Online Marketing Automation

What is Marketing Automation?

This sounds like a complicated thing and probably hard to understand.  But really, it's very simple and easy to explain.

In the world of internet marketing we focus a lot on traffic and getting contacts.  This is the way our clients get new business or generate a wider reach for their audience.  Regardless of your goals we want to be as efficient as possible.

Depending on the amount of traffic you are getting to your website will depend on the way we manage leads.  On the small end if you are only getting contacts once or twice a week we don't really need too much automation to follow up.  It's easy to make a phone call when someone contacts you online by filling out a form.  But what happens when you get thousands of those a month?  That's a great problem to have!

This is where we need to automate some tasks.  Depending on the quality of the lead it may require we filter out the best ones first and work our way to the least possible fit.  We do this by segmenting contacts into lists for email conversations.  So depending on the way someone comes into our system we may create a list built for a particular buyer persona or which stage of the buyer journey they may be in.  Other ways are maybe for a particular product or service.  It really depends on your business and how you are successfully nurturing prospects through your sales funnel.

Depending on the size of your business we use different tools to set this up for you.  Our favorite is Hubspot and is the core of our service for somewhat larger businesses.  The reason I say that is because it takes a lot of manpower to manage the system and if you don't have the resources you will struggle keeping up with the system.

My favorite graphic to show how this works comes from Hubspot showing how Inbound Marketing works.  This image is years old but still does a great job of representing the process.

The automation part is the part you can't see here.  Starting from the left which is really the top of the funnel, we work to the right placing things to make it all work together.  So we create a blog like the one you're reading.  We put calls to action to drive traffic to a landing page where we have an offer like our ebook about Inbound Marketing.

From there we create smart lists which automatically put contacts into different lists for communication.  Some people call this spam but if you using email marketing effectively it is a very powerful process to engage prospects.

What is really innovative in thinking about this process is the Promoters.  By giving exceptional customer service we create evangelists who generate more interest for new prospects that feed back into the top of the funnel.

The process may seem complicated.  That's why we work with your business to make sure your online marketing efforts are successful.