Using Marketing Automation to Grow Your Company Faster
Just because you don’t have a huge marketing budget doesn’t mean your company can’t become a household name. Who hasn’t heard of Dropbox, Instagram, or Airbnb? These three brands reached the pinnacle of success without spending a fortune—and you can, too! All you have to do is get the ball rolling and your marketing will gain momentum without needing constant effort and investment on your part. Use these four marketing automation hacks to get others marketing for you.
Go viral the easy way
We’ve all heard about ‘virality’ – everybody who is anybody visits a website, ‘likes’ a business or shares a link. But with so much content vying for attention it doesn’t seem like an easy task. The secret to going viral is to offer incentives or force your clients to share. You can ‘force’ virality by only allowing your clients to continue using your service if they share it with friends, or you can incentivize it by offering a freebie. Airbnb’s success depended on virality by its users spreading the word about how easy it was to use the accommodations service.
How can you incentivize people to spread the word about your business? Consider the Dropbox model: Dropbox gives you a limited amount of storage with a free account, but you can get extra space at no cost if you invite friends. Gaming website Zynga allows you to enjoy certain games for free – but when you reach a certain point, you have to invite friends before you can level up. Another strategy is to offer a free online tool to your members. When they sign up, send an automated message allowing them to upgrade and receive a feature they’d normally have to pay for – and as an added bonus, they can share this benefit with a certain number of their friends.
Your Marketing Automation Sales Team
A lead may or may not turn into a client, but the quicker you respond to a lead, the better your chances of getting a conversion. Manual responses take time, and in many businesses, the information you give after first contact is the same. If you automate this process, you begin the direct interactions after your client has confirmed interest. Plot your prospective clients’ progress through your sales process and prepare responses accordingly.
Make users famous
People love seeing their names in print. Content marketing can be an expensive business – but what if you could get user-generated content? YouMoz is an example of how you can leverage user-generated content to your advantage. Of course, you’ll have to moderate submissions, but after that, the whole process can be automated. It’s also worth remembering that people find third-party generated content more credible than anything you might say yourself. It’s a double whammy: free content that everyone believes in plus, users who will want to share their published content with friends, thereby adding to your audience. Instagram does this extremely well by featuring users’ posts, which encourages return visits to see whose post will be featured next.
Use hyper-targeted content sequences
Yes, it’s a mouthful. But don’t let the terminology intimidate you. It’s really a simple process. It comes down to offering your site visitors and prospective clients the kind of content they’d be interested in. Your site membership registration form can tell you a lot about the kind of person you’re talking to. If you have fields for profession or hobbies, you can ensure that members are automatically given information that will be of interest. Your site visitors will soon be telling their friends about the valuable information on your site, and that brings you new users. Best of all, it can be automated. You build relationships and brand loyalty without lifting a finger!
Know your customers
A marketing automation strategy can get you up there with the big names, but before you begin, you need to know your customers. Who are they? Where do they find their information? What do they want to know? How do they experience your website? Although marketing automation and personalization may sound like two different things, you need to automate in a personalized way to capture interest and loyalty. Get the balance right, and the sky’s the limit.
Evan Samurin from Information Street sums it up with this, “Marketing Automation is like the the ultimate ‘choose your own adventure book’ written just for your prospects and customers. Imagine having the ability to create a conversation with your marketing, a conversation that reacts as your prospects and clients take action. This gives you the ability to pull people through your funnel by having the right conversation with them at the right time rather than forcing them all down a single path.
This is extremely hard, if not impossible, to do manually which is why most businesses don’t do it. But now because of technology, you can create a lifecycle that your prospects and customers can navigate themselves through automatically.”
