It can sometimes feel like you have an almost endless list of things to do for each new marketing campaign. This can be further complicated by campaigns across different channels, or when some tasks are outsourced while others are performed in-house. And often this requires using different tools which can make it hard to understand just how effective a campaign has been.
So how can you help simplify the process of organizing your marketing campaigns? How can you make it easier to measure the results? Digital marketing automation lets both SaaS companies and small businesses easily create and run personalized campaigns that generate leads while improving their marketing processes.
In this post we’ll look at:
- Why you should simplify how you organize marketing campaigns
- The benefits of using one tool for all your campaigns
- How to organize a campaign from start to finish in Plezi
Why you should simplify how you organize marketing campaigns
Every marketer knows from hard experience that a great B2B marketing campaign can involve a lot of work. There are a host of different elements that go into planning a digital campaign, running it, measuring the results, getting it right and using these results to take action. Marketing teams also typically use several different tools to do all of these things and what can sometimes get lost, is your core audience and your business goals.
Take the example of a campaign designed to promote a white paper or guide. The time and resources you spend creating the content is just the start. Promoting it might involve an email marketing campaign, social media posts, and paid advertising on different digital channels. You’ll also need to create a dedicated landing page on your website and integrate things like calls to action (CTAs) and pop-ups.
Afterwards, you need to measure how effective your campaign and strategy has been. And if you’ve promoted content across several different digital channels, you’ll need to measure results for each. To maximize the campaign’s impact, you’ll also want to use those results to improve the next content and campaigns you create in the future.
Once you have converted leads through your campaign, you then want to take them on a customer journey – and by having everything in one place, you have the means to create a digital journey personalised to your audience (More on that later in this article).Â
All of that can understandably leave marketers feeling unsure where to start, but also without the means to properly track and identify the KPI’s and ROI of a campaign. That’s especially true in the current business environment when a lot of marketing teams are now being asked to do more with less. But there is a way to simplify how you organize campaigns and save time and resources in the process: marketing automation.
The benefits of using one tool for all your campaignsÂ
Using a marketing automation platform will let you streamline your marketing processes and manage every aspect of a digital campaign in one place. Here are six major benefits of implementing a marketing automation tool for your business.
1. Save time and resources
One of the biggest benefits of marketing automation is the time saved for marketing teams. By automating repetitive tasks, like sending follow-up emails or posting to social media, marketing teams have more time to focus on actions with higher added value like creating quality content.
You’ll also save significant time and resources not having to switch between different tools to perform the same tasks. Most marketing automation platforms can be easily integrated using APIs with a range of other software solutions like a CRM. This makes it a lot easier to not only create and run a campaign, but to accurately measure the results.
(Plezi’s automation software that offer multiple functionalities to attract, convert and nurture leads)
2. Easily segment and nurture leads
By using marketing automation to distribute content, you can score leads that come to your website through content and segment them into different groups. This makes it easier to identify who is really interested in your product or service, as well as who might be ready to buy.
Marketing automation also makes it easy to nurture leads through the buyer’s journey towards purchase. Help leads engage with your website and you can collect more information about them. This then lets you send them highly personalized content across multiple channels and at every stage of the marketing funnel, bringing traffic back to your website and helping your audience to engage more strongly with your brand.
3. Accurately measure the effectiveness of campaigns
Creating and running campaigns using marketing automation will also provide you with a huge amount of data about your target audience in one location. For example, you can see figures for website visitors, leads, and marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and where these have come from. This allows you to easily track how successful a campaign is.
What is more, you will learn about which content speaks to your target audience, which increases your brand awareness, in terms of traffic, which helps conversion to create leads and which digital strategy is really paying off in terms of quality leads. In order for your business to really improve its digital strategy and achieve its goals, you need to be able to identify your future customers from the different content they engage with.Â
Data for specific pieces of content will also let you track their conversion rates in real-time and allow you to identify possible leaks in your funnel. All of this makes it easy to accurately show the return on investment (ROI) of each piece of content, and for the marketing department as a whole.
