How can you streamline your marketing campaigns with the right automation software?

Determine what you aim to achieve with your campaigns, whether it's increasing brand awareness, generating leads, driving sales, or improving customer engagement. Once your goals are established, identify repetitive tasks within your marketing processes that can be automated, such as email marketing, social media posting, lead nurturing, and analytics tracking. Choose automation software that aligns with your specific goals and provides features to automate these tasks effectively. By automating routine processes, you can save time, increase efficiency, and focus on strategic initiatives to achieve your marketing objectives

A great starting point here is to work from a predefined campaign request form where you identify your goals and objectives, audience, preferred mediums/channels, budget, and timeline, as well as how said campaign benefits your customer.

Most MAPs have similar functionalities. Some are easier to use than others. Depending on your needs, one tool may suit better than another. Things to take in consideration are size of your contactable database (and expected growth), number of partitions needed (if any), skills of your team (do they already have experience with a specific tool, skills from one tool to another are transferrable but some tools are easier to use than others). Also take into consideration implementation and integration time (and complexity) as well as migration if you are migrating from one tool to another.

Most of the Automation tools have common functionalities, while some works easier and faster than others and you can choose them for that, here are the indicators, I believe should help you -Database: Size, growth, and partition needs -Team Skills: Experience with specific tools, ease of use -Implementation: Time and complexity for setup and integration -Migration: Challenges and requirements for data migration -Features: Necessary functionalities for marketing objectives -Usability: User-friendly interface and efficient task management -Scalability: Adaptability for future growth and evolving needs -Support: Quality of customer support, training, and technical assistance -Cost: Licensing fees, implementation, and ongoing support expenses

Choosing software is a question, process, and procedure unto itself. That said, the right marketing automation platform (MAP) or email service provider (ESP) will satisfy the needs of the business, integrate into your existing techstack ecosystem, and be user-friendly for the end user.

Data integration with your CRM and existing tools is an important part of your implementation. Even after implementation, as you will add new tools to your tech stack, you will need to integrate them to your MAP (or CRM or data warehouse, depending on the tools). MAP should also be integrated with your paid social accounts, event and webinar tools so the data can flow immediately and you can create multi channel integrated campaigns. Another tool that should be connected to your CRM and MAP is your attribution tool.

MAP will help you automate tasks build nurture and lifecycle campaigns, reengagement campaigns, and also PLG campaigns. You should also link it to your product if possible so you can trigger emails based on your customer actions in product. You could also use it for product launch or onboarding. Your lead scoring can also be done in your MAP. You can also automate data cleansing.

Monitoring results is super important, as soon as the campaign start you need to constantly monitor results so if something doesn't work you can quickly iterate to improve your campaign ROI and budget spend. You can monitor real time, take data driven decisions and share the reports with your teams so they see what works and what doesn't. Try to build full funnel reports that combine data from different sources.

By constantly trying new tactics and monitoring results, you will need to constantly iterate and change your strategy if required. You may realise that some sources are not performing as expected while others are performing much better so you can shift budget towards the best performing sources, or maybe you will need to improve / refine your targeting in the least performing ones to improve ROI from these too. Automate as much as possible. Work in an agile way, in sprints if possible since it really helps with planning.

When we say “automation” it’s natural to assume “marketing automation platform” (MAP). The reality is that all channel orchestration tools have some kind of automation built in to enable the orchestration to work at scale. The big questions you should ask, before buying, are: - do we have procedures to operationalise the content and data requirements to make a tool worthwhile? - does this tool, support the channel or mix of channels that the go-to-market plan prioritises? Automation creates efficiency, but it won’t generate outcomes if there are a lack of inputs and supporting procedures.

To streamline marketing campaigns with automation software, identify repetitive tasks and choose software that integrates well with existing tools. Consider ease of use, scalability, and customization options, and provide training and support for your team. Tips: Start with automating one process at a time, regularly update and refine automation workflows based on performance insights, and stay informed about new features and updates from your software provider to maximize efficiency.