The mantra is Marketing Automation is 10% tool, 90% brain! If we do manually not correctly from the beginning, then applying the machine would be a big failure. In summary, there are main steps from my own experience deploying and consulting customers as follows:

First, understand what is the nature of Marketing Automation

The answer is short and extremely beneficial “USING THE SOFTWARE FOR PERSONALIZATION AND SENDING A MESSAGE SUITED FOR JOURNEY, HOBBY, INTEREST, AND INTERACTIONS”. This sentence entails understanding the nature of the concepts of Fully Dynamic Segment, Lead Scoring, Journal Tracking to be able to design automation scenarios.

Second, content planning, nurturing scripts.

After understand about what Marketing Automation is, getting back to basics: 4-step customer portraying.

  • Step 1: Brainstorm from your personal experience outlining customer portraits.
  • Step 2: Filling those descriptions within your team and customer demographic.
  • Step 3: Surveying existing customers or customers of your rival.
  • Step 4: Analyze survey results and set up a complete portrait. If you are too lazy to do all 4 steps, then do steps 1-2 also yield 60-70% correct result. Absolutely “do not keep customer portrait in mind” because only the founder, co-founder, bod know and frontline personnel do not know.
Third, determine what content is on each step, the scripts for each stage.

Following the customer journey, the SME should pay attention to which way the customer is traveling, not enough to influence the customer journey from every channel, but when pulled back to the website, it can be designed.

Fourth, Determine the conversion goal of the Marketing Automation system.

Determine what is the definition of Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead, Sale Qualified Lead to design a “lead magnet” also known as hearing.

Fifth, plan content for each Phase of customer journey.

Basically only 3 TOFU classes (Awareness -> Interest and Unaware -> Problem Aware), MOFU (Interest Stage -> Consider and Problem Aware -> Solution Aware), BOFU (Consider – > Action and Solution Aware -> Product Aware). A Marketing Automation strategy generates optimal conversion efficiency when content is adequate at all stages and stages. The build order should be from BOFU -> MOFU then to TOFU.

Sixth, Proceed to Create “Baits”.

Create two types of effective attention: long-form content (wow content) at the top of the funnel ( could create strong viral and SEO effects if it is got done well ). Assorted packaged content (ebook, guide, video) for free to get email. In general direct to all landing pages and optimize landing pages to optimize conversions.

Seventh, throw the “baits”.

Create the community and marketing for that “baits” you created.

Eighth, get the lead in then need an interactive, nurturing script.

This section is also planned in Content Plans. However, depending on the purpose of conversion, it will adjust the additional branch interaction scenarios. This part has to  follow closely to the customer journey.

Ninth, mark the contact scores.

This section needs to align with the Sale team to set the rules, select the real key actions to determine the willingness to buy. Plan the corresponding actions for each score level to drive conversions from LEAD -> MQL -> SQL. This section uses the Fit / Not a Fit Matrix and the High Interest / Low Interest Matrix to plan. For example with 40 points, then send promotion and  with 60 points will push it to sale team.

Tenth, continuously evaluate and improve.

Like others, the campaign should be continuously evaluated, improved, supplemented and train the team to use.

The writing is short, but when start the work, this could be enormous workload! But do not panic!, The process I discussed above is the best PRACTICE apply for any businesses: from B2B industry, Education, training, any industry that customers need more time to decide to purchase, also can cost more our time to research.

Completing the best practice as above is fast for 6 months but slow for the whole year. However marketing automation can apply simpler, simpler scenarios without analyzing as much as:
– Enter information automatically send documents, open documents, send email reminders
– After 90 days of not purchasing goods, send email to remind
– Manual email string for customers from day to day
– New employee integration email series
– Send personalized marketing emails
– Example for real estate industry, instead of filling out the Google sheet form, now fill in the form directly into the database and automatically send emails / SMS to customers. Then, if anyone is interested in some 5-7 projects, Sale-men know that this customer is very potential.

Marketing Automation, the whole process of marketing sounds like a headache, but it is more effective to apply it partially and then slowly building. In general, a journey of ten thousand miles begins with one step … The journey of “playing” this “game” reveals many things, this is the hobby of marketers!