With technology advancing everyday, human touch is slowly being obliterated from marketing and sales interactions. More so, because consumers too are self-reliant these days. But they do want a personalized experience. Perhaps due to the shrinking amount of human touch in most interactions, people are seeking more of the same in return.
The moment anyone hears the words marketing automation for the very first time, the image that comes to mind is of robots handling marketing tasks. Admit it, you must have thought something similar as well. Funnily enough, marketing automation lets you do the complete opposite. It allows you to be as human as is humanely possible. That pun was completely unintentional, or was it?
Do not mistake marketing automation for a tool that will automate your entire marketing department while you can take a breather. That would make it no different than buying contact lists and sending blast emails at random. The marketers who have achieved success using marketing automation have used this tool’s versatility to understand their audience better. Knowing your customers is an essential aspect of marketing. Add an enhanced human touch to that, and you might have discovered the recipe to success.
So, how can you use a technology to satiate your customers? How can you make marketing automation less robotic and more receptive to what your human prospects want?
#1: Create Your Own Contact List
Buying contact lists are easy. You pay money for a certain number of contacts. These contacts might or might not have heard about you. They might or might not have interest in you. But you will still put your faith on this list and push your luck. You will cold call or email everyone in the list and chase useless leads.
What if you create your own list? Marketing automation has all the right features that lets you do that. Your own list will consist of people who are genuinely interested in your brand. They know about you, and perhaps they want to know more. Some, out of them might want to purchase your product or service.
Your contact list might not be as large as the ones you used to buy earlier, but at least you know that these are prospects who are interested in your company. Another thing that you should keep in mind is that you should always keep contact information updated in order to prevent database decay. That will help you a lot in the long run.
#2: Create Relationships & Nurture Them
One of the primary reasons for adopting marketing automation is that it lets you initiate meaningful relationships with your prospects and customers. But what good is a relationship if you cannot maintain it?
Marketing automation allows you to nurture relationships thereby improving the quality of leads. When it comes to nurturing, automation platforms offer a wide variety of features to personalize the entire process like dynamic content and segmentation.
#3: There’s More to Marketing than Email
Email marketing might be the oldest and reliable methods of digital marketing. But, at this day and age, you have to think beyond it. Prospects are everywhere on the internet thanks to social media. So, how do you make your marketing automation less robotic in this case?
Well, you can control and monitor all your social media channels from a single dashboard. You can engage your customers on a much deeper level and develop strategies to serve relevant, personalized content across all these channels.
#4: Form a Partnership with Sales
If you want your marketing strategies to be more humane, you need to partner up with your sales team. You have to coordinate with your sales team so that the lead handoff from marketing to sales is a smooth process. The last thing you need is a losing a qualified lead because of lack of coordination.
Mutually decide on a time to hand off your qualified leads to sales and provide them all the information on every lead so that they can close more deals. Not only will this benefit you, but your would-be-customer will be equally satisfied from the service of your sales team.
#5: Better Segmentation
One of the most integral parts of a marketing strategy is list segmentation. More so, if you are using marketing automation. You can easily segment people based on their likes and preferences. This will reveal what they are interested in and how you can nurture that interest with your content.
Sending the right content to the right person at the right time, is your key to success. You already have marketing automation by your side, what more could you possibly need to close that deal?
#6: Create Smart Content
If you want your marketing automation to be less robotic and more effective, you need smart content. You are obviously well aware of how content single-handedly runs marketing automation. So, you have to keep on churning out quality content to cater to different segments of your audience.
Cater to their every need and solve their every problem with your words. If you can solve their problems, they will keep coming back to you.
Bottom Line
When it comes to human touch, nothing is better than marketing automation. Don’t let that name fool you. The services that such a platform can provide is truly an asset for any organization. But you have to strategise carefully. Keep in mind what your customers want. Align your marketing goals so that it benefits you as well as your prospects. Think of your prospects as friends who need help, and you will be reaping profits in no time.
