How To Automate 80% Of Your Marketing Tasks So You Can Focus On Growing Your Business

OK, guys.

Here’s the end of our guide on how to generate and nurture more B2B leads for your online business. Many people rush into automation without understanding what their clients actually need and what their RELEVANT added-value content could be.

The goal of this chapter is to help you to start marketing automation for your online business so that you have more time to focus on your product and services and ultimately make your clients’ lives easier.

My goal is to help you to understand why and what you should automate. It is not an ultimate guide, however; there are smarter people out there doing automation.

Nevertheless, I’ll be focusing on businesses that deliver services and online products through doing B2B. This is not for ecommerce or B2C.

If I’ve missed anything, please feel free to let me know and I’ll add it to the guide if it’s relevant.

There are many articles online about this topic, but from what I can see, some of them are way too basic and others are overcomplicated. There are guides like Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring that are good, but the context of storytelling and nurturing is still missing.

I want to make sure that you understand Marketing Automation based on frameworks and within our context of B2B lead generation and nurturing.

I would recommend you take a look at the other 5 chapters in this guide before going into automation. It will make much more sense and you’ll understand it better.

The 3 Big Problems That Stop Marketing Automation From Working

In my view, these are the top 3 problems that can stop any marketing automation from working to its full potential.

1. The Idea (product and service) – a good marketing automation expert or piece of software can’t fix a bad idea. Sorry.
2. Relevance – if you haven’t studied and personalised your content to your audience yet, don’t start automation.
3. Copywriting and presentation

I’ll show you later on in this chapter how to fix the copywriting and presentation of your product and services.

Before we jump into the heavy automation methods, we need to make sure there is a framework in place.

From these 3 problems, we’ll be able to help you with relevance and your copywriting and presentation.

We talked a lot about the importance of delivering relevant content to your audience in Chapter 4 (How To Build And Convert Leads With Quality Content).

Why Do We Need Marketing Automation, Even For Small Businesses?

A simple way to explain this is to give the example of the greatest car salesman in the world  – Joe Girard. Joe employed two assistants to work on his secret weapon that helped him to sell over 13,000 vehicles over 15 years (between 1963–78).

What was Joe’s secret weapon? Greeting cards. Yes, he and his assistants sent over 13,000 greeting cards every month.

Today, you don’t need to employ those two assistants anymore and pay for salaries, insurance and benefits.

You can do it in an even more sophisticated way: by using marketing automation.

Regarding the boring job of Joe Girard’s “two assistants” in the 70s, here’s another reason “why” you need marketing automation.

One of the big innovations that data and analytics will unlock is the ability to create more personalised products and services across all industries – including media and advertising

(McKinsey Study on Big Data)

The same study shows that 45 percent of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated by adapting currently demonstrated technologies.

More than 20 percent of a CEO’s working time could be automated using current technologies.

Here’s an interesting graph from the same study, comparing the percentage of time that can be automated and the hourly rate of jobs in the US.

The future is creativity and meaning. Storytelling and sensing emotions are at the core of our human experience and are hard to automate.

Let’s focus on storytelling, creativity, and building meaning within our organisations and then let’s automate all the rest.

7 Hacks To Acquire, Nurture, And Grow More Customers

I don’t want to keep you waiting anymore to find out about possible hacks and how you can start automating your marketing, so, let’s jump right in.

Before we talk about tools and methods, I’d like to make sure we have a framework to work from.

We’ll use the Pirate Metrics, AARRR, developed by the head of 500 Startups, Dave McClure.

The AARRR growth framework helps us to drive value and depth throughout the whole customer lifecycle.

It starts with acquiring customers, by attracting users to your site. From there, we go on to activation, where you will be delivering a first-time user experience that will engage and activate people to become ongoing users.

Retention will ensure that users come back to your site. The fourth metric is about revenue, converting free users into paying users in order to drive revenue.

And finally, the fifth metric is all about referral, inspiring your users to refer others and drive word-of-mouth acquisition of your product or service.

So, this is the AARRR growth framework, a traditional form of demand generation or inbound marketing, whose main focus is on attracting customers.

Now we’re starting to think about growth marketing and how to drive depth throughout the whole customer lifecycle, and how to drive key metrics during each step of the way.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

Conversion Rate Optimisation For B2B – Part 2

This is a continuation of post Conversion Rate Optimisation For B2B. See the first part here.

Use The Good Old Pareto Principle To Understand Your Buyer Persona

Use the Pareto principle to define your buyer persona.

As you can see in the mind map below, there are 4 phases involved in identifying our buyer persona:

• Definition Phase
  20/80 your existing audience
  Tools: Google Analytics, Mixpanel
• Pain Identification
  20/80 their pains with surveys
  Tools: Omniconvert, VWO
• Landing Page Crafting
  One for each buyer persona
  Tools: Instapage, Landingi, Unbounce
• Form Management
  Different for each buyer persona depending on what you know about them
  Tools: Paperform, Typeform, 123ContactForm, custom-made

An Ongoing Process To A/B Test Your Landing Pages

To have an ongoing process to A/B test your landing pages.

If you’re using less than 5 LPs you are doing something wrong.

