How to Grow your Business Through Automation

Yes, you read that title correct, we are back again with the one and only – Dr Dave Chaffey. For anyone who does not yet know, Dr Chaffey is a phenomenal marketing expert, and co-founder of Smart Insights. It was an absolute honour to be able to host yet again another seminar with Dr Dave Chaffey where he very generously shared some of his great findings with us all. Today, we will share with you some of his great ideas and statistics. Growing and developing your business can be something very daunting as there are always the ‘what if’ risks involved. But that is exactly why we are here today – to give you the assurance that with great effort comes great success; and that to recognise an opportunity, you must face the challenges that first come with it. Marketing automation certainly seems a challenge to many, but once it is internalised, it can achieve you some significant results. We paired up with Dr Chaffey to tell you exactly how to grow and optimise your business through marketing automation; now you don’t even have to worry about the risks because we’ve cut them all out for you! You can consider this to be your glorious guide to growth. It is all upwards from here on. You can thank us later!  

RACE Framework

Before we dive into the details, it is very important to understand the RACE framework which Dr Chaffey considers to be the core foundational element to any business’s marketing success.
Reach: This is the very first stage where you grow your audience using paid, owned, and digital media to diffuse an effective first impression, seeking to ultimately convert these strangers into visitors.
Act: Once you have reached out to the strangers and successfully acquired them as a visitor, you must then actively interact with these visitors, encouraging them onto the next stage of prospects and leads. If you do not act interact actively, you could lose the visitor.
Convert: It is time to convert these leads into customers by achieving sales through customer satisfaction. These sales can be obtained through various activities, one of the many being to register them onto a nurture program.
Engage: Now that these leads have become customers, it is a great opportunity to keep them nurtured by actively engaging with them and encouraging them to repeat purchase. The ulterior aim at this stage is to obtain the customer as a repeat customer.
  Here below is an image of Dr Chaffey’s framework: Source: Smart Insights free digital marketing planning template  

Automation Maturity and Trends

The very first step to grow your business through marketing automation is to analyse and understand the maturity cycle of digital marketing and identify any trends within the cycle as well as acknowledging when the plateau of this digital cycle is expected to be reached. Below are some statistics that Dr Dave Chaffey had found regarding marketing automation and its relevance to businesses today.

Trending tools identified within the marketing automation of businesses

Trend factors that should be identified are the marketing tools that companies use to automate their platform. From the statistics of Dr Chaffey’s findings, 94% of companies have implemented automated emails within their platforms. This is a dramatic difference compared to the next-common factor of automated landing pages which received 59%. The least-implemented marketing automation tool by companies is SMS, as only 10% of companies use this approach.

Who uses marketing automation?

Dr Chaffey finds that 10% of the business population does not use any form of marketing automation. Though an even more concerning statistic expresses that 32% of businesses only use marketing automation on a very basic level without utilising and exploiting many available features. This means much of the automated service that this population of businesses could use, instead leave untouched. Businesses that have implemented automation to a core extent, optimising their features around this only average to 9%. This is troubling as almost the same amount of the business population that does not use any form of automation is just 1% away from the amount that fully internalise this feature. This microscopic difference already begins to tell a us a long story. We are living in such an era where digital automation remains the core facet of a successful and trendsetting business. Metaphorically, this is the backbone that all businesses must entail to mark their space in this volatile world of digitalisation.

The effectiveness of marketing automation techniques

Based on a sample of 111 companies, Dr Chaffey investigated the effectiveness of some marketing automation techniques that companies implement. The most-effective marketing automation technique that is implemented by most companies are landing pages for capturing leads, running at 19% of the sample population. Present was 17% of the population that does not use this technique. Following right behind is the second-most effective founded technique of personalised landing pages with 17% of the population claiming this to be very effective. However, this was an interesting one because over half of the sample population had claimed they do not use this marketing automation technique. Identifying the least-used technique, personalised websites are something that as little as 7% have deemed as very effective, whilst 67% of companies from the sample do not utilise this at all. That is a large chunk! This must be due to the diligence required when implementing this technique as website personalisation and dynamics can become very problematic if there is an insufficient amount of data on the customer or visitor. If this technique is implemented without enough data, then the website dynamics may not appeal to the party, leading to significant miscommunication errors. This technique is extremely effective, but for it to work, enough data about the customer or visitor is crucial to be present.  

Targeting Strategy

Beneath the ultimate targeting strategy lay the secret of enhanced email engagement which is triggered by personalised responses sent out to customers. This in return leads to greater response rates from the customers. Dr Dave Chaffey found that 32% of companies do not use targeted emailing. This means that all their respondents receive the same emails rather than personalising emails according to the nature of the responses. To effectively personalise the content of the email, constructing a persona is crucial. This persona should entail details such as characteristics (name, demographics, and work); buyer behaviour (goals and motivations, barriers and challenges, social media usage, and devices owned); and the customer journey (discover, compare, select). Once the persona is constructed in a detailed format (as guided above), the information of the customer should be transmitted into the persona, amplifying a much more targeted email approach which will result with your company receiving a significantly higher email engagement.  