(The different areas where you need to have content)
4. Refine and improve future marketing actions
The main advantage of having all this data is that you can use it to take action. Firstly, this will let you optimize your existing marketing processes going forward. For example, the number of MQLs you convert into customers might indicate whether you need to change how you score leads.
The data will also let you optimize your content and communication with leads. Content conversion rates will indicate whether you need to make changes or add additional information. It will also let you create more of the content that works and less of what doesn’t.
5. Improve marketing alignment with sales
Being able to collect more information about leads also lets you qualify them more accurately. That in turn increases the chances that sales will be able to convert those leads into customers. With sales more effective as a result, alignment between the two teams can only be improved.Â
Marketing automation software can also easily be integrated with a CRM. This enables you to automatically pass information between the two tools in both directions. That helps makes both teams more efficient and makes the transition between the two departments seamless for your leads. By creating a better buying experience, you increase the chances that your website users will make a purchase.
6. Scale with confidence
It’s vital that the processes you use to organize your marketing campaigns can grow with your business. If you use several different tools to do this, or still perform tasks manually, it will be harder to scale these processes to reach a larger target audience in the future.
Using one tool to create, run, and measure the effectiveness of campaigns makes it easy to scale your marketing processes when you need to. There’s no need to juggle different subscriptions or licences, and automating processes makes them much less dependent on staff availability or individual talent.
How to organize a campaign from start to finish in Plezi
Let’s come back to the example we looked at earlier of a digital campaign to promote a white paper or guide. This process can be greatly simplified by using a single marketing automation platform like Plezi.
(An example of content in Plezi’s platform, which allows scoring and tagging)
Once you’ve created the content, Plezi’s easy-to-use drag and drop interface lets you create dedicated landing pages for your website optimized to convert visitors. Plezi’s smart forms let you learn more about visitors without ever having to ask them for the same information twice.
The platform lets you easily create and track both emails and newsletters sent to your contact database to promote content. You can also create social media posts and schedule them, all directly within Plezi, potentially saving you hours every week. And you can set up sponsored ads and measure their performance without needing to change tools.
The platform lets you easily create and track both emails and newsletters sent to your contact database to promote content. You can also create social media posts and schedule them, all directly within Plezi, potentially saving you hours every week. And you can set up sponsored ads and measure their performance without needing to change tools.
Plezi also provides you with a wealth of information about a campaign’s performance. For content like white papers, you can see numbers of visitors, downloads, and leads generated as a result. And for each marketing campaign, Plezi provides you with data on visitors and leads for each channel. This lets you quickly see how effective a campaign has been and what channels have delivered the best results.
(Plezi’s app, where you can see the success of your content by medium)
You can understand how well a campaign has worked by looking at the traffic generated, conversions and MQL’s. You can also see the source and medium, for example, of those different stats directly on Plezi. Invaluable for you to understand the effectiveness of your different channel strategies when promoting your campaign.
And content (or nurturing) doesn’t stop there. You can carry on nurturing your leads through Plezi’s key feature, the Smart Campaign, uses a system of tags that are assigned to leads when they view content. This lets you automatically deliver highly personalized content to each lead at the right time, enabling you to generate more qualified leads as a result. And you can carry using the digital content, by using it as a personalised message in our smart campaign to be sent to the specific audience interested.
In today’s world, your marketing processes need to be as efficient as possible. Rather than several different tools, something here for emails, something to follow leads, excel and google spreadsheets etc… you can join up your digital marketing strategy and make it easier in the process.
By using a single marketing automation tool, you can easily create, run, and track campaigns across a number of different channels. This will save you valuable time and resources. It also enables you to accurately measure the results of each campaign, improve your marketing processes, and help future-proof your business.
How has marketing automation helped you to simplify your marketing processes? Why not tell us about it in the comments below?
