Marketing automation is an essential tool for a successful marketing strategy, and when used correctly, it will assist marketing departments in generating more leads, closing sales, and proving true ROI. A great marketing automation platform includes all of the tools needed to make a company’s marketing strategy a success. However, due to its immense power, it can easily overwhelm a marketing department.
So, How to approach marketing automation implementation?
When it comes to implementation, different marketing automation platforms will have slightly different requirements. Your setup may also be influenced by your company’s structure, such as whether the tool will be used by a single team or multiple teams across departments.
That being said, there are a set of standard steps we recommend you take to ensure a well-planned, accurate, and error-free implementation.
Set your goals beforehand:
Before you begin implementing the software, you should ask yourself, “Why am I doing so?” Even though Marketing Automation is a global trend for marketing automation agencies and everyone appears to be so deeply involved in it, you must know what requirements you have for the software and pinpoint the goals you want to achieve.
Modern marketers are not associated with old-fashioned slide presentations or simply hanging out at exhibitions while “networking.” Because of the increased competition in all industries, companies want their marketing teams to focus on driving revenue, so knowledge of how to use a marketing automation tool is essential.
Technical Setups:
Ensuring proper domain configuration is critical for preventing emails from being routed to spam folders or causing problems with individual business emails.
To ensure the best deliverability and support your sender reputation, you’ll want to add or update Sender Policy Framework (SPF) and DKIM records in your Domain Name Service (DNS). If those acronyms mean nothing to you, work with your IT team or an Email marketing automation agency to implement them.
It’s also important to think about using a separate email domain for campaigns because a poor sender reputation can affect your business emails as well – which is a real issue!
Finally, to remain GDPR compliant, you’ll need to add or update the tracking code, potentially install a plugin for your chosen automation software, and update your tracking preferences or Privacy Policy page.
Complete these critical tasks as soon as possible so that you can move forward with confidence that your marketing emails and activities will be received and tracked correctly.
Staffing:
Marketing automation is intended to reduce the number of repetitive tasks associated with marketing. Sadly, some businesses underestimate the time and effort required to launch a marketing automation strategy.
Companies that are successful in implementing marketing automation use multiple employees to achieve their marketing objectives. Assigning all marketing activities to one employee is likely to overwhelm that employee.
What’s the Solution?
A better solution is to hire a marketing automation agency or a content creator, and a salesperson to divide these responsibilities. Working together, these three roles can fully integrate marketing automation activities with your overall sales and marketing goals.
Develop a content matrix:
It is critical to have good content. Even if you have the best marketing automation platform with a large amount of data and a smooth performance, it will be useless if the content is of poor quality. Customers require high-quality content.
Some businesses find it difficult to plan and create good content at times. As a result, it is preferable to create a content matrix or content grid to identify gaps in content coverage and make better use of previously gathered content.
First-time marketing automation users frequently lack content. As a result, all content assets must be mapped out, listed, and then matched against several dimensions such as customer type, industry, product interest, geography, pipeline stage, and so on.
Knowing this can assist you in creating content wherever it is needed.
Have an Optimization Plan:
The final critical component of implementing new technology is understanding how to measure your success and plan for the next stage of growth.
Begin by identifying your marketing automation SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) objectives: The most important strategic goals of a marketing automation strategy, according to a recent survey, are increased lead generation, lead nurturing, and sales revenue.
Following that are improvements in customer engagement, marketing productivity, measurability, and campaign targeting. Set your goals and determine how you will measure them. Then, use those objectives to improve your strategy and technology.
