We all know marketing automation has lots of benefits to provide to the small business. It saves time, money, strengthened sales and marketing partnership, measure ROI effectively, etc. However, for a better result, you must make sure your marketing strategy is aligned with the buyer’s journey.
By correct alignment, we mean delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time.
How do you start the aligning process? The following steps will help you to do that efficiently so that ultimately it helps buyers to make the decision.
Figure out the buying process
To figure out buying process you need to understand the mindset of your buyer (like on what basis they take their buying decision) and map out the decision making process they take.
Your aim should be to encourage your lead to take the next step which brings them closer to the final step (i.e. to make the purchase).
Build your strategy that assists multiple conversion pathways. For example, some audience might contact through your email newsletter, some might message you over social media, some might directly email you on your given email address or others may want to talk to a salesperson. Therefore your strategy must include every possible conversion pathways to give everyone a platform to engage with you.
Know the analytics
Before your strategies, understand the analytics and what figures are trying to explain. It is better to have a clear understanding of analytics at the beginning so that accordingly you can map out the process.
For example, what percent of people prefer which channel of communication, how long it takes to convert a lead into a customer.
Understanding analytics is very important. It will highlight the area where you and your team need to focus and work on to gain the result.
Coordinate with your sales team
No marketing strategy can be successfully implemented without the coordination of both the marketing and sales team. The sales team and the marketing team must work in collaboration.
For example, the marketing team must know when and how the sales team is targeting the audience, in this way marketing team will get an insight into the sales team activities, where they need assistance and where they are doing fine. Having coordination between these two teams ensures your organization’s strategy isn’t overlapping with the strategy of others.
Understand buyers persona
Once you understand the buyer’s persona then it will be easy to convert them. If you are not familiar with buyer personas, it would be going tough for you to increase conversion.
Buyer persona includes everything about the buyer, like demographics factor, buying behavior, last activity on the website, last purchase, etc.
Once you know the personas, you can ensure that your marketing strategy, content, goals resonate with those personas.
Implement the right technology
Implementing the right tool brings success, it plays a vital tool between success and failure. Before opting for any marketing automation tool, evaluate all available tool and identify the tool that best suited to your needs. Your marketing automation platform also needs to integrate with your CRM to close the loop between sales and marketing and for tracking ROI.
Automation doesn’t only mean emails, it is far beyond that like, web forms, dynamic content, landing page and more. Make sure to consider all this when marking the decision regarding technology implementation.
By doing proper planning, implementing the right strategy and monitoring the analytics you can convert more leads to customers.
