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If you’re still hesitant about adopting AI into your marketing plan, or you’re just not sure where to start, we have good news for you. Getting started with AI doesn’t have to be a huge investment. You’d be amazed at how some simple marketing automation tactics can make all the difference.
According to the Marketing AI Institute, an incredible ‘98% of marketers use AI in some way’, with 77% of marketers harnessing it to save time on repetitive tasks. So you’re in good company.
If the promise of eliminating monkey work isn’t appealing enough, businesses are adopting AI to:
- Improve data-driven decision making
- Reduce costs
- Personalize customer experiences
- Scale operations
- Innovate new products
All of these can be implemented into your marketing plan. So now that you’re convinced, we’re going to give you an easy step-by-step guide on implementing automation into your marketing strategy.
What Is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation involves using software to bring AI-driven solutions to marketing departments, mostly for handling routine tasks. It most commonly involves lead-scoring, email sending and personalization, and social media scheduling. New tools arrive on the market every week, opening up the options marketing managers have for automation.
That all sounds wonderful, but it isn’t without its challenges. These are good to be aware of before you begin building your strategy:
- Over-automation: If literally everything you do is done with AI, your customers can smell it, and it comes across as inauthentic.
- Complex setup: To get a fully working automation ecosystem, you’ll need to invest time and skills. Which leads us to…
- Skill gaps: According to the Marketing AI Institute, only 22% of businesses claim to have implemented some kind of AI training for their employees. Keep in mind that more complex setups will require skills your teammates may not have.
- Human involvement: Anything you set up will still need monitoring by human teammates. Keep this in mind if your main goal is to reduce workload.
How does marketing automation work?
Rather than buying a single all-in-one tool for automating every single marketing task at once (though who knows how close we are to that being possible), marketing automation involves using various tools to automate certain parts of the process. You might still make all of your content yourself, but AI will help you distribute it.
You’re probably already using automation in your email sending process, as it's been standard industry practice for years. That could mean having a tool that A/B tests different subject lines and sends the winner to the rest of the recipients.
AI is also useful behind the scenes to help with internal operations, like having dashboards that update automatically, lead scoring, or tools like Bash which easily generate and summarize documentation.
Let’s say you host an online event, and someone has to remember to pass a list of attendee data to your sales team. You could speed things up by having a report automatically generated in Salesforce and assigned to the right salesperson.
Example: A customer journey with marketing automation
So if we’re imagining how marketing automation is implemented across a customer journey, it might look something like this…
- Awareness stage: A potential customer lands on your website. A pop up appears with a personalized message based on the pages that they visit.
- Consideration stage: After browsing your website and finding your blog, they sign up for your newsletter. They receive an email nurturing flow that changes based on which emails they do or do not open.
- Decision stage: They add an item to their cart, or start the sign up process, but leave before they checkout. They receive an email prompting them to finish by offering a discount or going through common FAQs.
- Purchase stage and nurturing: Once they become a customer, you identify them as a potential brand advocate based on how often they renew/use the product/make additional purchases. They receive extra benefits like exclusive discounts or early access to new features.
Building Your Marketing Automation Plan
Assuming you already have a marketing strategy in place, and that you’re excited about gaining some AI superpowers, now you need to get started. But where to begin?
We’ve broken things down into an easy-to-follow process.
Define your goals
Start by defining your goals. What specifically do you want to achieve? This is crucial information if you need to get buy-in from leadership, who will likely ask for concrete results before investing money or tech time in a solution.
Since AI is such a time-saver, your goal might be to free up team capacity by a certain number of hours per week. Or you might go channel-by-channel, and say that you want to improve conversion on a specific landing page, or improve email open rates.
Identify quick wins
Time to value is crucial for new projects, so you want to start by identifying quick wins. Choosing one thing to focus on will be better for both measuring results and not getting overwhelmed.
- What’s a small but long-time problem that no one else has gotten around to solving?
- What standard industry practice (like A/B testing email subject lines) have you been slow to adopt?
- Which tools in your existing stack have AI features that you haven’t explored?
- What can you test for yourself before recommending to the rest of the team?
Tip: Assume nothing! The key to successful AI adoption is collaboration, so ask your teams what their pain points are, and if anyone has had success with AI automation in the past.
Review your customer journeys
For maximum impact, look for weaknesses in your current customer journeys. Where are the leaks in your bucket? Are there leads that go unnurtured?
This goes back to our quick wins point. Look for areas where you have the biggest room for improvement, to increase your chances of your automation efforts paying off.
You should also look for points in the journey that take a disproportionate amount of your time. If anything involves a significant amount of copy and paste on your part, chances are there’s an AI alternative!
Choose the right tools
Before you go rushing around looking for the hottest new AI-centric tools, don’t overlook what you already have in your stack. And definitely don’t rush into buying the most comprehensive (AKA expensive) marketing automation platform. It’ll make your job easier if the tools you’re already used to have AI features that you just haven’t taken advantage of yet.
If not, you might consider checking out some more specific software:
Comprehensive marketing automation tools:
- HubSpot
- Pardot
- Marketo by Adobe
Channel solutions:
- Mailchimp and ConvertKit for email
- Salesforce and Pipedrive for CRM
- Hootsuite and Buffer for social media
- Zendesk and Drift for chatbots
Project Management and Communication:
- Bash for project documentation, automated meeting minutes, and internal communication
- Rock for messaging and task management
- Trello for project management
For the best results, make sure the tools you choose integrate with your CRM to capture key customer data.
Set up your campaigns, test, and iterate
Start with a campaign that’s nice and simple. Email automation is the easiest place to start if it’s your first time automating anything. Don’t get carried away and create an overly complicated flow, at least not for your first try!
Run a few tests with some segments of your audience to see what works and what doesn’t, and also to make sure you don’t break anything.
When the results start coming in, see if there are any improvements you can make. If people are still dropping off in your flow, test more relevant content or more appealing CTAs and try again.
Keep improving
Make retrospectives part of your marketing automation strategy. This gives you the opportunity to look back and see the big picture. Don’t just consider whether you hit your goals or not, ask yourself:
- Were the goals clearly defined and achievable?
- Did we follow the original plan, or did we have to change things on the go?
- Did we have any blockers with the set up?
- Was the timing of the automated messages effective?
- Do our automations save time, or create more work?
- What are the main learnings from the project?
On Your Way to Automation: Get Started
Now that you understand marketing automation, and you’ve hopefully got some idea of where to begin, it’s time to dig in. If you’ve already got notes and ideas jotted down, here’s a quick action plan generator to get you started.
Throughout the process, remember what you started with: your goal. Whether you’re aiming to improve customer relationships or free up your marketing teams’ time, a little automation goes a long way.
