Getting Users From Click to Client

As transportation systems began to improve throughout the 19th century, the ability for products and services to become less regionalized and available to a broader audience across vast distances came with them. Standardization of manufacturing processes allowed market penetration early in the lifecycle of new products and technologies as they emerged. Harking back to my previous post and Henry Ford’s Model T, the assembly line he invented not only standardized production but also lowered production costs. A resultant lower purchase price offered affordability to the masses, including Ford’s own employees, with their newfound wealth and expendable income as part of a nascent middle class.

Concepts in rapid mass production can be applied to marketing, as well. Automating repetitive tasks like email marketing, lead nurturing and customer segmentation boosts production and has other benefits. Reducing errors ensures consistency and uniformity, especially when working with a brand’s voice and tone. Increasing efficiency empowers teams to accomplish more in a given day. When efficiency is improved using existing resources, the return on investment, or ROI, on areas such as headcount, software subscriptions, tools and the like is enhanced. Essentially, you do more with less, allowing workers to do more.

Did you miss our introduction to marketing automation? Read Jason’s first post in this series now!

We hope this provides a comprehensive overview of how you can implement marketing automation in your company’s go-to-market motion. We’ll cover essential steps, best practices and tips for overcoming common challenges when deploying automation. Applying even a single concept could have a downstream impact which could, in theory, free up more time to eventually implement them all, transforming your business and unlocking potential.

Understanding Marketing Automation and Its Benefits

Marketing automation is more than just automating tasks; it’s about using the technology available today to nurture leads, personalize customer interactions and drive conversions in ways that were once accomplished only by seasoned professionals. It includes various strategies and tools, with email marketing, lead nurturing, and customer segmentation at the core of its components.

While the true benefits of marketing automation are striking, they aren’t necessarily surprising. Saving time by automating repetitive tasks, improving targeting through audience behavioral or preferential segmentation, and delivering personalized customer experiences at scale aren’t new concepts. What we present here, however, are techniques to accomplish them with efficiency and accuracy.

In addition to the benefits mentioned above, one more comes to mind. Attempting to align two important teams in any organization, sales and marketing, can be one of the most difficult to engineer. They may appear diametrically opposed and constantly point fingers at each other when misaligned. Marketing assumes every lead is closable, because why else would they be in your funnel? And sales will always gripe about the lackluster number or quality of leads.

When properly aligned, however, these two teams provide vital information to each other, creating a dynamic feedback loop. Decisions on target audiences that include seller feedback on the quality of the leads from the last campaign assist with finding the right prospects. Understanding why customers decide to buy from your company or not, is invaluable feedback marketers can use in their messaging when formulating the next campaign.

Having a unified platform for managing customer interactions allows for a seamless flow of data shared between these cross-functional teams. Metrics and analytics are readily available and can generate reports from the same shared data. It also ensures sales and marketing teams access the most up-to-date information. And it enables better coordination between the two and thus, a more personalized overall experience for your customers and clients.

Core Components of Marketing Automation

Automated email campaigns are the most commonly automated feature in marketing. These campaigns streamline email marketing efforts by sending personalized, targeted messages based on user actions or characteristics. For instance, you can set up automated welcome emails for new subscribers or send targeted messages to specific customer segments. These tools often include features like A/B testing to optimize subject lines and content for better engagement by reporting which version performed best based on predetermined KPIs like open or click-through rates.

Lead scoring helps prioritize leads by assigning weight to specific demographic and behavioral data. This data can include information like job title, company size, website activity, email engagement, or content they’ve downloaded. By focusing on high-scoring leads, sales teams can concentrate on the most promising opportunities, potentially increasing conversion. Alternatively, if a website visitor is viewing only a careers page, they’re likely not a lead and their score should be low, and an indication to sales they shouldn’t invest time reaching out.

Feedback is a gift, whether good or bad, and automation tools provide valuable insights into campaign performance through comprehensive analytics and reporting features. These reports track website traffic, lead generation, email engagement, and customer conversions. Strategists can use this data to understand what works and what doesn’t. To best optimize any marketing strategy, it should be made based on data-informed decisions and not merely on someone’s gut feeling. Platforms like HubSpot offer AI-powered analysis that can generate reports based on natural language queries, saving you time and headaches for those of us who aren’t data scientists.

