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!

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