How to bring marketing automation into your business

For a mature company with data and tech processes and systems already set in motion, it can be hard enough to prove the value of a traditional marketing budget, let alone bring marketing automation into the conversation, onboarding new platforms and perform a MarTech assessment.

As with any new idea that might meet hesitation, you’ll need to be led by customer needs and armed with the right data and proof points to present to each stakeholder.

So if you’re ready to include a messaging platform or marketing automation into your marketing mix, stay with us for the next few minutes as we walk through the most important things you’ll need to cover when bringing automation into your business.

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Step 1 - Understand why you need Marketing Automation

The first step to alleviate any hesitations within the business is to understand why you need to incorporate automation in the first place. For some, this could be as easy as personalising comms to increase conversion rates by showing your customers that you’ve given some thought to your emails or app marketing.

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Step 2 - What Impact do you Expect‍

It will take some time to set up a new platform, drive change and business adoption -, so how do you justify this upfront cost and initial set-up time to prove the long term gains it can bring to your business?

Start by listing out what parts of your marketing you can automate and where you think this will have the highest impacts. If you can add dollar values to potential conversion points or ROI from emails, SMS messages and push notifications this will only help your case but don’t feel scared to base this on educated assumptions. Marketing automation is designed to be continuously optimised so this is only going to help you.

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Step 3 - Map your Customer Journey ‍

So you know you want to automate comms and you have a gut feeling this will impact your business for the better. But do you know exactly which of these comms will be automated? Or what data points are going to trigger your messages?

Before moving any further, get a plan in place by mapping your customer journey out on a big ol’ whiteboard or a Miro board if you’re working digitally.

Start by mapping your consumer touch-points and overlaying your channels, messaging and data triggers to get a complete picture of your customer journey. Add in your dream state and use this to show others in your business where automation can move the needle on some sticky conversion points or increase engagement.‍

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Step 4 - How will you Measure the Impact‍

Automating your marketing efforts won’t have nearly as much impact if you don’t already have a robust marketing plan backed by a sophisticated measurement framework and an attribution model, custom-built for your business drivers and growth levers - to ensure your sales forecasting and marketing ROI are measurable across all channels (our team of experts can help you with a media attribution solution).

You'll be ready to choose your automation platform, and import your data to start personalising and triggering the right messages to your audiences at exactly the right time.