Successful startups need more than just a great product or service idea and some assured funding. To identify, engage with, and satisfy consumers in today’s market, fledgling enterprises need to gather data on the target audience for their offerings and develop digital marketing strategies appropriate to creating brand awareness, customer acquisition, and the enhancement of the customer experience throughout the buyer’s journey.
Effective marketing in the digital economy is a time-consuming and complex process, involving many separate tasks. These marketing activities range from information collection and big data analysis, through monitoring website traffic and search engines, to the creation of relevant content and landing pages that can generate leads, influence purchase decisions, and ultimately satisfy the key metrics and business goals of the organisation.
A fully optimised campaign can boost the efficiency of your marketing efforts, strengthen your relationships with consumers, increase revenue, and help build your startup into a stable and profitable business. That's where marketing automation software comes into play.
Marketing automation can be instrumental in this optimisation, by taking mundane tasks out of the hands of your marketing professionals, leaving them free to concentrate on higher value activities.
To make automation an integral part of your startup marketing strategy, you'll need to invest in the necessary technology – that is, a marketing automation tool or solution. As with most business technology systems, there's a considerable choice, and not all marketing automation tools were created equal.
We'll look at some of the criteria for selecting the best marketing automation tools or platforms in a moment.
First, we’ll consider five moves you can make within your own organisation and its existing technology stack to make that automation solution work more effectively for your startup.
You should go through your existing CRM database to identify and delete any duplicate records, verify the names of all your contacts, and make sure that those contacts are associated with their correct accounts. Clean data is essential to an effective, segmented marketing approach for your marketing campaigns.
Email marketing is a critical aspect of customer engagement, and contact information is an important part of market research. To ensure that this data remains accurate, you should run all email addresses through a verification service to identify those that are still active and flag any that are inaccurate.
Your IT personnel, CRM administrators, creative, and marketing teams will all have a role to play in integrating existing systems with the best marketing automation platform available, and performing tasks such as contact verification. They will also create content, and take a hand in implementing your marketing strategies – so it's important to keep them all on board.
Marketing automation will also change the way that certain parts of the marketing process are performed, so it’s vital to explain these alterations, and prepare your workers before the system goes fully online.
The success of an automated marketing campaign should be measurable in terms of key metrics and performance indicators (rather than deceptive vanity metrics), which you should define early on and keep track of. By continually testing and analysing the results of your marketing plan, you can make updates to your automation settings as necessary, and create improved strategies.
Over time, new marketing automation tools may become available, and new techniques may develop. So it’s important to keep up to date with industry intelligence, technology upgrades, and best practices.
Regarding the marketing automation platform itself, here’s a checklist of criteria to consider when making your technology choice:
Besides enabling you to generate real-time sales alerts, track visitors to your own online resources, and identify the websites that they visit, marketing automation can streamline the marketing process and assist in the creation of personalised content. It can also increase customer lifetime value (CLV) by automating customer follow-up activities, cross-selling, and up-selling.
In order to create a marketing automation strategy, you should:
This information will help you assess and choose the right marketing automation solution for your marketing activities.
Through lead generation, you can find prospective customers for your startup business and start turning them into paying consumers. You can do this by producing value-led content that provides genuinely useful advice, and by providing favourable offers or deals that ultimately lead your prospects to making a purchase.
In fact, according to a recent study by Invespcro, lead generation is the top goal of marketing automation, with the goal of generating better qualified leads in the shortest amount of time possible.
(Image source: Invespcro)
(Image source: HubSpot)
To use marketing automation effectively for lead generation you can:
Here are 5 steps to successful marketing automation for startups:
Most start-ups can gain in both efficiency and focus with their marketing activity, by using the power of the right marketing automation software.
To learn more about how Incisive Edge can assist in successful marketing automation for your startup business, get in touch with us.