If you approach marketing automation with an understanding of how it works, you can use the data it compiles for you to your advantage with terrific results in your inbound marketing. It’s a powerful tool for both drawing traffic to your site and improving the quality of your content, so we’re going to teach you how the system works so you can start using it to your advantage.
Setting Up Your Marketing Automation
The real value in any marketing automation system is its ability to increase your content marketing return on investment (ROI). Of course, first you need to set up an environment that will let your marketing automation work at its fullest, and the way to do that is to optimize your website usability and data metrics. Here’s what you’ll need to do:
- Create a scoring rubric: Input the factors that define your ideal site visitor, especially if you’re a B2B marketer. This lets you lets you track and figure out what type of content attracts your target demographic.
- Optimize your landing page: Optimize it both for information gathering as well as usability. By connecting your landing page to your marketing automation system you can automatically update your contact information, buyer profiles, email lists, and more through form registration.
- Get Your Visitors Filling Out Forms: Research shows that visitors are more likely to fill out forms if they have less information to fill out, so instead of making one bulky form with upwards of 10 fields to fill out, make multiple small ones the user will encounter throughout their experience on your website.
Gathering Data and Putting it to Use
Now that you’ve optimized your potential for gathering data, you’ll want to drive traffic to your content so you can generate data to be collected. The best way to do this is through content advertisement, and the most effective types of content advertisement for this is sending out messages promoting your content both through your social media networks and your emailing lists. Once you have generated some traffic, here’s what you’ll want to do:
- Prioritize contacts: Though all of your clients should be taken care of, there are some that are better for your company than others and those should receive more specialized attention. A marketing automation system can automatically sort visitors into categories you’ve set up so you can see which clients are the most active and adjust your attention accordingly.
- Involve your sales team: Get your data to your sales team and help them fine tune their procedures, too. This data can be used across almost every department in your company so you shouldn’t hold out on anyone.
- Stay relevant even after the sale: Content is valuable to your client even after the business between the two of you has been done. By keeping your clients coming back to your site for information, you increase the chances that they will come back and do business with you again.
Foundation, promotion, and result analysis — the three pillars of marketing automation. If you get these under your thumb you’ll not only have more visitors interacting with more of your content, but the quality of that content will start improving, too. It’s a powerful tool so start learning it as soon as you can.
[ “7474, 6877, 6876”]
