There is a staggering amount of information online about how to market your business, and frankly it can be overwhelming. One of the buzz phrases of the last couple of years has been Marketing Automation. In the simplest of terms, Marketing Automation refers to software that has been developed to automate repetitive marketing actions such as emails, social media and other website actions. These platforms are streamlining tools that apply automated solutions to sales and marketing processes; resulting in more effective marketing across multiple channels by removing the guesswork and manual effort required to manage them individually.

Marketing automation allows you to plan, coordinate, manage and measure all of your campaigns, both online and offline, all in one place and thereby enabling you to focus on your core business.

When talking to our clients, they have shared a common struggle in running their business’ marketing: they start one or more marketing initiatives but within a short amount of time their energy has waned, they’re not consistent, and they don’t monitor and report on results, follow-up on leads, or use the information to adapt their digital marketing strategy on an ongoing basis.

A simple marketing automation setup might include activating email workflows, integrating your digital strategy, continuous campaign management, lead scoring, and finally, reporting and projection – and most importantly, leveraging all of this information for optimum results.

Integrate your digital strategy

Ensure you hit your milestones and keep on track of your planned activities by integrating your marketing strategy into an automated platform.

Fuse Agency’s Marketing Automation (MA) platform integrates multiple areas of digital marketing initiatives including Google Adwords, website tracking and clicks, end-to-end management of eDM campaigns, and social media sharing and reporting. Combining this process into one system makes it easier to track results, identify trends and determine  where your strengths and weaknesses lie, allowing you to strategically plan ongoing strategies.

Activate email workflows

Automated email marketing doesn’t have to be impersonal. Personalisation is the key to success in this area, and it’s possible to create personalised email marketing messages to your target audience within marketing automation; you’re simply automating the process so that you are consistent and more effective.  Our platform allows us to send follow-up emails based on a lead’s activity and online behaviours, allowing us to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time.

One of the best ways to drive business is email marketing to your existing contact database, but you can easily use marketing automation to achieve growth from both new and existing clients with marketing automation.

Continuous campaign management

Marketing automation tools have the ability to track campaigns from the word go, and offer end-to-end reporting throughout the process.

Fuse Agency’s platform rapidly detects changes in your customer data and responds to it quickly, capturing opportunities as they occur. It provides up-to-date insights into how your campaign is developing and gives you the ability to react faster to changing marketing conditions and further optimise your reach. When put into practice, this enables you to effectively develop and execute multi-channel, highly personalised campaigns.

Lead scoring

While generating new leads is a primary goal of most businesses, the old 80/20 rule applies: 80% of your future income will come from 20% of your existing clients, and many believe that it’s 50% easier to sell to existing clients than to new clients.

Lead scoring is ranking prospects against a scale which represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organisation. Effective lead scoring enables you to increase sales efficiency and effectiveness by focusing attention on leads which you deem most valuable; increase marketing effectiveness by quantifying which types of leads or lead characteristics matter most; offers tighter alignment and strengthens the relationship between marketing and sales through establishing a common definition for which lead types are ready for sales attention.

Projection and reporting

Finally, an often neglected but essential aspect of all digital marketing strategy is to track, monitor and report on your campaign performance, ensuring you tweak as required, and tailor future digital marketing campaigns accordingly.

Marketing automation platforms generate reports which keep you informed on how your content campaigns are performing, where your leads are coming from and what they’re doing. Harnessing this information enables you to make more informed business decisions on the direction of your digital marketing practices.

What platforms do you currently use to manage your marketing campaigns? Would you say they are integrated, or would it be easier to see all results in one space?

If you would like help with setting up automated marketing campaigns for your business, integrating your digital strategy, or have any questions about this article, please get in touch with our team at Fuse Agency. We’d love to chat. Give us a call today on 07 3198 4890 for a free demo of our software.