Many companies have had to adopt a digital approach to marketing recently and have had to adjust the way they handle their go to market strategy. And in order to adopt a more digital approach, many teams chose to implement a marketing automation platform.
Whether you're new to it or have been using a marketing automation platform already, there are four key focus areas when it comes to marketing automation that your business should consider utilizing. Check out the quick 3-minute video below to learn more!
Don't want to watch the video? No problem! Take a look at the video summary below.
Video Summary:
Focus Area #1: Visitor and Prospect Tracking
If you're like a lot of companies, you might have seen visitor and prospect tracking features during a demo and went, "Yes! That is exactly what we need! Our team would love this."
One thing is for sure – it is a great feature. Often it will allow you to see who is visiting your website, what IP addresses are hitting your site, and what pages a prospect might be looking at. But how do you ensure you are really utilizing it? You can start by answering these questions:
- Have you gotten your sales team to utilize this feature? Do they look in the system before they make a call or drop an email to a customer or prospect? Once your sales team gets the hang of it, it will make visitor and prospect tracking all the more prosperous.
- Have you turned on notifications? It's important to make sure that you've created alerts that trigger if/when a prospect visits a certain page or watches a video.
- Are you taking advantage of the overall data available to your team? Many marketing automation platforms also have reports that you can send to your team which allow them to view a snapshot of what is happening when visitors are on your organization's website.
If you've said no to any of those questions, there's more you and your team could be taking advantage of in your marketing automation system. Make sure to spend some time in these areas until all of your answers are "yes" to the questions above.
Focus Area #2: Campaigns
So, you may be looking at traffic reports or source information within your marketing automation platform, but I encourage you to go dive deeper than that. And that brings me to my second point: Focus on using campaigns.
Typical campaign tools look at multiple tactics and wrap them into one dashboard. For example, if you're going to host a webinar, you may tag many social media posts, any blogs, any call to actions, or unique URLs promoting that webinar to one campaign. Overall, what this does is give you the ability to look at what's working and what's not.
Trust me, you probably won't get the reporting you need correct the first time. Why? Because if you're like most companies, your campaigns start to merge together and tactics are usually shared for many campaigns. But what this does do is it gives you data to look at and start to share with others and your team to show what marketing is working on.
Focus Area #3: Conversations and Chat
Many marketing automation platforms either integrate or have functionality integrated with it right out of the box.
The third focus area is making sure that you investigate whether your system has a website chat functionality. You could even look to see if it has an integration with Facebook messenger or Instagram, your email, and possibly website forms to create better communication between your brand and your customer.
Any one or all of these will give you more visibility into how a prospect/customer interacts with your brand.
This is a common missed opportunity to tie all your communication into one, easy-to-use platform.
Focus Area #4: Workflows
The last marketing automation feature focus area includes utilizing workflows. Many times, there are multiple names for workflows. But ultimately, it can be any type of automation. No matter what it's called, investigate how your team can use it to be more efficient.
Maybe you use it to tag or add data to fields when a contact enters your database. Or you use it to nurture your new prospects with drip email campaigns. You could even be using it to trigger alerts and tasks for your team.
No matter how you use it, I challenge your organization to start thinking about the manual things your team does on a daily basis. Then, think if there is any way you can automate that task/process to make it easier and more efficient for your team in the long run.
Start Putting these Focus Areas in Practice Today
So there you have it. There are four areas I challenge you to focus on this year when it comes to utilizing your marketing automation platform. If you have any questions on these four focus areas or any other questions in regards to marketing automation, send me an email. I'll be happy to answer them.
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