How to Create an Impactful Marketing Automation Strategy

Marketing automation is the great equalizer, letting small businesses play like big leaguers. It helps you get things done, saves you lots of money, and improves your overall productivity -- all while you’re binge-watching your favorite Netflix series.

The best part is that setting up a robust marketing automation sequence isn’t rocket science.

With reliable marketing automation tools and strategies, you can set up your automated marketing funnels in minutes and keep ‘em running 24/7. It’s that awesome.

Read this guide to learn how to build effective marketing automation strategies to streamline your marketing campaigns.

What to consider when creating and implementing a marketing automation strategy

Before you jump onto the marketing automation bandwagon, consider these crucial success points in your automation strategy.

1. Your objectives

Establish your goals for implementing marketing automation. Having a clear goal refines how you’ll integrate automation into your marketing strategies.

For instance, do you plan on using email automation to get rid of manual email marketing tasks? Or is your primary goal to cut down on costs? Be clear about your goals so your marketing automation strategy aligns with them.

Without a clear goal, you run the risk of setting up automations that don’t have a clear direction and that won’t bring you meaningful results.

2. Software integration with your current systems

Ensure your marketing automation software integrates with your existing platforms. This avoids manually inputting volumes of data from your email marketing automation tool to your existing systems.

Use marketing automation tools with open API or built-in integrations to connect your apps and support your marketing plan and strategy implementation.

3. Performance measurement

Set metrics to measure your marketing automation strategy’s effectiveness.

Choose an automation platform that offers in-depth analysis of your marketing campaigns’ performance so your sales team can track every prospect touchpoint or interaction.

This will help you monitor where your automation efforts are succeeding or failing, giving you insights to improve specific areas and processes in your marketing automation strategies.

6 marketing automation strategies you can use within your small business

Take your small business to the next level by harnessing the benefits of marketing automation. Below are some marketing automation strategies perfect for small businesses.

1. Set up drip campaigns

Drip campaigns let you send email messages automatically on schedule. It allows you to send the right emails at the right time to the right audience.

It nurtures your relationship with your subscribers and builds trust over time, allowing you to move them deeper into your sales funnel and ultimately convert them into customers.

Drip campaigns are set up to run automatically, so you don’t have to send the emails manually -- your email marketing software does it for you.

Consider these tips when creating drip campaigns.

• Set campaign goals: Establish your campaign goals so you have a guiding compass when choosing which content or offer to include in your emails.
• Add loads of value: Send content that addresses your audiences’ most pressing concerns or goals. You can distinguish yourself if your content provides value and contributes to making their lives better.

2. Use automation for audience segmentation

Can you imagine how tedious it’d be to sort out hundreds of email subscribers? You’d be pressed to segment your subscribers based on location, needs, gender, age, or interest, if you did everything manually.

That’s why automating your email audience segmentation works so well. It helps you accomplish the task quickly and effortlessly, allowing you to focus on bigger and more important tasks.

Also, automated data input and segmentation reduces human error. The more accurate data you have about your subscribers, the better email marketing content you can create.

3. Streamline team collaboration

Streamline your team collaboration so your marketing workflows run smoothly. The less friction within your marketing team, the quicker task handoffs happen. This lets your team accomplish more.

To streamline your team collaboration, use monday.com, a reliable project management software.

The software is packed with features that simplify and facilitate your marketing projects, including automation, task prioritization, scheduling, progress monitoring through a board system, a shared team calendar, and custom boards to track resources, among others.

Use monday.com to create project boards for seamless marketing team task assigning, progress tracking, timeline monitoring, and more. Image source: Author

Project management platforms let you automate several of your marketing tasks and streamline your workflow.

4. Create dynamic content

Adaptive or dynamic content lets you personalize the content you’re presenting to your audience. It automatically changes based on your audiences’ preferences, behavior, or engagement with it.

For example, in your automated email marketing campaigns, if you’ve obtained sufficient data from your subscribers, you can create dynamic email content showing separate offers specifically for men (e.g., men’s shoes) or women (e.g., dresses on sale). With proper data, you could segment your emails in many different ways.

It’s easier to grow your sales with dynamic content because your offers are a perfect fit to their circumstances.

5. Social media scheduling and posting

To maintain a strong social media presence, engage your audience deliberately by posting regularly. It’s not always easy to post regularly on social media sites, especially true for entrepreneurs who have hundreds of things lined up on their to-do list.

Buffer can help you with this.

It lets you create and schedule your posts on several social media sites from Buffer’s platform. This centralizes your process, eliminating the need to log in to various social media sites every time. You only need to visit one site, your Buffer account.

Whether you’re out on client meetings or with your family, your social media posts can go live automatically when you set everything up through Buffer.

The best part is, scheduling your posts is dead simple with Buffer. Just drag and drop your content on the specific day and time you want it to go live, and you’re good to go.

Set your social media posting schedule on a specific date and time on the content calendar. Image source: Author

With intuitive social media marketing tools like Buffer, running your automated marketing campaigns is a lot easier.

6. Measure performance

Collect crucial data from your marketing campaigns to measure the efficacy of your marketing automation plan. Monitor your sign-ups, audience engagements, sales, etc. Monitoring and measuring will show which initiatives are working and which aren’t. Subsequently, you can improve your marketing campaigns.

Choose a marketing software that’s packed with automated data-tracking and analytics features. You’ll gain invaluable insights about your marketing campaigns, allowing you to make meaningful adjustments that will ultimately bring you sales.

Develop a robust marketing automation strategy today

Digital marketing for small businesses doesn’t have to be rocket science. By integrating automation in your marketing campaigns, you can get more done while doing less. What’s more, you make your life as an entrepreneur a lot less frustrating since you rid yourself of menial, time-consuming tasks.