Marketing your business – Part 4

In the last section, we covered the importance of building brand awareness and using your fans to help build and shape new products. Being conscious of the different types of marketing channels and how to advertise, your new product, with them. In this section, we will be covering, one of my personal favourite sections, Automation.

from what I can see the marketing industry has a growing need for automation for example if we want to make bid changes on our account we are limited to the data that is available to us as well as limited to how much time we have in the day while you are sitting in front of the computer. Let say there is a woman in London on a mobile device who is searching for your brand. This information may line up with your customer base, so you want to bid higher. But hang on what if there is a man in Birmingham that is sitting on a tablet device that doesn’t fit your customer audience you need to bid down. What if this is at 11 PM which is out of working hours who will make that change? This is an example where automation comes in.

There is an old rule in marketing called the Rule of 7. This rule basically states that your potential customer needs to see your message at least 7 times before they take any action. You might be thinking that’s not a problem I’ll just bombard my customer with ads, sounds good but it’s likely the only action that the customer takes is blocking you.

Currently, a lot of small business are not utilising automation and digital tools to their fullest.  However, when asked most small businesses do admit that they need to invest more in technology as long as the Return On Ad Spend is higher than the cost.

How to make automation work for you

There are many categories when it comes to automation. When you are looking at paid search you can split Automation into three sections which are reporting, insights and making changes. If you look at email marketing you can automate the process of sending out emails with the correct message regardless of where the customer has joined your sales funnel. But no matter what the marketing channel is automated they all have one thing they have in common and that is they all save you time and resource.

So, where do you begin?

You should start to look at your marketing strategy and see where you can begin automating your processes. For example, within Google ads, you can automate your bidding. This saves you time in making adjustments manually and allows the algorithm to make changes 24 hours a day 7 days a week all year round. The algorithm also has access to more data than you could possibly use. The best part is the longer you leave it to run the more it learns and the better it gets at seeing potential customers so your ROI increases over time.

Automating bids is fairly straight forward but what about reporting would it be great if you could see a report that shows you what your results were for any particular channel without you having to get the data and sort and filter it all manually. This can all be automated.

Statistics for automated email messaging show the revenue generated by cart abandoners increases significantly when you have an automated system in place that sends an email to the customer to let them know they still have items in their basket.

Remember 24/7/365

Keep in mind that computers can work all day and at whatever time you need them to, this leaves you more time to focus on strategy.

Conclusion

So, as you go through your normal day think about how you can use automation to streamline your marketing processes. Even if it is as small taking data from one spreadsheet to another see if there is a way to automate it. I often use Google ads scripts to analyse my performance data I can see very quickly what campaigns have been performing and what ones haven’t. It allows me to detect issues faster than if I just did everything manually. My scripts also alert me when something is out of the ordinary for example if there has been a spike in spending. If I received that alert on a Saturday I wouldn’t have got to it until Monday but with my scripts in place, I dealt with it much faster saving me money.

As well as automation through scripts you should also consider the different platforms that are available on the market. There are some platforms that will not only analyse your data but also keep an eye on your competitors. With Facebook, you will be able to see when they usually post, how many of those posts have liked or have been reshared. You could use this in your marketing plan.

This article is the last in the series I hope you have found benefit from some of the areas that I have covered. I would also advise if you are new to marketing it is best to seek help from someone who is experienced in the field to save you money should you make a mistake.

Rutland Capital Partners have assisted many businesses with finance or support to grow or help them, if selling is the best way forward, either way we would be happy to help you. Please get in contact with us if you would like to discuss further.