Why Cracking Marketing Automation Is the Key For Startups
By
Mohammad Farooq
What factors allow startups to succeed?
Two of the ten most critical factors that dictate startup success are: marketing and growth. Even after you’ve covered the other critical factors which include; the idea, the leader, the team, capital, execution, a good plan etc. Without good marketing, things can go wrong pretty fast.
According to Jayson Demers, Founder, and CEO, AudienceBloom:
How you package and market your business matters. An inferior product that’s branded in a more appealing, exciting, and unique way will always outsell its superior product that happens to have plain, non-memorable branding.
What’s the ultimate goal of digital marketing?
Having a robust and comprehensive digital marketing strategy is something that every entrepreneur (and especially startup entrepreneurs) should pay close attention to. When you’re developing your digital marketing strategy, you’ll realize that having a detailed strategy for each major proposition or market will allow you to have focus and direction, and this will result in growth and success of your startup. You also need to learn what behavioral segmentation is.
The RACE digital marketing system is a great example of an integrated system that allows you to focus your efforts:
Planning, managing and optimizing digital channels against defined targets, SMART KPIs and a focused investment in content marketing. – Dr. Dave Chaffey
In your digital marketing process (which should be specific to your business), your ultimate goal is to subtlety guide those who you reach and attract through your sales funnel until they become your repeat customers. Whether you define this conversion goal as being a visitor to lead, most entrepreneurs would agree that the conversion rate is probably one of the most critical metrics that would help to gauge the success of their efforts.
Why marketing automation is key for startups?
Enter marketing automation. Marketing automation allows you to leverage different strategies and platforms to nurture and convert visitors and leads into customers both economically and efficiently. Since for startups capital and time are usually very tight, marketing automation can be priceless.
So, how can you make the most out of marketing automation in order to achieve success for your startup?
Being aware of the hurdles that you’re likely to face with marketing automation, you’ll have a much easier adoption process. An easier adoption process will in turn allow you to kick start your digital marketing strategy into high gear, and therefore allow every chance for your startup to succeed.
By taking into consideration the barriers that you’re likely going to face with adoption of marketing automation, you can put together action plans for overcoming these obstacles by integrating them into your goals. Using marketing automation tools like Getresponse can be fruitful in smooth integration and achievement of your goals.
As such, some of your main marketing automation goals that will almost certainly guarantee your success should include the following:
- Increasing lead generation
- Improve lead nurturing
- Increase sales revenue
- Improve customer engagement
- Improve marketing productivity
- Improve performance measurability
- Improve campaign targeting
Once you have your goals in place, what’s your best bet for choosing the right marketing automation system for your business. Given the above findings, which features should you pay the most attention to when choosing a marketing automation system. The Marketing Automation Trends Survey below, by Ascend2 and Research Partners, February 2016 gives us some clear answers.
The Bottom Line
As a startup entrepreneur, there are many things that you have to do to eventually bring your product to the market. Usually, startup teams are lean and the amount of work that has to be done is massive. In short, resources are often quite limited and yet the expectations and demands are often very high. As such, having good systems on your side that can not only organize the work that you have to do into a logical order of measurable activities, but also having the work automated for you can be invaluable. This is why cracking marketing automation is key for startups.
Mohammad Farooq works as a Social Media Analyst. When not doing anything related to social media, he goes backpacking around India. He regularly blogs about travel, movies, political issues and a lot of other things on his blog ReveringThoughts.
