How to align your marketing automation strategy with the buyer’s journey

On By mattroyseIn Digital Marketing

Customers make up the principal asset for any company. Keeping them interested and engaged is key to increasing efficiency. This pays back into your purchase pipeline.

You can achieve this through strategic marketing automation and by focusing on the customer. Find it difficult to strategize?

How to develop your marketing automation strategy

Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you create your marketing automation strategy.

Step #1: Read your customers’ personas

Familiarize yourself with the demographics of your customer base. Clearly define your ideal customer. Make it easier for your sales team to convert leads. Conduct short, and sporadic information captures through interviews and sales surveys (progressive profiling). You can use this to generate content that your customers will want to interact with. Some tools include:

  • Social analytics – Twitter, Facebook (establish demographic profiles)
  • Search analytics – Google (know more about search terms and who visits)
  • Sales team surveys – Find out what customers complain about
  • Customer interviews

Step #2: Follow their footsteps

To capture a customer’s attention, understand how they approach your company. Follow them from the moment they interact with your content through phases of awareness, consideration and decision until they purchase. Align your marketing strategies with your customer’s behavior. Understand your customer’s thought process to enhance engagement with your content and increase the chances of a conversion.

Marketing automation software helps track your customers and makes it easier for you to send personalized emails, text messages and newsletters. As a result, you can increase the conversion potential of your leads.

Step #3: Conduct a content audit

Conduct content audits to optimize the user experience and increase your conversion rates. It help you determine the effectiveness of your content. A content audit also helps you decide what to keep, change, and discard. It is more efficient than merely tracking customer activity, which can sometimes be unreliable. Content audits gain information from the customer directly and improve the overall experience. Customers dislike long forms and tend to switch tabs quickly. To avoid this, use marketing automation to capture information in small pieces regularly (via progressive profiling).

Step #4: Use analytical tools smartly

Analytics tools can help you better understand your customers better. It is essential to comprehend and use this information. Find out how the process from awareness to purchase occurs. And then strategize accordingly to improve your conversions. Know where your buyers hit roadblocks during the buying journey. This can drastically improve conversion rates. Some things that analytics can be used for is tracking visitors, monitoring cost per lead, and cost per acquisition.

Step #5: Communicate with sales and support

Sales teams are on the frontline of your company and know a lot about your customers. Sales understands the concerns and objections that customers raise. Tapping into this source gives you access to customer insights that can create significant impact. Talk to your sales personnel to gain this information. Then, help them by providing assistance where needed. Improve the dialogue between sales and marketing teams. Consequently, you ensure that customer satisfaction is the highest priority through optimal lead nurturing.

Step #6: Catch customers’ attention through planning

Knowledge of your client base makes it possible for you to be in front of them at each point of the buyer journey. Most buyers research online thoroughly before purchase, so maintain a relationship with them actively. Customers respond to various engagement plans, such as emails, social media and text messages. Use good marketing automation software that helps personalize lead nurturing.

Step #7: Establish the support systems for your plans

Creating sound support systems is essential for the success of your business. Be critical while selecting them. They form the backbone of your model. One of the decisions you will make will be zeroing in on marketing automation tools. This is important and difficult. Marketing automation can make or break your business.

Some things to consider when selecting marketing automation are:

  • Business needs
  • Customizability
  • Capability
  • Ease-of-use
  • Intelligence
  • Support systems
  • Budget

The way to creating your marketing automation strategy

You now have an insight into aligning marketing strategies to your customers. Undoubtedly, marketing automation is integral to your company. Use our pointers to guide you in the right direction. Choose your marketing automation software wisely.

This guest blog article was written by Radhika Mohan Singh Roy who is the head of marketing at EngageBay. He has earlier been a senior marketer with Agile CRM, the manager for communities & social media at Simplilearn. Radhika has previously also worked with Google, Apple, and Bank of America. He has a masters’ degree in English and is a certified Six Sigma Green Belt.