10 Essential Elements to Consider When Planning for Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation is not just about turning on a switch and walking away. It's a long term investment that requires a lot of time and dedication to ensure that you're getting the most out of your investment. That's why it's crucial to enlist the right professionals who are familiar with automating your marketing. Since my years specializing in automating my companies' marketing, I've continued to grow as an expert in this space. Over the last year, I've been increasingly recognized as a leader in automated marketing and have been featured in many industry publications. In this article, I discuss about the 10 key elements that should be considered when planning for marketing automation.
1. Plan your strategy
Planning your marketing automation strategy can be a daunting task. But if you take the time to plan it out, you'll have the best chance for success. It's important to remember that marketing automation is an evolution and not a one-time effort. Knowing information such as what you want to achieve and how much time and money is needed to get there will help you to avoid getting lost or wasting your time on wild goose chases, both of which can happen if you are not strategic with what information you gather along the way. You will need to tweak and adjust your strategy along the way as you gather data and make changes based on what you've learned.
2. Identify your needs
Before starting any project, it's important that you figure out exactly why automation is necessary for your business objectives so that you know where to focus your efforts and resources most effectively. Marketing Automation helps set a firm foundation for future actionable steps in the process of automating lead nurturing and online campaigns to drive engagements and increase revenue.
3. Plan your budget
Before you engage with a market leader, be sure to plan your budget. This is important for a number of reasons. First, it guarantees the success of both your sales and marketing process by reducing the risk of overspending. Second, it assists in making investment decisions by accurately determining how much you can afford to spend on development and implementation. Third, it outlines accurate expectations for developers and other stakeholders so they can ensure that deliverables are both realistic and achievable. Fourth, it provides you with a realistic timeline in order for you to avoid the confusion arising from inaccurate or unrealistic timeframes.
4. Choose the appropriate technology
There are many marketing automation technologies available in the market and it can be difficult to choose which marketing automation technology is appropriate for your business. Companies often select a marketing automation tool based on the size of their business and the network, but this is not always indicative of what you should choose. It's important to look at functionality, pricing, and support that are best for your business.
5. Work with an agency
It is important for a company to work with a market leader in order to achieve success. Marketing automation tool does not itself bring you success. There are many companies that have implemented marketing automation tools but failed because of improper planning and lack of assistance in the process. Often times an agency can play a key role in supporting your team as they execute against the new process. For instance, dJolt can help you find opportunities to scale and grow your program and help you analyze how you can continue to make the most of the new process in the future.
6. Establish and communicate clear goals
Once you have selected your marketing automation tool and technology, it's important that you communicate clearly with team members regarding your goals and objectives so that everyone knows exactly what's expected of them. The next step is for everyone to collaborate on how you will meet these goals in light of different objectives and challenges across departments, locations, or jurisdictions.
7. Start small
Regardless of how big your marketing team is, it's important to start small and scale marketing automation while providing real value. You do not want to spend time on a project that is too large or complicated and gets discouraged if things don't go as planned or quickly as expected.
8. Train your team
Once the pilot project has been completed and you meet your goals, it's important to train your team how the new process works so that they can be involved in the next step of executing tasks related to Lead Nurturing Process in a consistent manner.
9. Execute
This step is key as it demonstrates how human activity (i.e. lead nurturing) is impacted by automation. Here, you should measure the impact automation has on your marketing and sales process to see if you have achieved your initial objective. If not, you may want to re-examine your strategy for adapting current campaign content for optimal results.
10. Continuously improve
when it comes to automation, it's a process that never ends. Even though you have reached some sales goals, or even exceeded them in some cases, there is always room for improvement and there are always new objectives to accomplish down the road. Since automation is a process, you can always evaluate where it is now and then improve upon that result and improve your overall results.
Marketing automation is a great way to keep your company focused on its marketing objectives, while still having the freedom to run automated campaigns. It helps the business achieve their goals by offering them more time and money for other aspects of the business such as management and sales. Marketing automation provides a way for companies to automate activities, allowing them to reach more customers in a smarter, faster and cheaper way. It helps companies focus on improving efficiency of their current initiatives in order to achieve better ROI and generate more revenue with fewer resources.
The overall focus of marketing automation is efficiency, and most companies looking for new solutions are focused on improving efficiency of their current initiatives in order to achieve better ROI and generate more revenue with fewer resources. These companies also need integration that works across all the systems they use. However, you should note that these benefits are not free and will require some effort on your part to ensure those efforts reap results. However, many companies fail to implement such systems correctly because they don't take full advantage of marketing automation best practices or understand how they can leverage them successfully for their business.