Customer segmentation divides audiences into distinct groups. They can be segmented based on shared characteristics, such as demographics, behavior or purchase history. This enables messaging and content to be customized to fit each segment’s specific needs and interests, improving campaigns’ efficacy. If you’re running an upsell/cross-sell campaign to your existing customer base, you wouldn’t use the same email template you used to introduce your company to new customers.

When nurturing leads, these tools help guide them through the sales funnel by providing relevant content and personalized interactions based on which stage of the buyer’s journey they’re in at that moment. Automated workflows can be triggered by specific user actions, such as filling out a form or visiting certain pages on your site. Did someone abandon a shopping cart in your e-commerce store? Send them a brief email reminding them about their cart after they left your store and didn’t check out.

Benefits of Marketing Automation for Small Businesses

Marketing automation tools level the playing field and provide small businesses with access to sophisticated marketing capabilities that were once only available to larger enterprises. This allows small business owners and employees to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives. Automating tasks can also lead to significant cost savings for small businesses, allowing them to compete with much larger marketing budgets. One of the best ways to generate more leads, improve conversion rates, and maximize ROI is to optimize marketing efforts.

There are countless tools on the market today to automate a company’s marketing strategy. Many of them are specialized in accomplishing one or two very specific tasks. Email marketing platforms like MailChimp or Constant Contact are examples of tools that can be used to automate your outreach. For those on a tight budget, or in bootstrapped startups, HubSpot offers free plans that can scale with you as your business grows.

No matter which platform you choose to start automating your tasks, the most critical factor is that it most closely aligns with your business needs. It should help you achieve your marketing goals while increasing productivity and staying within a reasonable budget.

Steps To Implement Marketing Automation

Let’s look at the steps required for developing and deploying automation in any organization’s marketing workflow. As the old adage goes: If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Having a solid plan of action starts with the end in mind, and you’ll want the desired outcome to serve as a North Star, aligning with your business’ objectives and key results, or OKRs.

Setting Goals and Objectives for Marketing Automation

Before establishing any goals related to marketing automation, understand your company’s core objectives. How will your marketing automation efforts contribute to them? While “increasing revenue” might be a goal, it’s not very specific and doesn’t imbue your strategy. Be specific about what you define as a goal and the metrics to track progress against it.

Determine the specific metrics that indicate progress toward goals. These key performance indicators (KPIs) will form the basis of your goals in marketing automations. For instance, if your aim is to increase revenue, your KPIs might include driving traffic to pages featuring products that have a higher average sale price.

Remember, work with the end in mind. Before setting new KPI targets, understand your current performance. Analyze your existing marketing data to establish a baseline for each KPI. For example, if you currently get 1,000 website visitors per month, you wouldn’t set a KPI goal of driving 10,000 visitors six months from now. Instead, you might aim for a more realistic target of 1,800 visitors per month, representing a challenging but attainable 10% increase month over month. Perhaps you decide on a stretch goal and aim for 2,000 visitors a month.

Although you may have heard of them a time or two before, SMART goals ensure your marketing automation goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Specific: Clearly define what you want to achieve with your marketing automation efforts. Avoid vague goals; instead, use specific numbers and deadlines. For example, “increase website traffic” is ambiguous. “Increase website traffic by 15% in the next quarter” is much more clear.

Measurable: Select KPIs that can be tracked and quantified. Choose metrics that can be easily measured through analytics and reporting tools, such as website traffic, lead generation, or email open rates.

Attainable: Set realistic goals that are challenging but achievable. Consider your available resources, budget constraints, and historical performance. Avoid setting goals that are overly ambitious, as this can lead to discouragement and hinder progress. Keep your head in the clouds but your feet on the ground.

Relevant: Make sure your marketing automation goals align with your overall business objectives and marketing strategy. For example, if you want to expand into a new market segment, your marketing automation goals should focus on reaching and engaging that specific audience.

Time-bound: Establish clear timeframes for achieving your goals. Set a drop-dead date to create a sense of urgency and accountability.

Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Platform

As a Diamond Partner, and an original HubSpot partners, we at Kuno Creative are indubitably partial, but with good reason.

We see many of our clients who are small businesses and startups leverage HubSpot features that are typically exclusive to much larger organizations. With a free plan for email marketing, it equips businesses to create, personalize, and optimize their marketing campaigns. HubSpot’s free website builder with built-in marketing tools allows for establishing an online presence quickly and at minimum cost. Natively embedded in the CRM platform, its marketing automation tools provide a unified view of customer data and interactions, as previously discussed. This integration reduces tech bloat and the need for disparate, redundant, potentially costly systems.

Moosend is another cost-effective option, particularly praised for its behavior-based automation and list management features. It offers a free trial and a relatively low-cost Pro plan starting at $9 per month. This pricing structure makes it a viable option for limited budgets. The platform allows for personalized email campaigns and audience segmentation based on behavior, ensuring that businesses can target specific customer groups with relevant messaging.

We’ve only scratched the surface; we would need an entire Tolstoy-length novel to cover all the tools on the market today. And with each having its own strengths and weaknesses, carefully evaluating all of the different platforms available is fundamental to any successful launch. Be sure to account for any specific requirements, budget, and technical capabilities of your firm. Consider ease of use, feature availability, and integration capabilities with your existing systems (such as your CRM), in addition to scalability, customer support, and pricing.

Signing up for a free account is a great way to research and compare different platforms before you buy. Free trials with a limited time or limited functionality can give first-hand experience of the user interface and may provide insights into its viability. Take the time to find the best fit for your business’s long-term needs and choose whichever platform can adapt and grow with your company.

Best Practices for Implementing Marketing Automation

A successful marketing automation strategy involves more than just choosing the right platform; it requires attention to data management, content creation, and campaign testing. Maintaining clean and accurate data is paramount for effective automation workflows. Implement regular data hygiene and validation processes and integrate your platform with your CRM for seamless data flow. Develop engaging content and design automated workflows that align with your goals and the customer journey. Use A/B tests in your outreach to optimize for engagement, pipeline velocity, and conversions.

Maintaining Clean and Accurate Data

Auditing your data is a critical step before implementing marketing automation because it ensures you are working with accurate and up-to-date information. Here is a quick crash course on maintaining clean and accurate data.

Begin by identifying all sources where your customer data is stored. This may include your CRM, marketing automation platform, email marketing software, spreadsheets, and other databases.

Next, document how data flows between these different systems. Note any manual processes, integrations, or data transfers that occur. Understanding your data flow helps you identify potential areas for data inconsistency or redundancy. Keep an eye out for the following:

Missing Values: Check the accuracy and completeness of your data. Look for any missing values by identifying fields that are regularly left blank and establish processes to capture this data in the future or decide if having the field is necessary.

Duplicate Records: Develop a system to identify and merge duplicate records, ensuring a single source of truth for customer information.

Outdated or Stale Data: Implement procedures for regularly updating contact details, such as email addresses and phone numbers. Encourage customers to update their information through preference pages or forms.

Data Integrity: Ensure data is entered consistently. Establish data standards and validation rules to minimize errors and inconsistencies. For example, enforce the use of drop-down menus for specific fields, such as industry, state, or country, to avoid variations in spelling or formatting. If left uncorrected, reporting on these later will be a challenge.

Once you’ve spent the time to clean up dirty data, you’ll want to establish a process for regularly scheduled cleanings. This may involve standardizing formats to ensure data is consistently formatted, such as using a consistent date format, phone numbers, or capitalization for names. Delete outdated or irrelevant information that is no longer valuable for your marketing efforts. If an email to a contact bounces, delete the email address to avoid a second bounce. Lastly, be sure to address any inaccuracies identified during the audit.

Some larger organizations have a position solely dedicated to data governance. They can save hours of cleanup work in the long run by making sure what goes into the system is properly formatted and valid. But you may not need an entire role for this. Develop a framework for data governance that will maintain the quality of your data over time. This framework should outline who owns the data, who has access to it, validation rules, and procedures for data updates and maintenance. Regularly review and update your framework as you discover data anomalies in your system.

