Last week we wrote a post about Marketing Automation. If you’re not familiar with this term yet, go back to last week and read up! Otherwise, keep going to see what the automated marketing cycle looks like and how it flows. By seeing how it works, you’ll understand how it can link all of your marketing efforts into a single process.

All set up

Let’s pretend that you’ve gone through the selection process that we talked about last week. You’ve asked yourself the pertinent questions, spoken to your team about it. Then you chose the right product for you and met with a consultant to make sure all of your needs will be met and that you purchase only the things you need. Now, you’re ready to get cracking.

Everything in one place

With automated marketing, every aspect of your online marketing can be set up and handled in one portal. So, you’ve got all of your emails, landing pages, forms and social media in one place. No more checking everything individually because it’s all put together and laid out before you now.

It’s much easier to manage it all this way and things aren’t going to fall through the cracks. Life gets busy and you forget to look at how many folks opened your last email or check on who’s clicking around your landing page. Since it’s all there for you, it’s much easier to get some insight as to what’s going on.

Gathering insight

Now that you have all of your numbers organized, you can take a good look at them. Separate the folks who are simply causal visitors to your site from the people who seem to be more serious. You’ll be able to tell because you’ll see the serious folks scoping you out. Maybe they opened your email, visited your website and then “liked” you on Facebook or followed you on Twitter. A more causal visitor may have only visited your landing page.

Take what you know

Now that someone is really interested, you can identify anonymous visitors through lead intelligence to find out who they are and where they are within the buying cycle. Are they a new customer or a returning one?

Not only can you identify who’s interested in you so that you can reach out to them, but you can also use what you learn to figure out what components of your marketing chain are failing. Is it your emails, your landing page, your social media? Knowing where you’re losing people will help you know what you need to optimize.

Make a list of leads

With the help of that lead intelligence we mentioned earlier, you can now reach out to serious prospects and nurture that relationship. The next thing you know, you’ve got yourself a customer, friends!

 And that, GLAD WORKS friends, is the basic gist of how the automated marketing cycle flows. We oversimplified because the nitty gritty details aren’t really important right now. This is just an overview for our blog friends. We like to introduce you to new things because we like you and we think you’re really cool.