automation Archives - Creative Agency Secrets

How Marketing Automation Can Help Your Business Long Term

2 January, 2019/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip Mutt

Market automation is a technological process that streamlines as well as provides visibility into the marketing activities of a business. It is an assortment of tools, processes, and workflows, where the tools are used to automate the commonly repetitive tasks. While marketing automation is highly important in producing and nurturing new leads, for long-term business engagement it can be costly for your business without initial proper implementation. It is considered an excellent practice for your market automation to be infused into the sales and marketing processes to optimize a buyer’s journey from potential customers to loyal clients.

A study projects that the market for market automation will grow by 3.3 billion USD to 6.4 billion USD in 2024. The driving force for this growth is the increase in demand for personalized advertising, the urge to keep clients for the long term, and the use of predictive analytics techniques to understand customer behavior.

To help you understand how to market automation could be a lifesaver for your business, below are seven key points:

1.Time-Saving

Marketing automation helps shift your business focus to only the most essential aspects. For instance, once you create content for marketing campaigns, the technology takes care of all the other activities automatically. The burden of grappling with social media posts from one platform to another is eased, so you can easily schedule posts to be published to these social media sites based on need.

2.Customer Loyalty

With the ever-changing needs of the customer, everyone wants to be ahead of the game by obtaining customer loyalty. Achieving customer loyalty in the long term is a grueling task unless you can leverage analytics to understand customer dynamics, such as predicting their new likely interests. Automation makes businesses smarter in retaining customers, as most small companies are always on the lookout for new customers while continually losing existing ones. Once you understand the purchasing behavior of customers, it will be easy to align your marketing strategies with their respective interests.

Below are ways you can increase customer loyalty:

Sharing Company Content – You can share company content from your company sites such as blog posts and videos. When done on time, it enhances chances of customer retention, for instance, by helping them have optimum use of their purchases through user guides and new product features.
Request Feedback – One other way that market automation maintains customer loyalty is by requesting feedback. However, it is essential to note that feedback should only be required when appropriate to do so to reduce the chances of being a bother to the client.

3.Tracking and Monitoring Results

Market automation has an embedded metric for understanding marketing efforts, and this helps you continuously measure success through market optimization. Insightful analytics from marketing data streams will help you perceive the performance of your marketing campaigns. Once you can clearly understand the nature of engagements, you can further follow up on new customer streams, as well as fine tune the marketing campaign to align with changing client needs. Tracking will help you make better-informed choices on what should be improved and what should be discarded.

4.Lead Generation

Market automation, when optimally implemented, will help you increase sales through new leads generation. These leads mostly come from website visitors, new engagements, and exciting insights from predictive analytic tools. It is therefore prudent to capitalize on such insights to achieve a long-term return on investment (ROI).

5.Aligning Marketing and Sales

Another critical factor that will enable marketing automation to achieve long-term business goals is that you can align your sales and marketing activities. An enhanced collaboration where marketers—in their effort to provide a personalized market experience—also presents valuable information to the sales team, helping them craft important communication for sales closure. This kind of collaboration will lead to a much-shortened sales cycle, based on proper profiling of potential clients and working towards fulfilling their buying anticipations.

6.Marketing ROI

Marketing automation provides visibility into your marketing activities and an environment that enables you to track engagement and optimize campaigns. You will ultimately reduce your marketing cycles, which later transforms into increased revenue for your company.

7.Reduced Costs

Any automated process reduces the cost of manual labor in terms of staff or contractors for the same tasks. What this means to your organization is the availability of a pool of funds that can be plowed back to improve front-end business processes.

Conclusion

Marketing automation is worth the financial investment as it will help your business achieve your long-term goals in the long run. With improved visibility into your marketing activities, you can realize high sales turnover through the faster decision making and proper planning. Finally, you will be among the few companies setting the pace for the rest to follow.

January website checks you MUST make

19 January, 2017/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Rebecca Caroe

It’s January – we are back from the Christmas break and many firms are still on a skeleton staff. Some are back full time – but we’re all filled with the pressures of a new year – new marketing plans, new services, new products.

For most of us, we’ve already forgotten the marketing we did in December. But we shouldn’t.

Because many websites are now inaccurate, out of date or just plain giving WRONG information.

Here’s a good example I called up today. I got their “out of hours” telephone answering recorded message. It is past the 9th January and nobody’s home…. cooeee…..

Company contact information is wrong

So if you have a holiday closure message on your website – get that fixed up and corrected pronto.