Data quality is everyone’s responsibility, and it should be an ongoing effort. If your company works with customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) or personal health information (PHI), ensure your data is stored securely and complies with any privacy regulations your company may be subject to. Implement appropriate security measures, such as access controls, encryption, and data backup procedures. A well-executed data audit provides a solid foundation for effective marketing automation, enabling you to target the right audience with the right message at the right time. Right?

Creating Effective Automated Workflows

Think of automated workflows as blueprints guiding your tool’s actions. Map out the steps you would take if manually emailing contacts, and translate those steps into automated actions within the platform. Segment your audience to deliver personalized content through your automated workflows. Utilize branching logic (if/then branches) to tailor messages based on user behavior, such as email opens and link clicks.

One of my favorite ways to map out a workflow is with sticky notes on a whiteboard. Each note represents a stage or action along the journey. You can also use diagram software like Lucid Charts. For us visual learners, these methods allow us to take a step back and see the whole picture. It also shows when a task may require manual input or those that can be automated. Need to move things around? Pick up the note, put it where you think it would be more effective, and take another step back.

Common Challenges and How To Overcome Them

Implementing marketing automation is not without its challenges. Businesses often face hurdles such as a lack of technical expertise, resistance to change, or difficulties measuring ROI. Invest in onboarding and ongoing training to support your team and address technical challenges. A staged or gradual implementation can also aid in the adoption of your new platform. By providing role-based learning paths, users learn the features of a system that applies to their job function incrementally, versus a “big bang” approach. This allows you to test and refine processes, identify and address issues early on, and minimize disruption to your operations.

Addressing Technical Challenges in Marketing Automation

Integrating your marketing automation platform with your CRM is pivotal for aligning your sales and marketing efforts. However, if not correctly executed, integrations pose significant technical challenges.

For example, leads that haven’t been qualified yet could be transferred between teams prematurely. Ensuring data flows seamlessly between systems and that teams have access to the same up-to-date information is essential for a smooth customer experience and overall efficiency. Issues with APIs, data formatting, or real-time sync can lead to data discrepancies, broken workflows, and communication breakdowns.

Migrating data from existing systems to your platform can be complex and prone to errors, especially when dealing with large volumes of data or multiple sources. As discussed above, a data audit is critical before implementation to address issues in your data. Creating a meticulous data migration plan is essential to mitigate challenges. This plan should outline mapping, cleansing procedures, validation rules, and a clear migration timeline. Failure to properly cleanse and prepare your data before migrating will guarantee inaccurate segmentation, flawed reporting, and ineffective automation.

Unfortunately, this is such a common occurrence, there’s a colloquialism for it: Garbage in, garbage out.

In addition to integrations and migrations, customizations can also be challenging. Carefully consider customization needs against long-term maintenance and complexity. While configuring systems to match specific processes is sometimes necessary, excessive customization can lead to a rigid and difficult-to-manage system. As your business evolves and you adopt new technologies, overly customized systems will become a bottleneck, hinder scalability, and increase the cost of future updates or migrations. If you do customize your system from its out-of-the-box settings, remember to document as much of what gets changed as you can for posterity’s sake.

Luckily, most marketing automation platforms offer support services. Technical documentation, online forums, and direct customer support channels via phone, email and chat are usually available to all users. Consult the platform’s knowledge base and support resources when troubleshooting integration issues or seeking guidance on data migration. They provide insights into best practices, common pitfalls, and workarounds for specific challenges related to their platform. For instance, HubSpot encourages users to explore their developer forum for assistance with APIs.

For larger projects, consider hiring an external consultant who specializes in implementing marketing automation if you lack in-house resources. These consultants bring first-hand experience with different platforms, integration best practices, and data migration strategies. They can assess your unique requirements, design a custom-built implementation plan, and provide hands-on support throughout the process.

Rigorous testing will also be a necessity before going live. Test all integrations, data flows, workflows, and automation thoroughly to ensure they function as expected. If available, establish a sandbox or testing environment that mirrors your production environment to identify issues before they impact your customers. At a minimum, attempt these with smaller subsets of your data before attempting to make changes to your entire database. Attempt a few hundred or so records and test, test, test.

