7 Marketing Automation Tips for Business Growth

Marketing Automation is the process of creating automated campaigns, workflows and sequences to close more sales, optimise your business, segment your database, and automate repetitive tasks in your company.

Our favourite Marketing Automation tools for small to medium business is Infusionsoft. You can build Marketing Automation Campaigns really fast and once you know your way around the application it’s really easy to use.

Our favourite Funnel Building tool for small to medium businesses is ClickFunnels. You can use ClickFunnels to create high-converting sales and marketing funnels very quickly.

The platform has dozens of Integrations and hundreds of Sales Funnel and Marketing Funnel Templates. It integrates exceptionally well with our two other favorite Marketing Automation tools, which is Infusionsoft and HubSpot.

For larger enterprises or businesses turning over $1Million in revenue, we recommend HubSpot because of its powerful reporting, content marketing, and sales enablement tools – which are built right into the back end of your HubSpot Website.

Both Infusionsoft or HubSpot are powerful Marketing Automation Software Platforms, and when used with the following 7 Marketing Automation Tips, they will help you grow your business, increase sales and save you hours of time each week!

Marketing Automation Tip #1

Better Manage Your Tags and Static Lists.

Tags and Static Lists are an integral part of your Marketing Automation.

Tags and Static Lists are pretty much one in the same.

Inside of Infusionsoft they are called “Tags”

Inside of HubSpot they are called “Static Lists”

Essentially they both do the same thing.

They help you manage your leads, segment your database and identify engaged contacts in your CRM and contact list.

When we manage Infusionsoft and HubSpot for our clients, we are very mindful about creating too many Infusionsoft Tags or too many HubSpot Static Lists because the more you have the less you use!

We’ve seen some people’s Tags or Static Lists be in the hundreds, and at that point the business or company hasn’t really got any idea of which Tags or Static Lists start or finish any Marketing Automation.

For this reason, we like to keep things simple when it comes to Tags and Static Lists.

There is no need to Tag every single campaign action or digital behaviour that someone on your CRM takes action on.

Have a simple plan as to how you want to START or STOP your Marketing Automation (by a contacting getting a Tag or being added to a Static List) or grouping various people together (by adding a Tag or Static List to their profile within your CRM)

Marketing Automation Tip #2

Plan your Naming Conventions.

Your Naming Conventions help you keep a clean CRM and they include things like:

• Contact Tags
• Static Lists
• Campaign Names
• Workflow Names
• Sales Pipeline Stages Names
• Deal Stages
• Task Names
• Notes
• Email Snippets
• Email Templates
• Custom Fields
• Contact Properties
• Landing Page Names
• Website Form Names

Plan ahead and establish your naming conventions right early on in your CRM Development, otherwise you end up with a CRM that’s got information over the place.

Marketing Automation Tip #3

Integrate with your Website

Integrating and Optimising your website pages and landing pages with your Marketing Automation Software is one of the very first things you should do.

At the basic level, this feature of Marketing Automation allows you to capture all the leads and online inquiries from your website pages, landing pages, sales pages, and order forms.

Normally when you have a wordpress site and someone fills out a form on your page, the form results get sent to you via email, and then you have to follow them up or add them to a database or CRM.

With Marketing Automation you can “push” leads and contacts from your Website, or ClickFunnels Sales Funnels into your Infusionsoft or HubSpot CRM (or whatever CRM you are using).

From this point you can channel those leads and contacts into any Marketing Automation campaign, workflow, sales pipeline or deal stage.

Contacts can be placed into Short Term Nurture sequences, Long Term Nurture Sequence, Customer Onboarding Workflows and any other type of Sales or Marketing Automation Funnel that you can think of.

There is also another “higher level” website integration automation that is often overlooked and not used to its full capacity for remarketing… and that is Website Visits.

When a contact who is already in your CRM visits one of your website pages, you can commence Marketing Automation based on the pages they are visiting on your website.

This functionality allows you to further market and re-market to the most engaged prospects and customers on your list, which increases your Marketing ROI.

If you are using HubSpot, this is done pretty much automatically, but with Infusionsoft, there’s one little piece of code you need to send to your web developer – but it has to be placed on every page you want to integrate with Automation.

