7 Strategies for Doubling Efficiency in Digital Marketing Automation

After reaching a certain stage, the majority of digital marketing teams shift their attention inward. While they possess the knowledge and skills, the desire to enhance and expedite their processes arises. This is where the implementation of marketing automation strategies becomes crucial.

However, the technology that empowers marketing teams is growing in leaps and bounds. There are now around 10,000 marketing automation solutions, a 24 percent increase over the past two years, University of Hamburg (UH) research shows. More than 25% of marketing budgets are now being allocated to automation by companies, with a 69% increase in adoption across various industries. However, determining the initial steps, choosing the right technology, and identifying the most impactful investments can be challenging. Below, I will guide you through some of the most effective methods to enhance efficiency through automation.

What is Digital Marketing Automation?

Many brands are attracted to marketing efficiency. According to Zapier, the average marketer saves 25 hours per week through automation. Consequently, 45 percent of them report experiencing less burnout.

Automation also leads to improved performance. On average, data management performance sees a 57 percent increase, according to UH. Additionally, two out of five individuals state that automating tasks in this domain is more beneficial to their business than in any other area. Furthermore, HubSpot reports that effective marketers are 46 percent more likely to incorporate automation in their roles.

7 Digital Marketing Automation Strategies to Double Your Efficiency?

McKinsey reports that approximately 30 percent of tasks in 60 percent of jobs can be automated. This extends to digital marketing, where virtually any repetitive task performed by marketers can be automated. Below, we'll examine some tasks that yield the most substantial efficiency improvements when automated.

Strategy 1: Using a CRM to Improve Marketing and Sales Alignment

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform serves as more than just a repository for customer data. It acts as a collaborative space and a singular source of truth, fostering alignment between your marketing and sales teams. This alignment translates into increased sales closures and enhanced operational efficiency.

Here are a few aspects your team might consider automating:

• Automatically input lead data into your CRM when a lead completes an online form, followed by directing the lead to the appropriate sales representative.
• Extracting data from external sources to inform sales teams about customer engagement with the brand, including details such as their last website visit, specific pages viewed, or emails opened. This enables reps to tailor their discussions and save time.
• Have the marketing team create email templates and assets that sales reps can swiftly send with minimal editing.
• Sending email surveys to customers and prospects post-interaction to gather insights on satisfaction levels and identify opportunities for improvement.

Strategy 2: Scoring Leads to Improve Focus

Lead scoring involves assigning values to leads, and facilitating the assessment of their interest and viability. This process enables you to easily identify which leads warrant more attention and how to prioritize them effectively.

For example, your marketing automation tool might allocate points based on actions, such as awarding 20 points for completing an online form, ten points for clicking an email, or one point for opening it. Additional points can be added based on details entered into the CRM, allowing for a focus on specific criteria like larger accounts or particular geographic areas.

Lead scoring tools often provide the capability to deduct points automatically. For instance, points may be reduced if someone unsubscribes from your emails.

Integrating a lead's score into your CRM allows sales reps to leverage this information in prioritizing their calls. Furthermore, it can be used to adjust the intensity of marketing efforts for specific leads, increasing or decreasing outreach as necessary.

Strategy 3: Automating the Lead Follow-Up Process

Responding promptly to leads is vital, as it enhances the likelihood of making a connection and closing a sale. This underscores the importance of automating lead assignments in your CRM, as discussed in the initial strategy. However, many other facets of the lead follow-up process can also be automated. For example, you can automate emails following a logged call or when the lead doesn't respond. Additionally, a series of automated emails from the sales representative can be set up for routine scenarios, such as prompting the lead to schedule a demo or confirming the receipt of a proposal.

Strategy 4: Segmenting Email Lists

A robust email marketing automation strategy significantly enhances the effectiveness of your campaigns. The foundation of this lies in meticulous segmentation to ensure that your audience receives emails tailored to their specific interests. Explore segmentation based on:

• Product
• Service
• ·Persona
• Age of account
• Location
• Previous behavior
• And more

Strategy 5: Setting Up Workflows to Respond to Customer Actions

Automation is often perceived as an instantaneous process – you instruct the software, and it promptly executes the task. However, automation can encompass a sequence of tasks, known as a workflow.

Your marketing automation workflow necessitates a trigger to initiate it, a concept often termed as "trigger marketing." Workflows can be crafted around any event recognized by your CRM or marketing software, and you can specify the tasks or actions to follow the trigger's identification. Utilizing CRM data allows for additional segmentation within workflows, akin to constructing "if, then" statements based on triggers and segmentation.

Common Digital Marketing Workflow Triggers

• Visits to specific website pages
• Number of pages viewed
• Chatbot engagement
• Clicks on specific links
• Form completions
• Lead score thresholds
• Email opens or failure to open emails
• Shopping cart abandonment

Common Digital Marketing Workflow Actions

• Send an email or sequence of emails
• Add to a list
• Assign to a sales rep
• Tag the contact
• Update CRM data
• Start an internal ticket or notify someone internally
• Do nothing for a set period

Examples of Digital Marketing Workflows

• If a guide or report is requested via a website form, then send the asset via email.
• If a product page is viewed by someone in your CRM, then send them the latest offer via email.
• If a lead views pricing information, then notify the assigned sales rep via email and create a task in CRM for follow-up.

