marketing automation software play with your existing stack? Integrations allow you to manage data and get more from your tools.

During our webinar, we will present a list of top 10 MA tools to help you decide on options and feel confident choosing the best marketing solution for you and your team 

5. Measuring success

How do you know if your MA campaigns are having an impact on business growth? The key to answering this question lies principally with knowing what to measure,  what’s meaningful and what’s not. Of course, what you need to measure and how you define what a successful outcome is depends on what you are doing and what you want to achieve.

The first step to successfully measuring success is not about measuring at all - it’s about knowing what you mean by “successful”.

A surprising number of marketing campaigns are planned and executed without anyone really defining what a good (or a bad) outcome would be, or what value they bring to the business. Impressions, views, clicks, likes, shares, open rates or downloads. These are all perfectly acceptable choices of things you can measure, but if your business needs to sell 1000 widgets, knowing that you’ve had 10,000 ad impressions or 100 likes on social media provides nothing of value in and of itself. Is 100 likes even good?

Sitting down by yourself (or preferably with your colleagues and key stakeholders if you have them) and thinking about what’s useful to measure, and why, is critical. 

Output metrics
Defining your output metrics (or Output KPIs as they are sometimes called) is the primary responsibility of the business itself - because these are the very definitions of what success means in the context of your business. Some good examples of Output metrics could be:

• Units sold (number of)
• Sales appointments booked (number of)
• Demonstrations given (number of)
• Calls received (number of)
• Calls NOT received (percentage decrease from last period)
• Social Media Follows (number of)
• Website visitors (percentage increase from last period)

However, defining the measurable metrics alone is only half of the task. For each identified output metric you should also quantify the volume that would mean the activity has been successful. Let’s look at these examples again to quantify success:

• 250 units sold between campaign start and end of Q2 2021
• 15 sales appointments booked in February
• 10 demonstrations given before end of Q1 2021
• 500 calls received to sales team per month, starting January 2021
• 25% decrease in Customer Service calls compared to Q3 2020.
• Additional 750 Instagram Followers by March 2021
• 10% increase in unique website sessions year-on-year by June 2021.

If you can define your output KPIs so that they are both measurable and quantified, then you are doing things properly and setting up for long-term success.

In-process metrics

Defining your in-process metrics (or in-process KPIs as they are sometimes called) is the secondary task. In-Process KPIs are what you need to measure to understand how the specific activities in your MA campaigns are able to contribute to the Output KPIs. In-process metrics are meaningful for the marketing team or agency that you’re working with - but it’s important to understand that these are not measurements of success. To use a footballing analogy, the goal is to win the game, not to achieve a possession ratio of 75%.

The previously mentioned impressions, views, clicks, open rates, likes and shares are all good examples of in-process metrics, and you should quantify your targets and use them to monitor the campaign as it unfolds and to make any adjustments needed (use industry benchmarks if you don’t know what you should be aiming for) to keep things on-track to meet your objectives.

Conclusion

It takes time to develop a well-performing marketing automation programme capable of nurturing leads. Small businesses just getting started should understand the importance of testing campaigns and adopting the right measurement frameworks, using the right metrics. In this guide, we’ve covered several details that go into building effective marketing automation campaigns, and every organisation handles these processes differently. In summary:

• It’s really important to set your objectives first and decide on the target audience you hope to reach and how you would acquire and segment your first list.
• You have to be clear on what a typical customer journey looks like;
• Knowing your customer journey will help you pick the area of automation likely to bring greatest return for your efforts
• You need to choose the software tool most appropriate to your business needs.
• You need to test, measure and learn so you can optimise your marketing automation over time. 

If you would like to have a more detailed discussion and explore this topic further, contact the team at Rika:

[email protected]

(+44) 020 3367 2170

www.rika.uk

LinkedIn: Rika

Twitter: @RIKADigital