This gets a little “techy” for the average punter, so CONTACT US if you need help with this one.

Marketing Automation Tip #4

Integrate with your Paid Advertising

Paid Advertising is not getting any cheaper. It’s becoming more competitive and harder to attract your ideal prospects with.

For this reason you’ll want to automate your paid advertising as much as possible.

While you can’t automate the ads themselves, outside of setting them up inside of Google Ads or Facebook Ads, you can automate the flow once a prospect has completed their details on your website or landing page.

One cool feature that’s built into HubSpot is the Facebook LeadAd Form functionality. When using Facebook LeadAds you capture prospects information without them leaving the Facebook Platform they are already on.

This increases your opt in conversion rates, as it is one less step for a prospect to take, and when it comes to internet marketing – the more steps you give a prospect, the higher the drop off.

However there is a problem with Facebook LeadAds. The prospects stay inside of Facebook as a CSV file and you have to go into your Facebook Ads account to download them or check every day.

The HubSpot LeadAd functionality pulls these prospects from Facebook and places them directly into your HubSpot CRM ready for you kick off your Marketing Automation.

With Infusionsoft, this is a little more tricky, because you need a third party tool, called Zapier Premium.

Zapier will then push the Information from your LeadAd contacts into your Infusionsoft CRM and then from there you can drive your Marketing Automation from within Infusionsoft.

Marketing Automation Tip #5

Whiteboard your Marketing Funnel Framework

One of the biggest mistakes we see is a “choose your own adventure” approach to Marketing Funnels inside Marketing Automation tools such as Infusionsoft and HubSpot.

Users jump straight into their Marketing Automation Campaigns and start adding sequences and workflows with no real success plan or Sales Funnel Blueprint.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to whiteboard your Funnel Plans before you actually start building them with ClickFunnels, Infusionsoft, or HubSpot.

Seeing your Marketing Automation and Sales Funnels on a Whiteboard before you build them out inside the actual Marketing Automation Application will allow you to achieve your marketing automation objectives sooner.

Marketing Automation Tip #6

Create a Sales Pipeline or Deal Stages

Both Infusionsoft and HubSpot allow you to create a Sales Pipeline or Deal Stages.

This is quite different from Marketing Automation, because it is a sales enablement process in your company designed to help your Sales People manage the communication with their hot prospects and close deals faster.

Marketing Automation is replaced with Sales Enablement and Sales Automation when talking about Sales Pipelines and Deal Stages.

Sales Automation supports your sales people and helps them streamline the sales process.

Sales Automation also helps you streamline your after sales service and how you manage the onboarding process for new customers.

Both Infusionsoft and HubSpot are powerful Sales Automation platforms, but the when it comes to Sales Automation, HubSpot is the hands down winner because of the following powerful Sales Enablement tools:

• Gmail and Outlook integration
• Built-in Email Sales Snippets
• Built-in Appointment Setting Functionality
• Automation of Deal Stages
• Multiple deal pipelines
• Quotes
• Salesforce integration
• Conversations inbox
• Live chat
• Conversation routing
• Conversational bots
• Email Scheduling

Marketing Automation Tip #7

Train and Educate your Team

Your Marketing Automation will only work for you if your team use it.

There’s nothing worse than seeing businesses and companies with powerful tools like Infusionsoft, ClickFunnels or HubSpot at their fingertips and their team members don’t use it often enough to make any real impact on the bottom line.

Ongoing Marketing Automation Training is the key to successfully creating the best campaigns and workflows for your business.

We recommend training your team once per quarter on strategy and implementation with your preferred Marketing Automation Tool.

Talk to us about our 3-Month Strategic Consulting SEO package, where we can help your team get the most out of your Marketing Automation, CRM and Sales Funnels.

In Conclusion

When strategically planned, Marketing Automation is a powerful and smart way to grow your business in the digital age. It’ll save you time, streamline your business and increase sales.

If you or your team need help with your Marketing Automation, CRM Integration, or Sales Funnels, or you want help deciding which Marketing Automation and CRM Platform is best for your business, CONTACT US for a No Obligation Quote.