Copyright dates on website footers are another culprit. Some are obviously years out of date and others still say 2016

It doesn’t have to be this way!

Automate publishing

Post Expirator Plugin for WP

Website CMS systems mostly offer automation services which allow you to set future dates to un-publish pages and posts. Take a read of this explanation of how to “expire” a WordPress post using the WP Post Expirator plugin. Set a future date at which the post will stop being visible – you can choose whether to return to draft or to delete the post.

Use code to update dates

Here is the code to insert into your footer to ensure that the copyright year automatically rolls over on January 1st. Get it pasted into your website FAST.

<script type=”text/javascript”>

document.write(new Date().getFullYear());

</script>

Better marketing processes

Of course, fixing up your mistakes now is fine – but wouldn’t it be better to not have made them in the first place?

How about you set up reminders in your calendar to nudge you to manually remove or unpublish information?

Get those plugins and extensions installed so the work is done for you by machines.

Or pay an outsourced marketing consultant like Creative Agency Secrets to do it for you.

Happy new year – and if you’re in need of some marketing and new business year planning, come to our Auckland workshop on 26th January.

How to Use Google Alerts to Drive Business

11 August, 2016/0 Comments/in Case Studies, Data, Digital media, Direct Marketing, Marketing, Marketing ideas, Sales /by Creative Agency Secrets Team

Google alerts are an extremely useful resource for promoting your business online. First of all, if you aren’t using Google Alerts to track your business, you’re missing a seriously useful hack. They are particularly handy for staying up to date with relevant and timely information regarding your business, so you can react immediately to any publicity or news as soon as it happens.

But that’s not all Google Alerts are good for…

Google Alerts can also be used via RSS as a news aggregator on your website or blog! This is particularly useful for showing your visitors you know what is happening around you as well as demonstrating a position of authority with regards to your particular topic. Displaying the latest, relevant news results provides a great reason for your fans to continue returning to your site. Tailored, niche content is much easier to digest when it is a subject aligned with your own browsing interests. It may even help increase the likelihood of your visitors purchasing from you!

The best part about this is it can be totally automated, so you don’t have to spend time curating material. But make sure you have tested and refined your alert keywords in order to get the best results. Or, be sure to check the results from time to time in order to filter out anything that doesn’t fit with your brand.

We will be putting together a guide explaining how to get Google Alerts displaying as an RSS feed on your website shortly…

The next application for Google Alerts is a little more intricate: With a bit of research and a thorough understanding of your target market, you can even use Google Alerts to find new business!

Example: How to use Google Alerts to Generate Leads

Our client provides storage equipment solutions to the global rowing community. Although they can retro-fit single pieces of equipment inside an existing boathouse, their biggest projects come from clubs and organisations who have or are building brand new facilities. These new facilities obviously require a complete fit out of storage equipment and therefore, are our client’s ideal market. So how do you know when a new facility is built and looking for storage equipment? Timing is everything – if you find them too late, they may have already sourced a supplier and you’ll have missed the boat. Google Alerts provides the answer!

By setting up alerts with keywords such as “new rowing boathouse”, “rowing building new boathouse” and “new rowing club” for example, you get a nice summary of boathouse developments happening around the world.

Of course you have to continue your research beyond the alert itself to determine the lead’s value. Sometimes, results are completely irrelevant, and sometimes they are duplicates of material you have already covered. However, on the whole, they are incredibly useful at identifying future projects, as they are often newsworthy topics in their local area.

The next step is to track all your leads in a spreadsheet. Information such as who to contact and where they are located is particularly important. Additional research on the lead’s website often provides the necessary information to point you in the right direction.

In our client’s case, we were interested in contacting the architects of the boathouse, so that we could get involved with the club and their design process, as early as possible.

We have experienced great success building up a database of quality leads for our client in recent months. It is then up to our client to continue the dialogue with the prospective club and come to an arrangement. We have had a great deal of success converting these previously unknown prospects into happy customers, and have done so without investing hugely in advertising, outbound mailing campaigns or other conventional outbound marketing activities!

We have been able to minimise the time taken to research new sources of business through alerts and have increased the prevalence of new business, while making it easy to filter out results of no value. And as it updates you each time a new boathouse is being developed, you don’t waste time searching for them manually. A weekly check of your alerts inbox provides you with enough

Regardless of your industry or business, there’s bound to be a positive application to use Google Alerts for. Whether it is direct lead generation, building a database of bloggers and journalists to share content between, or even researching a network of businesses whose interests align neatly with your own, the uses for it go on and on.

Tag Archive for: automation

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