Strategy 6: Personalizing Content

Adobe reports that over two-thirds of businesses recognized as performance leaders employ highly personalized tactics, incorporating person-specific deep data across all or most channels. However, as businesses grow in size, personalizing content becomes more challenging. Developing a marketing automation content strategy facilitates scalability.

Many businesses initiate automated personalization in email, a relatively straightforward process. This involves using placeholders or tags to insert data such as the customer's name and company into the message. Additionally, dynamic content can be leveraged to showcase products aligned with the customer's interests based on their purchase history.

Similar strategies can be applied to your website. For example, pages can be dynamically tailored in real-time based on factors like buyer persona, location, and other details. If you've ever shopped on prominent websites, you may have encountered personalized content displaying products you recently viewed, accompanied by a message like, "Hi, (Name)! Pick up where you left off." This approach is adaptable to various brands and industries.

Strategy 7: Simplifying Analytics and Reporting

According to surveys conducted by Adobe, an overwhelming 95 percent of brands emphasize the importance of automating their marketing reporting. Additionally, implementing automation in reporting leads to a notable 42 percent boost in performance, as reported by UH. Let's delve into what this looks like in practical terms.

Marketing Attribution Automation

As you fine-tune your digital marketing strategies, the process involves relinquishing ineffective approaches and amplifying successful ones. Understanding the origins of your customers and identifying common traits among converters is a pivotal aspect of this optimization.

Initially, pinpointing the "first touch" or the initial interaction with a brand online is relatively straightforward. Utilizing tools like UTM codes enables you to precisely identify the lead's source, down to the specific campaign and clicked link. Aggregate data can also be reviewed through platforms such as Google Analytics.

In the real world, however, conversions seldom occur with the first touch. Instead, a customer typically undergoes a multifaceted journey with various touchpoints. For example, they might discover your website through a Google search, return later to explore products, engage with a chatbot or agent for additional information, and eventually make a purchase online or at a physical store.

To make sense of this complex journey, automation becomes indispensable for executing multi-channel attribution, aggregating data, and analyzing it from different perspectives to discern effective strategies.

Social Media Reporting Automation

Whether your brand utilizes social media for content marketing, paid advertising, or a combination of both, it is essential to gauge the return on investment and ensure that your budget is allocated effectively. While each platform provides automated reports on these metrics, employing an aggregator tool allows you to consolidate data from each network and view it in a centralized location.

SEO Reporting Automation

SEO reports serve as invaluable tools for strategizing, identifying opportunities, and measuring success. However, manually reviewing every page on your website, let alone analyzing competitor sites, to generate the necessary reports is impractical.

Numerous SEO automation tools are available, each excelling in its own unique way. Depending on the program you choose, you can efficiently assess:

• How many high-quality backlinks your site has, and which sites are linking.
• How many keywords your site lands on the first page of Google for, and which ones.
• Your domain authority.
• Factors that impact your SEO, such as broken links, and where they are on your site.

Email Marketing Reporting Automation

The majority of email marketing platforms come equipped with varying degrees of reporting automation. For instance, after sending a campaign, you can typically assess bounce, open, and click rates, along with tracking revenue generated and subscriber counts over time.

However, as you start automating numerous emails through workflows, it becomes easy to overlook the performance of individual campaigns. If you find yourself at this stage, establishing a custom dashboard or configuring your email tool to aggregate the data and send regular reports becomes a beneficial practice.

Sales Reporting Automation

While sales and marketing are distinct entities, marketing departments need insights into sales activities for efficient resource allocation. Your marketing team may already have access to sales data through your CRM or other tools. If not, check the capabilities of your current marketing technology stack to ascertain if you can automatically generate and dispatch reports to decision-makers.

In cases where sales data is sourced from multiple channels, consider using aggregator tools that consolidate all sales data into a single, centralized location.

Get Help Implementing and Improving Your Marketing Automation Strategies

While enhancing marketing outcomes and efficiency can be achieved by automating individual processes, adopting a holistic approach by considering all potential areas for automation and developing a comprehensive roadmap is more effective. This approach ensures the selection of appropriate tools and maintains consistency in the logic underlying all automated processes. It also allows for team onboarding, ensuring adherence to best practices with data and a clear understanding of the outcomes associated with specific actions.

As a digital marketing consultant, I find great satisfaction in guiding my clients through the diverse ways they can save time, enhance results, and minimize errors through the implementation of marketing automation. If you’d like help automating your marketing processes or want to improve your existing setup, please contact me for a complimentary consultation.

You can also read this article on my website, 7 Digital Marketing Automation Strategies for 2x Efficiency.

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