A B2B Guide to Marketing Automation

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As a brand, connecting with your target audience is crucial. In order to connect with your target audience effectively, you need to know what content resonates with your target demographic, their sales cycle, and what they value most about your product or service. This type of in-depth research can be difficult to reproduce at scale, but marketing automation can be a powerful tool. Marketing Automation can help you identify your potential customers’ needs, establish several touchpoints on their sales journeys, and bring more sales to completion.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation refers to a set of tools and processes that are used to communicate with existing leads, bringing them closer to the point of buying. Any time a customer adds an item to a cart, leaves the page, and later receives an email with “Forgot Something?” in the subject line, that’s marketing automation at work. Setting up a series of processes, emails, reminders, or follow-ups can help you increase communication with your customers without taking the additional time or requiring you to hire new talent. Instead, marketing automation uses well-designed processes to help you discover potential customers, replicate high-performing practices, and encourage repeat purchasing behaviors. 

Marketing Automation Saves You Time and Overhead

Marketing automation has numerous benefits, but the most important is the time you save by streamlining your sales cycle. Rather than spending hours identifying and contacting qualified leads individually, it gives you the capacity to reach out to leads at the ideal point in their purchasing journey. There’s no need to manually import customers into your database. Instead, an automated marketing tool can identify and label leads for you by tracking a user’s interaction with your brand. 

Marketing Automation Can Strengthen Your CRM

Marketing automation also increases the power of your customer relationship management (CRM) tool, such as Salesforce. In tandem with a CRM, marketing automation can help you build a customized onboarding process and follow-up communication for clients in order to strengthen your customer relationships.

Especially in B2B industries, having a personalized connection can make or break a sale. Because automation analyzes your audience’s actions, it actively nurtures your leads by personalizing their experience and automatically segmenting their journeys. Marketing automation can monitor behaviors such as clicks, site visits, or purchase histories and provide your leads with information and opportunities that are customized to their needs. You’ll see improved conversion rates, and you’ll be able to assess and improve your sales pipeline with actionable data. 

How You Can Implement Marketing Automation

While marketing automation can be immensely effective, you need a strong foundation to see powerful results. This includes a reliable contact list, an up-to-date website, active email marketing tactics, and social media management. If you need a starting place, try refreshing your current marketing by conducting client interviews or researching SEO best practices.

Once you’ve established reliable groundwork, you need to indicate your specific goals. Your goals may include an increase in subscribers, clicks, sales, or page likes. After you’ve determined your goal, decide what platform you want to use.

There are several MA systems available, but consider your preferred budget, ease of use, type of marketing automation, and customer service when deciding which one is best for you. Finally, you should determine if you want to implement alone or hire a professional marketing company to begin your process. 

Iterate and Improve Your Marketing Automation

Nothing works as well in a silo as it does when combined with other tools. To continue achieving marketing automation goals, you should pair MA with inbound marketing and CRM tools to increase its reach.

You’ll also want to include other team members in setting up and improving your processes. Sharing reports with senior executives and data with your sales team will allow you to collect and implement their insights into the sales funnel. With the feedback and assistance from various departments, plus the results from your marketing automation tool, you can optimize your content, messaging, and strategies to retain your current customers and attract more.

Need Help Getting Started with Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is a powerful tool that can be complex to implement. Green Apple Strategy is a full-service marketing agency that helps clients communicate effectively to their desired audience. Are you interested in learning more about how we can help you start your marketing automation journey? Contact us today for a consultation! 

The 4 Best Ways to Capture Your Audience’s Attention in the New Year

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Ten seconds doesn’t seem too long, right? Based on the latest study, humans have an average attention span of eight seconds. On a first date, you usually tend to give someone the benefit of the doubt if things aren’t working out exactly to your standards. With social media lifestyles today, though, there’s no obligation to give anyone even an extra second of deliberation if the content is subpar or unreliable. To keep your audience engaged, you need to connect with them instantly, so they don’t lose interest—no second chances or “dates.” So, how do you stand out with your target audience? Regardless of the type of platform that you’re utilizing to gain listener retention, here are the four best ways that you can capture your audience’s attention in your new year marketing strategy. 

Speak to Your Audience’s Pain Points

For your audience to refrain from daydreaming or continue scrolling, they need to know that you are undoubtedly speaking to them. When you know your audience, you know their needs, anxieties, intentions, etc. When you focus on your target’s pain points, you confirm that you have solutions they need, which further results in increased view time, subscriber or follower rate, and customer loyalty. Today’s society and algorithms don’t allow non-relatable content to take up our space or time. Get to your point quickly by being specific, inspiring, and genuine to grab their attention immediately. 

Share Relevant Content

By relating to your ideal client, you build reliability, likability, and certainty. Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal customers or audience so that you better grasp what matters to them, therefore, what they want to see or experience. Consider these questions about your audience when creating your content calendar:

  • Why did they attend your event? 
  • How did they receive your targeted ad? 
  • What makes them interested in your content?
  • Why are you the solution they need?

By answering these questions and determining the basis of why your audience is “following” you, you’re able to speak to their emotions and cultivate connections, better yet, relationships. Test out relevant, inspirational quotes, current events, success stories, industry statistics, or even humorous content to see what your audience favors. According to Forbes, customers with a positive emotional association with a brand are 8.4 times more likely to trust the company, 7.1 times more likely to purchase more, and 6.6 times more likely to forgive a company’s mistake. As you can see, once you capture your customer’s emotions, you also gain their loyalty. 

Help them Imagine the Possibilities

Using the word “imagine” or placing your audience in “what-if” scenarios automatically transports them to your desired mindset. It allows them to mentally see themselves in an imaginary world, whether you choose to make that a good or a bad place. 

If you’re working on promoting your services for B2B interactions, you could ask, “What if your revenue could grow x amount in 6 months?” or “Imagine having x purchases made by the end of the year.” Positive options like these give your audience something to look forward to with their future with you. 

Enhance your Visual Content

People process visual content more quickly than they process words. Additionally, 67% of consumers consider clear, detailed images to be very important and carry even more weight than the product information, full description, and customer ratings. 

If you’re strategizing your social media content, create enticing graphics that speak to your target audience. Better yet, incorporate videos that tell a story. According to HubSpot, 54% of people want to see videos more than any other content in the future. Develop a connection with your audience first thing by giving them the content that they want to see.

Ready to Jumpstart Your Marketing Strategy?

The truth is, our attention spans aren’t getting any longer. Try implementing these strategies so that you can stand out from your competition and win over your target audience. 

If you’re looking to enhance your marketing goals, connect to your audience more efficiently, and increase your brand awareness, Green Apple Strategy is here to help. Contact us today for a consultation.