Business is personal. Strive to humanize every department even as you embrace automation and robotics. Marketers who find the most success with marketing automation are those who understand their audience and tailor consistent messaging and content to meet their needs and expectations.
Most small businesses use marketing automation to accelerate e-commerce, keep customers engaged, and encourage repeat business.
Marketing automation apps provide the tools necessary to accomplish marketing goals, but it’s important to maintain the human side of your business. Here are a few things you can do to make business interaction humanly possible.
Build your list from people interested in your product
Your campaigns are only as good as your list. Don’t buy lists — generate your own list of qualified leads and constantly replenish it to combat database decay.
Traffic to your blog is an important part of establishing your business as an authority for the services or products that you provide.
Provide newsletter opt-ins on your website
Driving traffic to your website is a great way to acquire new prospective customers. By offering a email newsletter opt-in, you can capture leads interested in receiving updates directly to their inbox.
People won’t subscribe your newsletter if they won’t receive anything beneficial to them. Create an educative ebook or guide and give it away fro free.
Launch a relevant business blog
A business blog is a great way to connect with your customers, announce new products, and provide a human face to your company’s image. You don’t want to miss that. Blogging is now a critical part of growing a businesses.
Blogging is more than just marketing copy on a page. It’s information, personality, and it offers the ability for open communication.
It gives the customer a venue to speak with you, about you. You can learn a great deal and act on information much faster.
With success stories from the likes of HubSpot, KISSmetrics, Quicksprout, Buffer, Groove and Shopify, there is no denying the fact that blogging can significantly improve your marketing efforts.
Make it easy for your blog visitors to subscribe to updates.
Host a webinar
Hosting a webinar is a great way capture email address and directly in front of potential customers. Show off your expertise and help prospects by addressing their needs. Choose relevant topics your customers will find useful.
When you host free webinars then you are able to build a decent fresh list by promoting it via social media or by hosting it for someone else. It’s also a good way to expand your reach to new audiences.
Companies like HubSpot use webinars as a primary lead generation source to increase sales along with their great blog content.
You can partner with other experts in your industry to host awesome and educative webinars. It’s very common to do a joint venture webinar with industry leaders who can share their information to your network or list and visa versa.
If you build up a good reputation with your online presentation and add value to others, then word spreads fast in the world of webinars and be prepared to connect with some major players.
Think beyond the inbox
Email may still be the most important way to build relationships, maintain awareness, qualify leads and nudge prospects along the sales cycle, but these days, it pays to think about “lead nurturing” as more just an email campaign.
Think social
All three leading B2B social media channels (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook) offer variations on “custom audience” programs that enable you to upload lists of customers, prospects, or target accounts and deliver ads exclusively to that audience.
“Marketing automation started with email, but your customers are interacting with your company across all sorts of channels. Find a marketing automation system and develop a strategy that serves up relevant content across all the channels your customers use, from email to the website to more informed, relevant sales calls.” says Meghan Keaney Anderson (Product Marketing Director, HubSpot)