Marketing is something that every business must do consistently. It’s an integral part of the business world and has been so for centuries. But the marketing landscape today is quite different than those of the past. With digitization growing exponentially over the last few decades, we are seeing a new forms of marketing outcompete their traditional forms. What are we talking about here — Digital marketing! The businesses investing in digital marketing have benefited tremendously and are continuing to reap the benefits everyday.
There’s a very attractive aspect of digital marketing activities that is catapulting it to the de-facto choice for modern businesses — Marketing Automation. So, what is marketing automation? The process of automating repetitive marketing activities. With marketing automation software / platforms, one can automate a variety of marketing tasks, including email marketing, social media management, and even advertising management.
Now, are you wondering if automation will reduce the effectiveness of your marketing campaign? On the contrary, it will benefit and set your campaigns up for success. Results speak for themselves, and many businesses have seen that marketing automation enables them to deliver a more personal experience to their customer. With marketing automation, you’ll find it easier to run a variety of digital marketing campaigns.
How Can Marketing Automation Help Your Business?
Many people believe that the success of market automation is a result of marketing automation software. That’s far from reality. The truth is marketing automation software cannot make your campaign successful if there’s no marketing strategy involved. With a killer combination of marketing automation software and a personalized marketing strategy, you can nurture your prospects with useful and highly personalized content. It will also help you convert your prospects into paying customers.
Marketing automation is not limited to converting your prospects into paying customers. That’s not the end game! Gaining customers should never be the final output of marketing automation. In fact, customers should be the central focus of any business. Marketing automation will play a very important role in retaining your customer and help you deliver a fulfilling brand experience to them.
Expertly crafted marketing automation strategies never consider customers as the output of a successful marketing campaign. Instead, it puts the customers at the center and with each step, reduces customer friction at each point. If you value the relationship that your business has built with your customers, then marketing automation is something that you shouldn’t neglect. With marketing automation, you can continue to build customer relationships and increase trust even after a customer has made a purchase from you.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
There’s no doubt that every business is different in terms of their objectives and desired results. Regardless, the following benefits have been common across a wide variety of businesses using marketing automation:
Increased Productivity of Your Marketing & Sales Teams
Marketing automation frees up your sales and marketing teams from routine tasks. They can then focus more on the tasks that are more important for your company. As marketing automation takes care of routine tasks, your sales and marketing teams can work on sharpening the marketing strategies and strategic planning. It’ll help your business achieve goals and objectives within a stipulated time.
Better Control Over Your Marketing Campaign
Once you have a marketing automation system in place, you will find that it enables your marketing team to gain better control over the marketing campaigns. They will be able to see how various marketing channels are working. Plus it will help make your marketing team feel better, as they are in control of how the process will be carried out, and won’t feel like a mindless robot acting on predetermined commands.
Personalization
In today’s age, personalization is something that has become a necessity for a successful digital marketing campaign. With marketing automation, you will find that you can deliver personalization at scale. This is one of the key benefits that come with a marketing automation plan. It enables you to deliver personalized content to all your website visitors, the messages that matches their interests. Marketing automation empowers a business to present their website visitors with a tailored call to action and product offers that suit the customer needs.
What’s the benefit for your business here? For starters, the chances of converting your prospects into paying customers increases considerably after implementing marketing automation. With the help of marketing automation, you can direct your prospects to personalized web pages. These web pages encourage them to purchase your products or services. The website visitors are also able to find what they need quickly and that too, with ease. Hence, they will have a positive experience with your company from the first interaction.
Better ROI & Increased Chances of a Conversion
An Aberdeen Group study found that if a business has insights on what their target audience wants, and they create a sales funnel based on it, the conversion rates are far higher if they leverage marketing automation. Marketing automation ups the conversation rate by 53%. It also leads to an increase in growth rate, as it rises by 3.1% when compared to a campaigns run without marketing automation.
When it comes to ROI, marketing automation has received thumbs up from 76% of companies that implemented it. As per a Marketo report, 76% of respondent companies said they saw a positive ROI from marketing automation within a year. 44% of respondent companies said that they saw a positive return within six months of implementing marketing automation in the same survey. That’s commendable, and it proves that marketing automation adds value and delivers far more than what it costs.
Summary
Without a doubt, automation holds a critical position in the modern marketing world. When it comes to lead generation and nurturing, no businesses can do without marketing automation.
Many businesses are still not leveraging marketing automation today even after knowing the tremendous value that it delivers. Why? They believe that marketing automation is difficult to implement. In reality, the variety of new tools and technologies have made it easier for businesses to implement it. With further development in marketing automation tools & technologies, it will become even easier in the future.
With more and more brands adopting marketing automation, the competition will intensify. A business using marketing automation, along with a well thought out marketing strategy, will be better positioned to come out a winner.
