How to Use Your Website to Enhance your Marketing Automation

Discover how you can utilise marketing automation to improve conversions across your website

 

One of the reasons that we love buying from small businesses is because they can offer us a personal service. They treat us as individuals, get to know us, and learn about our goals and needs. This positive customer experience earns loyalty and repeat business.  As organisations grow and win more customers, it used to be nigh on impossible to maintain this personal touch across multiple channels. The closest we came to achieving it was through customer segmentation. That was until marketing automation came along.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation allows organisations to communicate with individuals at scale. It is essentially a software tool that helps you manage your data and marketing activities efficiently and effectively by automating day-to-day tasks. It helps marketers to generate more leads, nurture them with highly personalised, relevant content and turn them into loyal customers by enhancing the overall customer experience.

What does it do exactly?

There are more channels and more data than ever before so we need help to manage it all. Marketing automation is designed to get the most out of prospect and customer data by coordinating marketing efforts that drive revenue. It brings together multiple channels like social media, email, and web (content, landing pages and forms) to help you prioritise and manage contacts and campaigns, score leads, carry out A/B testing and measure the impact of your activities. It also streamlines sales and marketing activities as most systems integrate with a CRM system. As data is held in one place, all teams have greater visibility of leads and can take a joined up approach.

Ok, but it’s just for email, right?

There is a widespread misconception that marketing automation is only really for email. Although email is an important component, if you use it solely for email you are limiting the impact that marketing automation can have.

Done well, marketing automation gives you the opportunity to see a wide range of behaviours that your leads are demonstrating through their interactions with all your channels. For example, the role that your website can play in marketing automation shouldn’t be underestimated. By understanding what attracted your visitor to your website, the content they clicked on, how long they spent on particular pages and when and why they revisited, all provides marketers with a much wider context to understand and get to know their prospects. What’s more, it can help them guide those leads further down the sales funnel by providing the right information at the right time for them to take the next step.

By the same token, if your website is not performing as well as you’d expect, marketing automation will help you address some of those challenges. If your website conversion rates are low, your content is not nurturing leads effectively through the customer journey; then marketing automation can help identify and address where your site is falling short and boost conversion rates and ROI.

5 ways to maximise ROI for your website with marketing automation:

1. Develop a content strategy

Develop relevant and optimised content that speaks directly to your target audience. Discuss and address their issues or talk about new ways to achieve their goals. Make your content educational, engaging, and shareable. Many marketing automation systems can recognise individual visitors to your site and if they are from a target organisation, sector or location, dynamically alter the content displayed on the site to be more relevant to that visitor

2. Use website personalisation

Once your visitors start to engage with different types of content on your site, you can set up marketing automation so that it will show them other relevant content in real-time, like related articles, blog posts, webinars or eGuides. Think of it as the B2B equivalent of Amazon’s recommendations.  As your leads spend more time on your site and visit more pages, you can learn more about the issues that they are trying to address or what they are trying to achieve and supply the content that can help them. The result is a more personalised and valued customer journey that increases conversion rates at every stage of the sales funnel.

3. Keep your leads coming back to your site

Of course, most B2B leads will make multiple visits to your site to gather all the relevant information, establish your credibility and decide they can trust you. So give them reasons to keep coming back. Combine web activity with email and retargeting ads on social media to highlight more relevant and useful content. Use bespoke landing pages and forms to access and download gated content and glean more insights about your leads as you develop your relationship with them. Marketing automation makes it much easier to try A/B testing to see which type of landing page and what content works best so you can continually refine your tactics.

4. Score every lead

Decide what your ideal lead looks like and what their interactions say about their intentions. Use marketing automation tools to score leads as they progress through your sales funnel to find the perfect moment in their decision-making process for your sales team to make contact. With marketing automation, you can hand over a qualified opportunity with additional insight into their issues, needs and motivations based on the interactions you have already had with them.

5. Measure and report on results

Use marketing automation to monitor how your campaigns are performing. With streamlined processes, greater visibility of what your leads are doing, and where they are in the sales funnel, you can see how your website and content is performing at every stage. You’ll also be able to see where to make the tweaks to maximise the ROI of your content marketing. Marketing automation gives you the power to demonstrate the value of your content campaigns and how they are helping to achieve business goals.

The great benefit of marketing automation is that it allows us to treat large numbers of prospects like real people and respond to their individual needs appropriately. It means that we can use all our marketing channels to get a full picture of their unique needs and interests and tailor our communications to meet them. For too long, our websites have been static broadcasting tools with an ‘all things to all people’ approach. Marketing automation means that they can become part of a personalised two-way conversation and offer a far superior customer experience.

Takeaways:

• Marketing automation helps marketers manage data and deliver campaigns by automating day-to-day tasks.
• Marketing automation isn’t just for email, your website can play an important role in providing additional context and information about leads and help them convert.
• Engaging content at every buying stage, personalised experience, and integration with other channels will help you present the right information at the right time to increase conversion.
• Your website will enhance marketing automation but the reverse is also true: marketing automation will turn your website into an interactive and personal experience.

How can you maximise ROI from your website with marketing automation? Find out in The CMO’s Guide to Lead Generation Websites