Incorporating marketing automation in your small business’ digital strategy might seem a little overwhelming. We promise it’s not as complicated as it sounds! Marketing automation streamlines your marketing efforts. It also gives you the power to reach and engage with more customers than you ever could manually. Most importantly, automation technology has the potential to save you time, money and unnecessary stress, giving you more energy to focus on other important facets of your small business!
Benefits of Marketing Automation
Personalized User Experience
Marketing automation technology uses demographic and behavioral insights to deliver timely, customized messages, ads and emails to consumers. Highly relevant content offers users a more personalized experience. With marketing campaign automation, you can more effectively engage with customers to build strong relationships and increase conversion rates.
Save Time and Increase Productivity
Automating tasks in your email, social media and ad campaigns can eliminate time-consuming and repetitive manual processes. This saves time and increases productivity, letting you concentrate on other parts of your marketing strategy.
Increase Reach
Automation helps you increase the scale and scope of your marketing campaigns. By combining criteria from multiple channels, including demographic and behavioral data, marketing automation software can identify and generate more leads.
Collect Analytic Data
You can utilize marketing automation solutions to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. These platforms monitor your potential customers’ web behavior, as well as your campaign performance on multiple channels. Marketing automation software offers detailed, comprehensive reports to help you improve upon your strategy and maximize ROI.
Multi-Channel Integration Capabilities
Today’s marketing automation platforms integrate multiple online channels, so you can execute a holistic campaign across digital touchpoints. Using marketing automation, you can develop more consistent branded messages that resonate with users. Multi-channel marketing automation also collects more valuable data and insights that allow you to understand how users are interacting with your business across channels.
Social Media Automation
Scheduled Posts
You need to post on a regular basis to keep your social media followers engaged. Scheduling your posts a couple of weeks or a month in advance ensures consistency. Creating and scheduling ahead of time is also more efficient than setting aside time every day to create images, write captions and find articles to share. It allows you to manage your social media strategy in a more holistic way.
Automated Responses
The automated reply feature on Facebook Messenger allows you to immediately communicate with people trying to get in touch with you on your page. Even when you’re not available, you can let customers know that their message is important to you and you’ll get back to them as soon as you can with an instant reply! The automated response feature can also be utilized when a user lands on your Facebook business page. The user will be prompted to open Messenger, where they receive your automatic message asking, “How may we help you?”
Insights
Social media insights provide you data for each platform so that you can analyze information about your content, followers and engagement levels. With digital automation, you can integrate this data into the rest of your digital marketing strategy through remarketing campaigns.
Facebook Ads Automation
Automated Rules
Facebook Automated Rules allow you to create automation formulas that automatically trigger an action when specific conditions are met. Facebook Ads will automatically review your campaigns, ad sets and ads, and then notify you or make updates. For example, you can set up a rule that pauses a low-performing ad when it hits a specific metric or increases your budget when you hit a certain number of clicks.
Facebook A/B Tests
Facebook allows you to create A/B tests in Ads Manager. Using Facebook A/B testing, you can change different ad variables, such as your ad creative, audience or placement, to determine which combination works best. Once you choose your testing variable, Facebook will divide your budget to equally and randomly show the two versions of your ad. Facebook A/B testing will then measure the results of each ad and compare them to help you improve your campaign.
Google Ads Automation
Automated Bidding
In most cases, allowing Google to decide when and where to spend your daily or monthly budget is more efficient and effective than trying to do it yourself. It may take some time for Google to learn what works well for your campaigns, but it takes a lot of the guesswork out of setting bids yourself. If you have conversions set up to let Google know what actions you consider valuable, Google’s automated bidding strategy uses advanced machine learning to bid more or less in specific situations.
Responsive Search Ads
Responsive search ads let you create multiple different ad scenarios for Google to choose from when displaying your ad by entering several headlines and descriptions. Google Ads then picks the best combination to deliver the most relevant message to your customers in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Over time, Google Ads automatically tests different combinations to learn which perform best.
Even though this type of ad may cost more, it makes you eligible to display in the SERPs in more situations. You can also use the results to make better-performing static ads!
Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic search ads give Google more control than any other campaign option on Google Ads. When a dynamic search ad appears on the SERPs, the headline and landing page are dynamically created by Google using information from your website. Dynamic search ads don’t require keywords. The only thing you need to adjust are the descriptions.
This option isn’t right for everyone, considering the level of authority it gives Google to target relevant searches and generate converting ads. However, dynamic ads have the ability to deliver more conversions with little effort on your part.
Remarketing Ads
Remarketing ads allow you to reconnect with people who previously interacted with your website with strategic placement. This well-accepted form of marketing automation has been around much longer than the automated options mentioned above. Google Ads makes remarketing campaigns simple with straightforward set-up and integration with your other pieces of automation.
Analytics
We use both Google Analytics and Raven SEO tools to send automated reports. Automated reporting helps us show our clients what’s working without having to manually prepare a summary. You can use automated reporting for your small business to easily assess your digital marketing efforts and improve your strategy, without spending time pulling together data each month. You can also set up alerts so that Google Analytics automatically notifies you of any dramatic changes in website traffic, webpage errors, and more.
Mailchimp Email Marketing Automation
Automated Emails
Mailchimp’s automated email campaigns and email series help you connect with different groups of customers on a personal level. Triggered automation and segmented campaigns allow you to tell engaging stories with current and potential customers. Whether you’re welcoming a new subscriber, inviting a customer to your upcoming event or reminding a website visitor to return to their abandoned shopping cart, automated email marketing can be highly effective.
Segmented Lists
Segmenting your email lists into different types of customers can help you increase open rates drastically. Mailchimp allows you to group email recipients by how recently they purchase a product, how they learned about your company, demographics, geographic location or other characteristics you’ve collected from subscribers. This way, your emails will better resonate with readers through more personalized messaging.
A/B Testing
A/B testing functionality gives Mailchimp users the ability to test and compare subject lines or content when setting up a new campaign. You’ll create two different subject lines or email contents, and Mailchimp will create two or three variations of your campaign. Then, Mailchimp will send the variations to separate portions of your contacts to determine which one is the most effective. The remainder of your contact list will be sent the email campaign with the best open rate.
Multi-Channel Integration
Mailchimp connects to digital tools you already use, including online shopping carts, Facebook custom audiences, Google Analytics and ecommerce stores. This functionality helps you integrate email marketing into your comprehensive digital strategy. For example, when you integrate your Mailchimp account with Google Analytics and your ecommerce store, Mailchimp will track email-driven website visits and purchases. This way, you can find out what’s working and what’s not, and improve your strategy from there.