Experts like Lifecycle Marketing can create a well thought out marketing strategy that is highly personalized to your business goals and objectives. You don’t have to worry about executing and implementing marketing automation for your business yourself. Contact the experts today for a personal consultation!
Customer journey mapping, or user journey mapping, is increasingly becoming an important tool for manufacturers, marketers, and sellers to understand how a customer is engaging with the brand at different touchpoints in the overall sales cycle. The interaction between a brand and a customer is not limited to the mere act of the purchase. It is preceded by a long chain of interactions where the customer develops an awareness about the product or service, gets to know it, and then researches that product or the brand.
The act of purchase, according to a customer journey map, is not the endpoint of the process. Purchase is followed by customers sharing their experience interacting with the product and/or company for the very first time. Businesses are taking this step with the utmost sincerity, as well. They are trying to create out of the box experiences or OOBEs for clients in every way possible. This may include promoting “unboxing” experiences and sharing it online by customers, guiding them through the process of knowing the product from the very beginning, etc.
Stages of a Customer Journey Map
A customer journey map has four essential stages. The first stage is where prospective customers gain awareness of the product. Once the customers become aware of the product, they move on to the next stage of research. Here, the customer gathers some more specific facts about the brand such as its price, how long it will last, what the after-sales protocols may be, etc. The third stage is the actual purchase, where the customer buys the into the brand. Then comes the final step where the customer will get introduced to the product and experience its features and benefits first hand.
Four drivers shape each of these stages. Factors that, on one hand, determine how the stage will appear to the client and simultaneously help the seller to prepare a framework of correctly addressing the pain points of the customer. These four factors are actions, motivations, questions, and barriers.
Understanding “actions” means understanding what the customer is doing at that stage. “Motivations” help to understand why the customer is doing what he is doing, and what encourages him/her to move on to the next stage. It underscores the emotional areas that drive a customer to associate with a brand.
Understanding “questions” is to understand the uncertainties, jargon, or other issues that stop the customer from moving to the next stage. “Barriers” are all about the structural issues stopping the customer from moving on to the following stage. And these may include cost, implementation, etc.
A customer journey map takes into consideration all these stages and aspects of how a customer interacts with a brand. It examines the challenges that the customer faces during their interactions. It also finds out the inspirations that work in favor of the product. Understandably, it is an intricate network of causes, actions, and reactions. It is important that this mapping is done efficiently to deliver optimal results. An efficient customer journey map can be created by following the best practices. Here, we will discuss what these best practices are.
Best Practice #1: Establishing Clear Goals for the Map to Achieve
Businesses often set up a customer journey map just to follow the norm. A customer journey with unclear objectives becomes counterproductive and ends up confusing follow up actions. The best practice is, therefore, to look at the objectives of the maps in terms of specific questions. Let us look at some examples of what these questions could be. Developers of the map should ask themselves whether it can identify the weak points of the sales funnel. One should ask whether this map can provide insights on why the customer is taking, or not taking, a particular action. The map should be able to answer what challenges customers face most while moving from one stage to another.
If the map can answer these questions for all the stages involved, only then can it be called an efficient customer journey map.
Best Practice #2: Scenario Analysis
A customer may make different decisions under different scenarios. Since the final objective of creating a consumer journey map is to understand why customers behave the way they do, it’s an efficient course of action to test their decisions under different scenarios. The customer journey map often tries to analyze the intentions and motivations of the consumer under the most plausible scenario. But, the factors that constitute these scenarios may change from time to time. What if the price of the product increases or falls? Would that affect the customer’s decision in the same way? If so, how much of a change in price would trigger a change in decision. It’s important to analyze these maps under various scenarios. A scenario can be drawn from an existing customer journey or by exploring a new journey.
Best Practice #3: Customer Feedback Over Internal Assumptions
Analyzing the actions of the customer and the effort to determine his/her motivations and barriers are mostly dependent on how the businesses perceive them. Businesses draw inferences that action A is a result of motivation B and faces challenge C. Such internal assumptions often stem from conventional wisdom and years of experience in dealing with clients and customers.
However, these inferences don’t always end up correct. Consumers may take decisions coming under a wide range of different unpredictable conditions. Therefore, the best way to make a fool-proof customer journey route map is to gather primary information from the customers. This information can be collected through contextual inquiry, customer feedback surveys, etc.
Best Practices #4: Plotting Channels with Touchpoints
The customers interact with the business at different touchpoints of the customer journey. The businesses should remember that these touchpoints are not standalone entities. Each of the stages and the associated touchpoints are represented by the company’s marketing and sales channels. These marketing and sales channels could include the company’s website, their social media profiles, their customer care numbers, etc.
To ensure that the customer journey map is utilized in the most efficient way possible, developers of the map should always see it in conjunction with the appropriate sales and marketing channels active at that stage.
