With the industrial automation market size reaching over $200 billion, automation technologies continue to expand in capabilities. Nowadays, automation technology makes its way into nearly every business process. Even marketing teams now leverage automation to produce higher returns with less effort. But, to effectively utilize automation in marketing, startups need an effective b2b marketing automation strategy.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing automation involves using software and technology to automate marketing processes and improve the efficiency of marketing efforts. It leverages platforms like Pardot to provide tools and features that automate email marketing, lead generation, and customer segmentation tasks.
How startups can benefit from marketing automation
Startups can use marketing automation to manage a wide range of marketing activities, from creating and sending email campaigns to tracking the performance of those campaigns and making data-driven decisions. By automating these tasks, businesses can free up time and resources to focus on other business areas. It also improves the overall effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
5 marketing automation strategies for 2023
In 2023, startups can leverage the recent developments in automation to improve their marketing effectiveness.
Here are five marketing automation strategies your startup can use to find success in 2023:
1. Leverage personalized content
Personalized marketing delivers relevant and engaging content specific to each customer’s or potential customer’s needs. This helps startups improve their marketing results, with companies growing rapidly generating 40% of their revenue over slow-growing companies from personalization.
The personalization of content uses customer information and behavioral data paired with marketing automation platforms to collect and analyze data on customer behavior and interests. This data includes pages customers visit on a website, the content they download, and their interactions with email campaigns. Based on this data, marketing automation tools can deliver personalized content to different customer segments.
2. Create drip campaigns
Effective drip campaigns rely on multiple touchpoints to slowly convert a curious individual into a loyal customer. Startups can leverage marketing automation platforms to improve their drip campaigns in a few different ways:
- Automating the sending of emails: Startups can automate their entire email drip campaigns with marketing automation tools. They can be personalized to the individual to serve relevant and engaging content with every email. Some tools can also update the emails based on the engagement with previous emails.
- Tracking the performance of drip campaigns: Gathering data on drip campaigns is essential to improving them. Marketing automation platforms automatically collect and track the performance of drip campaigns to provide the necessary information for optimization.
- Integrating with other marketing channels: Marketing automation platforms can be integrated with other marketing channels to serve drip campaigns across channels and track the overall results.
3. Nurture every lead
To nurture leads, startups need a deep understanding of each lead. This involves collecting data about who they are and their engagement with a business. With a marketing automation platform, startups can nurture every lead with the help of automated processes.
First, automation platforms assign a score to each lead based on their behavior and interactions with the startup. This can help startups to identify the most promising leads and prioritize their follow-up efforts.
Next, they can create personalized forms and landing pages tailored to the interests and behaviors of individual leads. These personalized forms and pages provide high levels of engagement as they talk directly to the lead.
During this process, startups can use marketing automation strategies to provide support and resources to leads as they move through the sales funnel.
Finally, an effective marketing automation strategy for nurturing leads must rack leads’ engagement with the startup’s marketing efforts. This tracking provides a basis for improvement.
4. Continuously test and improve email sequences
With an effective marketing automation strategy, startups can continuously test their email sequences with automated reporting and analysis.
By automating email sequences, startups can also automate A/B tests for those sequences. Within an automated A/B test for an email sequence, startups can test different subject lines, email content, and calls to action while tracking performance. This provides definitive results startups can use to improve their email sequences.
Startups can also use marketing automation platforms to analyze collected data. These tools provide detailed reports that marketing teams can use to derive unique insights.
5. Learn from your competitors
There are two main ways startups can create marketing automation strategies to better learn from their competition.
First, marketing automation platforms can monitor competitors’ social media accounts and websites. This monitoring includes tracking their posts and content, then analyzing the engagement and response to those posts and content. In addition, it can also track websites to see when competitors launch new services or publish new blog posts.
Second, startups can use automated tools to create alerts and notifications for when their competitors make significant updates or changes to their marketing efforts. These alerts and notifications can be tailored to specific industries. For example, startups can create alerts for when competitors rank for new keywords to monitor their investments in SEO.
Implementing Pardot in your marketing automation strategies
To implement Pardot into your marketing automation strategy in 2023, integrate Padot with your other systems. This can include integrating Pardot with the startup’s CRM, website analytics, and social media accounts. With this integration, Pardot can provide a more comprehensive view of your marketing performance. It can also automate tasks such as lead generation and customer segmentation.
Once integrated into your other systems, you can start creating marketing campaigns with automation rules. Automation rules allow you to create triggers that cause actions. Triggers involve customer actions such as downloading a PDF or signing up for an email list. Once these triggers occur, Pardot takes specific actions such as sending the customer an email sequence or connecting with the customer on social media.
Creating an effective automation strategy for your startup requires a deep technical understanding of these cutting-edge tools and marketing expertise. However, startups rarely have the permanent staff to handle these efforts. That’s why Kloudblaze specializes in helping startups create effective marketing automation strategies using Salesforce tools such as Pardot. Contact us today to see how we can help you optimize your marketing efforts!
