Marketing… such a buzz word. It’s a broad term that gets used so often because it can refer to so many parts of your business. We will get into effective ways to market your business but one thing we do know is that regardless of how you market, it takes real time and effort and while that’s important for growth, it does take you away from other activities you need to do. Building an effective marketing machine requires thought, trial and error and good tracking, but once you find a method that works, you need to follow up with automation. The more you can scale these marketing activities, the more you can have running at the same time which is how you’ll actually see a return on your marketing investment.
Marketing automation is proven to be effective for growing small and large businesses and one of the main ways that business owners can increase their conversion rates is to optimize their sales funnels using these four strategies:
1. Use Email Automation
First, create different email automation campaigns for your business. These will help you get the email addresses of interested prospects at different points in the sales funnel.
For instance, you can do this by creating an email campaign on your website where visitors can subscribe to receive your content. You can then send these subscribers a welcome email that includes a reason why they were opted-in to receive emails from your business. This can include a brief overview of your business, your services, the industry, and the value that you can offer.
You can then use these email addresses to expand your reach to your prospects by sending out emails to them. These can include information about your products and services and include a call-to-action to drive them to your website to create a lead.
The key to automating your email marketing is first, good, meaningful content that prospects will actually engage with and second, having a platform that makes it easy to create campaigns (especially if you’re not a designer by nature or trade) and a system that will make it easy to send out your campaigns. Wix’s Ascend business tools offer a great way to manage both creation and automation.
2. Lead Nurturing
Your next strategy is to nurture these leads which means continuing to engage them, keep them informed of your services, offer value until the point at which they convert and engage you.
One of the best things you can do to nurture your leads is by sending them emails or texts with updates or news about your business. For example, you can send updates on new products that your company offers or a story about how you personally used a product and it helped you with a task that you were doing at the moment.
Another great strategy is to use automated emails that send content to your leads depending on their role in the sales funnel. So, for example, if they're in the "interested" stage, they'll be sent content on your business or your product. If they're in the "consideration" stage, they'll be sent information on how your business can help them with their problems or needs.
Since you never know what pieces of information will push a prospect over the edge, it is vital that you monitor and test your campaigns at this stage. Which topics did the most prospects bother opening in their email? Do you get higher conversion rates via text or email? Which campaigns actually led to someone responding and requesting more information? Without a system and automation to help you try these different approaches, you’re really shooting in the dark hoping you hit something.
3. Remarketing
In many ways, marketing is all about repetition. I always ask, why do brands we’re all familiar with still spend millions of dollars on TV ads? For one thing, we’re familiar with them BECAUSE they have spent millions of dollars advertising on every medium possible and their competitors won’t stop spending that kind of money to continue to promote their products. When we are first introduced to a product or service, it doesn’t mean we’re ready to buy but it’s important that when we are, we remember that one brand over any others. Timing, repetition, and nuance around your value proposition will help ensure you do get your prospect’s attention when it will matter most.
Remarketing is a great way to send ads to people who have visited your website and moved on because they were not ready to convert right then and there. You can do this by creating a list of people who have visited your site and then sending them ads on different platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
While remarketing is still in its infant stages, when executed correctly, it can be very effective because you’ll stay top of mind for them and potentially hit them with the right information at the right time, even if that’s weeks, months or even years down the road.
4. Automated Targeted Content
One concept that seems a little counterintuitive is creating custom content for segments of your prospects but scaling it through automation. If you think about how your prospects find your product or service and imagine a buying journey they may be on, you can pinpoint stages in that journey when some information is going to be more relevant to them than others (reference the last section about repetition and timing). To do this, you need to segment your prospects at key phases in the journey and produce content for those groups, then you can scale.
For instance, you can have a list of people who have visited your website, a list of people who have subscribed to your email list, and a list of people who haven't done either. With these three distinct categories, you can now send them emails or texts with content that will be more specific to their decision making at that stage in the journey. Not only will you be able to reach out to a greater number of prospects with the same effort and time but you’ll also be ensuring that what you send them will be effective and not generic.
These are four of the best strategies to use if you want to maximize your marketing. Need help? Get in touch with us! We specialize in funnel automation and modern marketing strategies. Contact us today for a free consultation.