Best Practices #5: Taking Actions
The most effective customer journey map is the one that is the most dynamic. The map should continue to evolve with proactive decisions from the businesses. Businesses should try to improve the experience of the customers by continuously improving the efficiency of those channels. Improvements can be achieved by removing unnecessary nodes from the map that complicates the process, removing unnecessary obstacles and challenges, and reinforcing the areas of success with greater engagement potential.
As a continuously evolving entity, customer journey maps should always be seen in their immediate context and in association with the channels through which they manifest.
For any organization, large or small, growth is imperative to sustain. A company that does not grow over time eventually ceases to exist. Why? Simple really: atrophy — competitors will eventually gobble up the available new business, leaving only the existing client base to become stale. Growth is a paradigm that often seems elusive. But, there are many tested ways to adopt a growth trajectory that fits perfectly with the nature and type of the company. Here, we will discuss some such tips that any company may follow to scale up their business and walk on the road of growth.
Defining the Customer
First and foremost one must figure out who is the ideal customer. Each product or service has a potential set of consumers who stand to benefit the most from that product or service. Some products are extremely specific in terms of their target audience. For example, a welding machine is not for the layperson to use. On the other hand, categories like FMCG products are consumed by a wide swath of the population.
It is very much necessary to create a profile of the ideal customer based on their demographic and psychographic characteristics. Demographic parameters include age, gender, race, income, marital status, geographic location, etc. On the other hand, psychographic parameters may include details on hobbies, attitudes, beliefs, spending patterns, interests, etc.
While preparing the ideal consumer persona, it’s always best to go into as much depth as possible. Marketers often keep their parameters wide-ranging to include the maximum number of potential consumers. But on the contrary, the more effective thing to do is to become as specific as possible, especially during a launch. This helps to spend efficiently and get the best possible return from the marketing investment.
Owning and Nurturing the Customer
Once the correct subset of potential customers has been identified, the intention of the marketing strategy of the company should be to own the customers not simply acquire them.
Paid promotions on social media sites often help to acquire a lot of followers within a short period. Although it proves effective to build traction in the beginning, this strategy falls short in the long run. Moreover, social media platforms often modify their settings and their policies. These sudden shifts often make the marketing strategies of the company go ineffective to a large extent. Therefore, instead of relying too much on the whims of a third-party platform, it’s best to establish a direct connection with consumers through strategies like creating a mailing list. There are several mailing list provider services available in the market that help to build such mailing databases.
However, these mailings should add value to the lives of your customers. They should not be too frequent and yet not too irregular. A weekly newsletter with information that the consumer might find useful is a perfect way to initiate a non-intrusive e-mail communication strategy.
Treating Each Customer As Your First Customer, Every Time
Growth marketers are often focused on the acquisition of new customers. Retention of the existing customer is an area where their strategies lose much traction. However, it is the loyal customer who drive growth in the long run.
An analysis of many company’s marketing strategies would show that their onboarding communication is excellent. However, once the onboarding is complete, the level of communication start to fall off. Resultantly, these customers start feeling disconnected and issues take longer to resolve. To effectively maintain the momentum of growth, companies must treat each of their customers as their first with the same swiftness they exhibited during onboarding.
Exploring Established Distribution Channels
Although establishing a native distribution channel is important, it takes time to organically build one. It is, therefore, an efficient option to leverage already established distribution channels that have readymade communities frequently engaging over the types of products and services that the consumers are interested. Many companies employ such executives whose job it is to interact with relevant communities in social engagement channels like Quora or Reddit.
Press and Partnerships
Nothing works like the power of word of mouth. It’s the most reliable form of marketing your product where you need to spend next to nothing, and in return, get the maximum possible number of genuinely interested customers. Getting the good word out in the press is one of the most popular ways to start a wave of word of mouth rolling publicity.
Partnerships help to grow in areas where it otherwise would have taken much longer to build a reach a reputation. Companies often become too concerned about the accumulation of profit. Creating a network of profit-sharing partnerships with companies that provide complementing services or products is an effective way to grow consumer-base in a short period.
Transparency
Practicing transparency in every-day operations is one of the most trusted ways to hack growth. Companies that grow publicly, grow fast. Today it is essential to keep the community aware of what the company is trying to achieve and how it is trying to achieve it.
Getting to know what the company is thinking for its place in the future, helps consumers to associate with a brand for the long term. It also creates a sense of intimacy and loyalty for the brand. Consumers identify with the brand and accept any drawbacks with an open mind.
Maintaining transparency also helps to make a company appear more human than its competitor. It helps in building goodwill that often helps in attracting investors. Investors feel safer and try to attach a fair share of the company’s goodwill towards their own brand as well.
With all these growth hacks in place, companies should keep in mind that there is no easy way to achieve sustainable growth. However, rigorously and honestly following these strategies, backed by data-driven interventions from time to time, unmistakably helps any company to grow no matter how strong the headwinds are.