By proactively addressing these technical challenges, you can ensure a smoother implementation and pave the way for a more efficient, data-driven marketing operation.

Managing Change and Getting Buy-In From Your Team

Speaking from experience in prior roles, having leadership‘s advocacy and endorsement for a new tool can make or break any implementation. If they’re less than enthused, it can have a trickle-down effect and communicate to the rest of the organization that the changes are unneeded, or worse, unwanted. Speak to the many benefits of automation clearly and demonstrate how the new system aids efficiency, standardization, and productivity. If your executive team is focused solely on the bottom line, show them the point at which the new system begins to pay for itself. And, most importantly, for a smooth rollout, involve key stakeholders from sales, marketing, and especially IT.

For those more tenured staff who are used to doing things a certain way, change is scary. They have done something for so long that they don’t have to think about it. It’s now second nature. Their apprehension is typically centered around the need to relearn what may have taken months or years to understand.

Address this head-on by being open about any concerns regarding job displacement, assuring your team that marketing automation is intended to augment their skills, not replace them. Position the tool as something that empowers them to focus on higher-level tasks that require human creativity and ingenuity, precisely because it is! Use real-world examples and case studies to demonstrate how other companies have successfully implemented marketing automation without negative impacts on their teams. Share stories of increased employee satisfaction, career growth opportunities, or new skill development resulting from automation adoption.

Finally, equip your team with the knowledge and skills they need to effectively use the new platform and its features. Regular training sessions, knowledge-sharing initiatives and access to updated documentation will enable your team to maximize the benefits of marketing automation. Ensure your team feels confident and supported in using their new tools effectively. Establish clear communication channels to address any questions or challenges that arise during the implementation process and beyond. Consider starting Office Hours, a standing, weekly meeting moderated by team leads or advanced users. These open-format meetings offer a chance for anyone to join, ask questions and then drop from the call. These can be a valuable resource for those in the weeds of learning a new system that has specific questions. This is also a great way to reduce one-off questions or pings to a system admin.

And, here’s one more pro tip: Document the questions and answers in your FAQ at the end of each meeting. Chances are someone down the line will have the same question at some point in their learning.

Why Choose Kuno for Your Marketing Automation Needs

We’ve spoken at length about adding marketing automation to your company’s outreach. It’s because here at Kuno Creative, we utilize it ourselves. And as a leader in inbound marketing, serving mid-sized, large and enterprise-level companies across all sorts of industries, we can do it for others, too.

Our proven strategies are tailored by experts. Because we understand each company’s needs are unique, we work to ensure that every inbound marketing plan is customized to resonate with the target audience and drive meaningful engagement. We provide our clients with the necessary content to overcome prospect objections and the technology to automate outreach, status updates, scheduling and reporting. This comprehensive approach dramatically decreases sales cycle length while increasing opportunities and closed deals.

Thanks to our comprehensive inbound marketing strategies, innovative digital marketing, HubSpot-accredited revenue operations and high-quality content creation, Kuno Creative has established itself as a team of marketing automation experts. Our bespoke digital experiences, sales enablement expertise and compelling brand narratives help businesses implement successful marketing strategies that drive transformative success and foster brand advocacy.

To ensure our clients receive the best possible service, we stay current with trends and technologies in marketing automation. Learn from the methods and strategies Kuno Creative employs to maintain our cutting-edge knowledge and deliver exceptional results.

We also employ advanced analytics tools like HubSpot, Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Analytics and Google Ads to monitor key performance indicators and optimize campaigns in real time. This data-driven approach allows us to make informed decisions and continuously improve our marketing strategies. with real-time actionable data, enabling us to refine demand-generation strategies and optimize marketing efforts. This also ensures that our client’s campaigns are always aligned with current web best practices, tactics and customer behaviors.

Get Started With Kuno Creative Today

Are you ready to elevate your business with cutting-edge digital marketing strategies? Schedule a free consultation with us and let’s see how we can help you capture more leads, grow your customer base and achieve your business goals.

Because, with Kuno Creative and the power of thoughtful marketing automation, it’s Closed Won. Done!