Beginner’s Guide To Setting Up Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is transforming the way modern businesses reach, convert, and retain customers. For companies just getting started with automation, the setup process can seem daunting. In this beginner’s guide, we’ll walk through the basics of what automation is, why it’s valuable, and how to choose and implement the right marketing automation platforms and workflows for your business.

Understanding Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed to automate repetitive marketing tasks. This allows marketers to more efficiently nurture leads, convert sales, drive ROI. Automation helps businesses scale their marketing and standardize processes using digital data and tracking.

What Makes Marketing Automation Useful?

There are many powerful reasons brands make automation for marketing a centerpiece of customer engagement: 

• Consolidates customer data from all channels and CRM in one place to enable smarter marketing and sales decisions and tracking. Provides a holistic view of the customer journey. 

• Automatically nurtures lead over time to become sales qualified without direct manual oversight. 

• Frees up significant time for marketers and sales teams to focus on more valuable priorities than basic lead follow-ups. 

• Helps ensure standardized, respectable contact with every lead to represent brand effectively. 

• Enables running and optimizing many outreach campaigns simultaneously.
  Gives insights needed to determine the highest converting marketing assets and tactics. 

Demonstrating Marketing Automation Through Real-Life Examples

A prospect fills out a form to download an e-book from your website. They provide their name, email and other information. Your automation platform automatically captures this lead information and initiates a pre-set workflow. 

This could involve adding them to certain email lists and nurture tracks and excluding them from others. It may score their lead based on information provided. A digital data consultancy   (data-driven consultancy) could help analyze the lead scoring methodology to determine the optimal thresholds for identifying marketing qualified leads. Over the next few weeks, a series of 5 carefully timed emails is automatically deployed to nurture that lead. The messages educate readers further and aim to convert them into marketing qualified leads by directing them to book sales appointments.

Lead scoring also helps determine if they become viable sales qualified leads to contact directly. If lead scores don’t rise sufficiently, the automated nurturing cycle repeats to continue engaging them. If lead scores hit thresholds, the contact is automatically handed off to sales reps as a highly qualified lead.

Choosing the Right Marketing Automation Platform for Your Business

Choosing the right marketing automation platform is crucial for setting up an effective system. Here are a few factors to consider when selecting the best platform for your business: 

• Budget: As a general known fact – HubSpot, Zoho Campaigns, and Pardot offer affordable platforms for small businesses. Marketo and Pardot work better for larger companies. 

• Business Needs: Depending on your business goals, you could pick an appropriate platform.
  Explore our detailed comparison of Marketo, HubSpot, and Pardot to help guide your decision.  

• Integration: Make sure the platform is integrated with your CRM, analytics, and social media tools. 

• Ease-of-Use: Choose platforms that have intuitive interfaces and templates that are easy to use for campaign creation. 

Marketing Automation Platforms to Consider

Many software options provide automation for marketing capabilities. When reviewing providers, it can be helpful to consult with a b2b marketing consultant to explore which platforms would best align to your budget, target customer profiles, in-house expertise and existing martech software stack. A marketing consultant that specializes in b2b can provide valuable outside guidance when it comes to selecting and implementing the right automation tools for your business needs and growth goals.

Here are some top marketing automation platforms to consider:  

• HubSpot – Comprehensive inbound marketing and sales software with intuitive automation workflows. Strong mid-market presence. 

• Marketo – Fully-featured marketing automation for enterprise brands. Complex but powerful. Adobe also offers Marketo Engage in its Experience Cloud. 

• Pardot – Salesforce’s marketing automation offering tightly integrated with Salesforce CRM. An enterprise-ready solution. 

• Ontraport – Affordable and intuitive solution well suited to small businesses’ needs. 

• Zoho Campaigns – Capable marketing automation with approachable pricing for mid-market firms. Integrates with Zoho’s wider business app ecosystem. 

The key is choosing a platform aligned to your resources and needs that can ultimately scale with business growth over time. Many platforms offer free trials to experience capabilities firsthand. 

Setting Up Your First Marketing Automation Campaign

Now that you’ve chosen your platform, it’s time to set up your first marketing automation campaign. Follow these steps to get started: 

1. Plan Your Automated Workflows: Map out your lead nurturing workflow by mapping the stages of your customers’ journey. Automated emails can be triggered by triggers such as form submissions or content downloads. 
2. Import contacts and segment your audience: Import the contact database you have into your automation platform. Segment contacts by behavior, demographics and engagement in order to deliver personalized content. 
3. Design Email Templates: Create email templates that cater to different stages of the customer journey. For example, welcome emails for new subscribers and educational content for leads in the consideration stage. 
4. Configure Lead Scoring. Set up a scoring system for high-value leads to be automatically prioritized. Assign points to key actions such as email opens, downloads of content, and registrations for webinars. 
5. Integrate Other tools : Ensure that your marketing automation platform is integrated with your CRM, social media platforms and analytics tools for better data flow. 

Best Practices for Setting Up Marketing Automation 

Follow these best practices to ensure your marketing automation campaigns are set up for success: 

1. Keep It Simple: Start with a few basic workflows and gradually scale as you become more familiar with the platform. 
2. Personalize Your Communications: Even though you’re automating, make sure your messages feel personalized. Use dynamic content and personalized subject lines to improve engagement. 
3. Test and Optimize: Regularly test your campaigns (A/B testing) to see what resonates best with your audience. This will allow you to refine your content and improve results. 
4. Map the Customer Journey: Ensure your automation is aligned with your customer journey, delivering the right message at the right time.
   If you need help enhancing the performance of your automation tool, consult with Martech experts to optimise your setup.

Most automation platforms offer built-in analytics to help you track these metrics and optimize your campaigns over time. Additionally, consider conducting a MarTech stack audit to ensure all your tools are aligned for optimal performance.

Conclusion

Marketing automation can seem overwhelming at first, but by following the steps outlined in this guide, you can successfully implement automation for your business. Start small and gradually expand as you gain experience. The key is to automate processes that will save time, enhance customer engagement, and increase conversions. 
 
Ready to implement the best marketing automation strategy for your business? Book a free consultation with our experts to get started.