How to Build a Successful Marketing Automation Strategy

By Dean Ara

Marketing automation is a game changer for many companies, but it can definitely seem like a daunting task. Building an effective marketing automation strategy requires a deep understanding of your target audience, your product, and your buyer’s journey before a single element of the strategy is set into action.

7 Steps to Build a Marketing Automation Strategy

If marketing automation success is what you’re looking for, here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when creating your marketing automation strategy.

1. Understand the Buyer Journey

Familiarize yourself with every stage of the buyer journey; top, middle, and bottom. What kind of information would draw your buyer in? What are the stages that they would or should typically go through and what should each stage accomplish? What are you doing to push them along from one stage to the next?

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2. Map Out Production

Plan your campaign from start to finish, including timelines for the creation of content and execution of delivery. Make sure your deadlines are realistic and then stick to them.

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3. Set Goals

Before you start planning your marketing automation strategy, you’ll want to determine exactly what the goal of the campaign is. Are you looking for sign-ups? Purchases? Further Communication? Keep this goal in mind while planning and make sure each step is designed to push prospects further toward that goal. It’s important to keep this big goal in mind so that you can define little goals for each stage of the journey. All of those little goals should move prospects further down the funnel.

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4. Map Stages of the Funnel to Content

Think through the prospect journey so you can customize content based on what they have already consumed. Marketing automation software means that you don’t have to run a “one-size-fits-all” kind of campaign, so take advantage of the ability to customize. Set parameters to segment your leads based on their content preferences and position within the campaign.

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5. Amplify Your Reach

Ensure that you are leveraging all possible points of contact and maximizing your reach. Don’t limit yourself to only visitors to your site and existing contacts. Don’t forget about PPC, social media, press releases, blog posts, and even your email signature. The more eyeballs that see your content, the bigger the top of your funnel will be.

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6. Application Integration

By now you’ll have your campaign elements chosen. Landing pages, blog posts, emails, PPC, etc. Your marketing automation software brings your strategy together, but you may want to integrate other apps into it.

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7. Test and Improve Constantly

When you create your first campaign you are working off of research and hunches, but once you’ve run a campaign or two you have data in hand that will help you build a better campaign. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel with every campaign. Instead, learn from each one and take that knowledge forward into the next.

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Get Started on Your Marketing Automation Strategy

If you’re new to marketing automation, you’ve now got a lot of questions to answer and a plenty of fuel for getting started. (Also check out our previous posts on the topic The Benefits of Marketing Automation and Why You Need It and The Best Marketing Automation Tools Make Life Easy.) Try not to get discouraged when looking at your list of to-dos and just check off one at a time.

Before your know it, you’ll be on your way to a successful marketing automation strategy.

If you’re starting to feel like the best path to marketing automation strategy success is to let the professionals handle it, TPM would be happy to answer any questions you have. Contact Total Product Marketing today.