An Easy Way to Get Started with Marketing Automation Now

By now, you probably understand the benefits of marketing automation. You know marketing automation saves you time, helps you scale your marketing efforts and allows you to measure end-to-end ROI. But do you know where to start?

On the surface, marketing automation is a daunting undertaking:

• How do I find the time to create all of the content I need?
• How many pieces of content do I need to get off to a good start?
• What are all of the steps I need to consider?

Without previous experience, you may not know the exact pieces necessary to put together a working strategy.

Need not worry, small business owners: You likely have everything you need to publish an automated campaign right now.

We’ll guide you through your first offer, and give you a game plan for success.

The Game Plan to Start Marketing Automation Right Now

While many small business owners put off marketing automation because they don’t think they have time, or believe it will take far too much work to get all of the pieces in place, the reality is you don’t need very much to get started.

While it’s great to set high expectations, developing a fully-fleshed-out inbound strategy with automated segmentation and triggered actions is not the goal — at least, not yet.

As a small business with limited resources, your goal (at this stage) is simply to get the ball rolling with a minimum viable product (MVP) — then measure, make changes and measure again.

What you’ll need:

• An idea of who your customers are.
• A marketing automation system.
• A piece of content with some value to your customers.

That’s it.

Remember, this is just a starting point. As you learn how your customers interact with your content, you can develop more sophisticated campaigns.

1. Figure Out Who Your Customers Are

Before you set up your first campaign, you need to determine who you’re trying to reach and how you’d like to reach them.

How will your customers find your campaign? How can you ensure your content meets their needs as they move through the buyer journey?

A mis-aligned strategy is simply a waste of your limited resources.

Consider the media your buyers use to find content, the keywords they use to search for answers and the messaging you should use to speak to their pain points. These are the foundations of every successful inbound marketing strategy.

In order to build upon this first campaign, you must also determine what success looks like:

• How will you know if you attracted the right customers?
• How will you measure the impact your content made on leads moving through the funnel?
• What areas of your campaign need improvement?

If you have not yet had these conversations with stakeholders, it’s important to get everyone on the same page. Not only will they help your campaign find success, but they will help align your marketing and sales efforts across the board.

Try utilizing powerful techniques such as persona story mapping to get a better visualization of your customers and how their needs tie into your business goals — create a link of empathy.

2. Find the Right Tool for Marketing Automation

There are a growing number of tools in the marketing automation space, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed as you try to choose the right one.

HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot and Act-On are some of the biggest players, but unfortunately their price points are often too high for small businesses.

The good news: there are quite a few affordable options that won’t require such a huge investment.

In order to narrow down the field, it’s important to first consider and define your needs:

• What features do you need to execute your strategies — landing pages, triggers and event-based email sending, a built-in CRM?
• What’s your price range?
• What kind of data would you like from the platform, and do you want to own it?

Keep your list of needs in mind as you perform your search.

One added feature many neglect to consider is whether or not the marketing automation tool has a large community. This is especially helpful for those who are new to marketing automation and need a little extra help from experienced users.

At Facet, we like working with Mautic for a number of reasons important to our business goals: it’s cost-effective (completely free, actually), it’s open source and we’re able to own all of the data.

Mautic also has a robust and growing community making it a great starting place. As you build your marketing automation skills and your needs expand, then it might make sense to move to one of the bigger players.

3. An Easy Piece of Content for Your First Offer

The biggest hurdle small business owners face when looking to start inbound marketing and marketing automation is finding the time to develop quality content.

However, you don’t need to re-invent the wheel when it comes to building out your first content offer. In fact, you may not need to build much at all.

Try to leverage the content pieces you already have and re-purpose them into offers.

Do you have a great blog post on your site, a video you’d like to share, an infographic you created? If so, you already have the makings of an offer.

Look to see how you can leverage the information in those pieces and develop tangential guides, how-to’s or checklists your potential customers might find valuable.

Perhaps you’re really starting from scratch and have not developed any content marketing at all — that’s okay. Take a look at sales decks or presentations you’ve given to clients and potential buyers, and consider how they deliver value.

More often than not, you can use those decks as great starter content with only a few minor adjustments.

The key is to consider everything you’ve created content, evaluate which portions your buyer personas will find valuable and get them up on your site a s quick wins.

How to Put Together Your First Content Offer

Once you’ve gathered all of the ingredients, putting the offer together can be quite painless.

The specific steps you’ll take will vary based on your marketing automation tool, but in general you aim to accomplish four things:

• Build your landing page.
• Get your content on the page.
• Build a follow-up and nurture email campaign.
• Measure results and make adjustments.

When building your landing page, make sure you consider best practices to give yourself the best chance at converting visitors. Simple conversion rate optimization can make dramatic differences in your landing page’s performance.

The most important of these steps, however, is to measure your results and make incremental adjustments. Keep an eye on your page analytics, in addition to the conversion statistics from your download form, to see the full picture.

This is how your campaign will evolve and grow over time.