Contact Strategy

Determining the effectiveness of your use of lifecycle messaging is something very crucial in the contact strategy. The cycle begins with an email being sent out to the demand generation who are flagged up as having a purchase intention. This intention is recognised through the system by capturing new visitors and tracking their activity. The CRM contact database is next referred to, to help identify whether this visitor is a lead or prospect. If a prospect is identified, they are registered as a repeat customer and are put onto a nurture program to retain the relationship and keep it active. If a lead is identified, they will be entered into a nurture series according to their behaviour and interests, tailoring this series as much as possible. If the lead qualifies as a B2B Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), the nurture program is maintained until they convert into a customer, after which they are put onto a different nurture program with the sole purpose of keeping the interaction consistent and to tame the nurture series. However, sometimes a lapsed customer can also visit the website. Although they are lapsed, they would still be treated as repeat customers and would be put onto the according nurture series program that aims to convert them into an MQL. This lifecycle messaging effectively entails automation that Dr Chaffey had analysed, finding that the most common automated email marketing technique is the very beginning initial welcome sequence. The next-most common one was found as nurturing emails based on behaviour such as the content either browsed or downloaded by the visitor. Although the nurture emails were found as the second-most popular, only 41% of the sample population implement this automated email marketing technique. This is alarming as it is a very effective approach that enhances personalised email content, sending the visitor very relevant content. We like to think of it as a tailored approach being the perfect honey to attract those bees. Another great contact strategy shared by Dr Chaffey was the built-in conversation messaging to website journeys. This means sending a live automated message to users through the website as they browse through. This message will be personalised according to what the visitor is browsing. It will be worthwhile to include a link in there too to make the most of their visit, suggesting some pages or resources from your website to them. For example, if your visitor is browsing through for marketing resources, you could pop up a live message to them in the bottom corner of their screen suggesting a page of your website to them that shares many free marketing resources for them to have a look at. This page can also be linked into this message for them to able to easily access it. A top tip for this would be to also have a quick feedback option below the message where the user can select whether they think this suggestion was very useful, useful, neutral, not useful. This would give an intelligible idea of how effective or relevant this message was according to the visitor behaviour and interests.  

Content Strategy

The content marketing strategy influences more dedicated, resourced, and measured content, being sure to lead your business the right way. This strategy enables your marketing content to seamlessly support the buying cycle as well as different types of buyers. Here below is a table that will assist you map out the journey more effectively as it displays the purpose of each stage. The first stage is to reach out to the customer, increasing your awareness in their eyes through SEO. Sparking engagement is equally vital at this stage, as this could make the customer develop an interest in your company if the SEO has not optimised this effect. Engagement can take place though pop-ups and other inline content. Although the engagement would now be present, taking action and keeping it consistent is our next focus by capturing the interests of the customer through welcome emails, website personalisation, live chat, and email nurture programs. This would lead to conversion into MQLs and the willingness to make a purchase. Now is the stage to convert the customer into making the purchase. At this stage engagement is still crucial, as you do not want to lose these buyers from making the purchase. This can be done by sending automated emails by the sales team regarding the purchase. Finally, the engaging stage – ensuring the contact is still maintained post-purchase is a great customer retention strategy. This can be done through E-newsletters, and dynamic website pages where the content is personalised according to the interests of the customer. Documenting your marketing strategy can take you a long way, as the majority of B2B marketers find themselves becoming very successful when implementing content marketing strategies within their companies. Source: Smart Insights content marketing strategy  

Personalisation Strategy

Automation and machine learning is specifically embedded within this strategy with the ability to being your business some great opportunities. However, according to Dr Chaffey’s findings, almost half of companies do not use artificial intelligence or machine learning to support email marketing, nor plan to implement any of the two. With only as little as 2% being able to confidently state that they have strongly embedded these features and have been using them since over two years. This microscopic number is something needs to change. The remaining 49% of Dave Chaffey’s population either plans to implement automation or had recently just started. This gives us some glaring hope to see some significant change in the next couple of years to come, as more businesses are turning towards some of the latest technology as well as this legendary tool with gradual effect. It is time to show the business world what they are missing out on, and the big great benefits that come alongside optimising your business marketing operations by implementing automation and machine learning. To increase the implementation of this great functionality, the decision influences within a B2B market must be clearly identified. Emotions weigh greatly within the B2B market, and surprisingly so, they tend to weigh significantly more than pure logic and reason. However, only 31% of prospective customers think B2B brands provide a personal value. This clearly demonstrates a large gap between what is being hoped for, and what is actually being received. Chaffey found that only 8.5% of businesses are willing to pay a higher purchase price even when they see no personal value within a product or service. This clearly signifies how crucial the remaining 91.5% of the business population deem a personal value to be even when conducting a commercial purchase. Therefore, a personal value should be the core embedment within the sell factor of a product. Whatever the demand, AI never fails to meet it. Yes, you understood correctly, AI uses the Natural Language Generation to personalise communications on emotional response and empathy. This means enhancing the communication via reward, praise, and achievement, making the interaction embed a humanised approach as personalisation reaches its peak through this automated system.  

Barriers of Automation

However, as legendary as the tool of automation is, there remain many barriers of adoption within this, being the primary cause for no significant increase in its implementation. A very common cause is found to be limited staff knowledge or skills required for automation to effectively function within the company. This means that there is an insufficient amount of knowledge dispersed on this concept within the world of business, often leading to it being overlooked. Following right behind, is the reason of lack of resources available within a company to manage implementation of automation features. In such circumstances where there is a lack of knowledge, skills, or resources amongst the business employees, then implementing a marketing automation system might cause more conflict than not having a marketing automation system.  

Be First in Line!

With the sufficient knowledge and resources needed to implement automation effectively, it can change your business completely; and we mean in an extremely positive way. You can whizz past all your competitors with this practice in place; all you need to do is have this glorious guide at hand to optimise your growth in this dynamic field. Marketing automation is a revolutionary twist in the world of business, and once you turn towards this great tool, you will never want to turn back. It is as good as having a genie, and certainly much better than Aladdin’s, but shh do not tell him we said that!