If you’re using between 5-20 LPs you are doing something very good.

If you have more than 20 LPs you are doing an amazing job.

Besides that, you should A/B test them so that you can craft them as an ongoing process.

Here’s what we recommend you to test (one test at a time):

1. Landing Page Layouts – you’ll need to test layout no.1 vs. layout no.2 (ask your designer to make 2 different layouts)
2. UVPs (Unique Value Proposition) – you’ll need to find out which UVP fits your audience
3. Test Forms – how many fields they have, and how the answers are presented within them
4. Call to Action – test content, colours, and place

By doing this, you’ll be able to find out which landing pages fit the best.

Re-engage Visitors With Exit-intent

The 4th thing you need to do is to not miss out on the zero moment of truth, when your users are trying to leave your website.

For this, you need to re-engage them with exit-intent pop-ups.

You can trigger surveys and offers, or you can do landing page engagement.

You could redirect them to a specific landing page based on that data you are gathering about them. We use Omniconvert to do this.

Understand The Vicious Cycle That Kills Your Lead-rate

95% of your traffic is unknown and lost, from which you can recover 84% using remarketing. (Source: Wordstream.com)

From the 84% recovered, you lose another 95% because your website content is not relevant to your returning visitors. (Source: Marketing Sherpa)

From the 5-10% converted into email subscribers, only 20% will open your emails and 2-3% will click on the links that lead to your landing page. Then, you’ll lose another 95% of your email traffic because your forms are not optimised. (Source: MailChimp)

Why does this happen?

Mainly because you are taking the standard approach to lead generation:

Source: Omniconvert.com

You have a total number of traffic and you lose 11%, so now you do some classic remarketing. You lose another 84% and you re-engage with 8%.

From this 8%, you start emailing and you convert 1%.

What would be a smart lead-generation approach and how can we get an extra 4% more leads from the same traffic?

Instead of leading visitors leaving your website, in that moment when they are trying to navigate away, place an exit-intent buyer persona survey.

Most people aren’t going to answer: approximately 81%. You can expect a 15% response rate and based on that data, if you’re smart enough and if you create a logic branch that is really persuasive, you’ll be able to convert them into qualified leads.

If they’re simply not answering and not providing you with enough data, you can still get information about their cookies. Using this survey information, you can do further buyer persona remarketing.

Buyer persona remarketing can bring you another 1%, and another 2% can be gained from leads captured through the survey.

3 Steps You Can 3 Steps You Can Take Without IT Assistance To Increase Leads For Your Business

Here are 3 things you can do without having to ask your IT team for help, so that you can increase lead generation for your online business:

Step 1: Deal With Treating Real-time Objections Using Surveys

An exit-intent survey with lead collectors will help you to:

• Treat your prospects’ objections in real-time
• Get more information for the sales team to close the deal
• Get insights for A/B testing for the marketing team

Here’s a case study about this I have from our partners at Omniconvert.

Case Study:

Provident (a financial services company) used surveys to increase their lead generation by 25%.

Based on the answers they received, Provident were able to discover how much of their audience was looking for a loan for a specific purpose, such as for education, health, going on holiday, redecorating the house, or a family event.

By doing this, they had now found what kind of audience they were attracting with their traffic generation. This led them to be able to make their personalisation strategies even more relevant.

Read more about the case study here.

Step 2: How To Be Relevant During Their Next Visit Using Personalisation

Define special landing pages for each buyer persona you’ve detected in Step 1.

• Do smart remarketing based on buyer persona
• Increase the conversion rate of the most profitable segments of traffic on your site
• Drive interest towards your product and turn top-of-the-funnel leads into qualified leads

Let’s continue with the previous case study and show you how Provident used personalisation to increase their conversions.

Because they had some data from their users’ previous visits (from when they filled in the survey), Provident were now able to do some “smart remarketing” and offer the right content based on the answers provided in the survey.

As you can see below, they show relevant banner ads on Facebook or Adwords based on their users’ needs.

Now, this is very powerful because they are not being spammy or generic; they are taking the real needs of their prospects into consideration.

As we already talked about in Chapter 4, the main key here is to be relevant.

Step 3: Optimise Forms Based On Your Buyer Personas

The 3rd thing we should be doing is testing our website’s forms to increase the conversion rate from our landing pages.

Here’s a case study from T-Mobile.

Just by changing their call to action from “order now” to “yes, call me”, their conversion rates increased because “yes, call me” is a much softer approach and is not such a hard-selling phrase.

They achieved a +38% conversion rate and gained +30% more leads from changing their contact form.

See the whole case study here.

Conclusions

• Before you get started with CRO, make sure you have a process and a system in place; it will make all the difference.
• Respond to what your customers want from you and look into where you believe you’re leaking leads.
• Understand your buyer persona and learn smart remarketing to get them back onto your website.
• Use surveys to find out more about your prospects and, based on this data, do smart remarketing and personalise your content to their needs.
• Have a continuous process for carrying out A/B testing on the things that you’ve discovered matter to your audience.

The first thing you need to do in order to grab more leads is to understand your audience and to use all of the tools that are now available to you.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

 

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog