How to Automate Your Marketing and Sales
Tanel Vetik
Head of Strategy
Strong sales funnels are the foundation of a successful business, and marketing is your foundation. At the same time they both take up a very large part of daily workload and cannot be delegated in full, unless you have a substantial team. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs don’t really have the time or the manpower to thoroughly deal with sales and marketing alongside all other tasks, even though most would like to spend more time on both.
Most business owners don’t come from a marketing background and focus too much on sales. Having a balanced funnel where marketing campaigns feed qualified warm leads, and sales picks them up, results in much higher conversion rates than a regular cold outreach would. The reason why many businesses don’t spend the necessary time to build marketing funnels, is because they either don’t have the time to do it themselves, don’t know how to do it, or don’t see the ROI in doing it at that given time. But there’s an easier way, and that’s automation.
How to Automate Your Marketing and Sales
Tanel Vetik
Head of Strategy
Strong sales funnels are the foundation of a successful business, and marketing is your foundation. At the same time they both take up a very large part of daily workload and cannot be delegated in full, unless you have a substantial team. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs don’t really have the time or the manpower to thoroughly deal with sales and marketing alongside all other tasks, even though most would like to spend more time on both.
Most business owners don’t come from a marketing background and focus too much on sales. Having a balanced funnel where marketing campaigns feed qualified warm leads, and sales picks them up, results in much higher conversion rates than a regular cold outreach would. The reason why many businesses don’t spend the necessary time to build marketing funnels, is because they either don’t have the time to do it themselves, don’t know how to do it, or don’t see the ROI in doing it at that given time. But there’s an easier way, and that’s automation.
Strong sales funnels are the foundation of a successful business, and marketing is your foundation. At the same time they both take up a very large part of daily workload and cannot be delegated in full, unless you have a substantial team. Unfortunately, most entrepreneurs don’t really have the time or the manpower to thoroughly deal with sales and marketing alongside all other tasks, even though most would like to spend more time on both.
Most business owners don’t come from a marketing background and focus too much on sales. Having a balanced funnel where marketing campaigns feed qualified warm leads, and sales picks them up, results in much higher conversion rates than a regular cold outreach would. The reason why many businesses don’t spend the necessary time to build marketing funnels, is because they either don’t have the time to do it themselves, don’t know how to do it, or don’t see the ROI in doing it at that given time. But there’s an easier way, and that’s automation.
Guide to automating your marketing funnel
Before mapping out a strategy for marketing automation, you should write down all the marketing channels you are open to using (Google, Facebook, email, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.) and map the potential customer’s journey from your first brand touchpoint to repeat purchases. Yes, not just until the first purchase – but to the point of repeat purchases. You want to aim for customer lifetime value. Your cost of getting the first sale is always going to be the highest. It’s a lot cheaper to get repeat purchases. It’s often free, if we use email marketing or give them a call.
If you’ve done the task, then you should now have your customer journey mapped out and the marketing channels marked down.
Now let’s add work processes:
- which platforms require you to do daily or weekly tasks,
- for which task is it sufficient to do something just once,
- when is it fine to do nothing,
- and when can activities be combined into a single task.
With this exercise, we get a clear overview of the workload for managing each marketing activity.
Now, it’s time to see where forces can be combined (e.g., collecting subscribers through a Facebook ad campaign for email automation, Google remarketing campaigns based on specific actions on the website, optimizing Google Ads targeting according to ad success, etc.). The most popular marketing automations are:
- Email marketing automation.
- Optimization of Google ads.
- Cross-platform dynamic remarketing.
- CRM and website analytics ABM-strategy data tracking.
Guide to automating your sales funnel
With marketing automations clear (if you thoughtfully read the previous chapter), let’s now look at sales automation. You’re probably thinking of chatbots, call centres, and spam emails. We certainly don’t recommend sending spam, but targeted and relevant cold email campaigns are advisable. Just as you have too little time for searching for new business contacts and partners, your potential customer is also busy. The best email marketing management company we know is Smaily, as they have the highest authority score and focus on mailing list quality. Their customer support has also always been swift and efficient.
To stay top of mind and offer value to your prospect leads, it’s good to send cold emails introducing your services and value propositions at a reasonable interval (e.g., once a month). This is entirely permitted under GDPR regulations in the B2B landscape. Such communication can also be fully automated – but do keep it as relevant as possible and respect your audience.
The second sales automation is probably familiar to every e-commerce business, as it involves selling additional products and services to existing customers. In the B2C landscape, prior consent from the customer is needed, and although this is not necessary on the B2B side, it’s still a “nice to have”.
Use email automations, dynamic ads on Facebook/LinkedIn, and Google dynamic remarketing. In addition, it’s recommended to set up emails to be sent out when the purchased product is running out (e.g., cosmetics, when you know the average time of use) or when their purchased product goes very well with another alternative product or service.
The third method of sales automation is not directly related to “making” sales, but rather is a process-supporting activity. Over time, noting down the potential customer’s journey can take up a pretty large part of the workload (especially if there are dozens of prospects in the sales pipeline). Here, sales funnel automation comes to the rescue, which keeps an eye on emails, categorizes activities under the right contacts, creates tasks about activities promised in the text, and much more. Such SaaS platforms are usually paid and often expensive, but if the price of one sale reaches hundreds or even thousands of pounds, then maybe it’s time to start automating your lead tracking. One of the best platforms for this is Hubspot.
Good luck with automating your sales and marketing. Once you’ve built these systems or hired someone to do it for you (here’s where we can help you out), you’ll start noticing a lot of free time in your schedule. That’s a guarantee!