Marketing automation is one of the hottest topics in digital marketing today and for good reason. It allows you to automate many of the repetitive marketing tasks from sending out timely emails to cleaning up data to build better segments and deliver better reporting. With a strong marketing automation core, it can allow marketing to be directly connected to the company CRM providing a holistic view into all of your lead and contact data.
Buyer Personas & the Buyer’s Journey
The first step to building out a successful digital marketing strategy is to understand the data that currently resides in your data and make sure the profile information for your contact’s is as complete as possible. By reviewing this data, you will then come to see the buyer personas that impact your business. This data will vary from business to business as B2C is different from B2B and targets will vary based on what your sales team is looking for and based on who has purchased your product/solution in the past.
Once you have the information you need about the buyer personas, it is time to uncover the buyer’s journey with the help of your sales team. I have worked with teams of all sizes, including enterprises businesses, to uncover what each stage of the buyer’s journey means and define this for your business. From defining what a “lead” is, to understanding marketing qualified and sales qualified leads, all the way up to understanding the opportuntiy pipeline reporting. By having a comprehensive understanding of each stage, you can help to divide up your marketing efforts to ensure that each stage that a prospective buyer will go through is accounted for with marketing materials, whether it be email communication, landing pages, or social outreach.
Automation Workflows
Once the buyer personas and journey are understood, you can move into the email marketing and landing page development. The start of any good automation experience is to account for new contacts that come into your database, whether from digital or non-digital marketing tactics. This is referred to as Net New processes.
Having worked with many established companies, I have found that while many are actively emailing their contacts, when prompted with the question about how they handle net new leads, there is often not an answer. Now let’s stop and put ourselves in the shoes of the contact. If I walk into a store for the first time and walk out, regardless of whether I purchased or not, I am going to have some perception of the business and decide whether or not I will come back. By having a Net New automation campaign in place, you can help ensure that whether or not a contact purchased from you that they are accounted for and helped in hopes of progressing them through your buyer’s journey.
Nurture Your Leads
I can help you learn how to segment your database and create engaging inbound marketing campaigns for your business. Simply use the link below to contact me and I will be in touch.