Revolutionizing the Buyer's Journey: The Importance of Marketing Automation
Mar 21, 2023
Mar 21, 2023
10 min read
10 min read
Customers need nothing less than a flawless and trouble-free purchasing experience in today's fast-paced environment. Customers want to feel powerful, engaged, and in control from the moment they learn about a product to the moment they make a purchase and beyond. Businesses are under increasing pressure to meet these expectations as online shopping and e-commerce grow or risk losing clients to rivals who can.
Along comes automation, the customer journey's superhero. Automation may help businesses create a better customer experience, decrease errors, save time and money, and ultimately improve revenue by leveraging technology and software to optimize and automate key purchasing-related operations. Automation can make every step of the customer journey easier, quicker, and more productive, from customized promos to lightning-fast deliveries, from round-the-clock assistance to hassle-free returns.
Automation, however, is a requirement, not just a fancy feature. Businesses that don't stay up with the most recent trends and technologies run the risk of slipping behind in a world where customers have more options than ever. Automation is becoming a must for companies of all sizes and sectors if they want to stay competitive and satisfy their consumers' changing expectations. It is no longer just a luxury for big organizations with significant wallets.
Thus, if you're still managing your customer experience using manual processes and antiquated technology, it's time to think about the advantages of automation. In this piece, we'll examine the primary ways that automation may change the customer experience and why it's critical to use this potent tool now more than ever. Prepare to meet automation, the customer journey's superhero!
What is a Buyer’s Journey?
Before we begin to understand why automation in a buyer’s journey is so important, let’s break down what a buyer’s journey consists of. A buyer's journey refers to the series of stages that a potential customer goes through when making a purchase decision. It's the process of awareness, consideration, and decision that a buyer undergoes before purchasing.
- Awareness: More often than not, you should be able to anticipate what will happen next. For instance, you can expect that presenting consumers who are browsing a certain product page with comparable products will enhance conversions if you discover that they convert more frequently.
- Consideration: The step of consideration is up next. Here, the buyer is acting as a detective, looking into all of the options before making a choice. It's comparable to shopping for a new phone and devoting hours to reading reviews, comparing features, and determining your budget. The only difference is that the purchaser is using your good or service. At this point, you must arm them with all the knowledge necessary to decide wisely. Moreover, don't be scared to brag a little. Consider it like a job interview; you want to stand out by highlighting your successes and strengths. But keep in mind that we're currently conducting research, so no sales pitches are permitted just yet.
- Decision: The Deciding phase is the final stop on our journey. At this point, the customer has finally whittled down his or her choices and is prepared to buy. It's like selecting between two equally adorable pups, but only one has the better personality (and a lower price tag). Here is where you want to stand out from the crowd and make your brand memorable. Explain to them why you're the greatest option and eliminate any obstacles that might hinder their purchase.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation uses technology and software to automate time-consuming marketing jobs and procedures. This can involve activities like lead creation, consumer segmentation, social media management, and email marketing. By implementing marketing automation, businesses can streamline their marketing initiatives and boost efficiency, effectiveness, and ROI.
Marketing automation aims to automate and streamline marketing procedures so that firms may concentrate on higher-value duties like planning and analysis. Businesses may boost lead generation and conversion rates, client engagement and loyalty, and eventually revenue development by utilizing marketing automation. Now let’s unpack these benefits in extensive detail.
Why do you need Automation in your Buyer’s Journey?
For companies aiming to boost their marketing efforts and improve the customer experience, marketing automation offers a number of advantages. The following are some of the main advantages of marketing automation:
- Lead Generation and Nurturing
It might be hard for a business owner to keep track of every prospective client and make sure that they all get individual attention. Although lead nurturing is an essential step in the sales process, it can take a lot of time and effort. Thankfully, automated marketing can simplify your work.
Building and keeping up a relationship with potential clients is the key objective of lead nurturing. It is crucial to gain their confidence and consent to offer them information about your company. Yet, it can be challenging to manually keep track of every lead, particularly as your organization expands. Marketing automation can help with that.
You may quickly group and target potential clients with pertinent messaging by employing automated processes. For instance, you can divide your email list into several groups based on your customers' purchasing patterns, search histories, or regions. By doing so, you can tailor your communications to each lead's specific needs and give the most pertinent content.
- The Scope of Personalization
In a world where there are multiple replacements for a product or service, what truly sets a brand apart is the level of effort they are willing to put into the personalization of the process. Consumers desire a customized experience that demonstrates your appreciation for their presence. It can be challenging for business owners to meet the needs of personalized customer service. Automated marketing can help with that, though.
You can effectively and efficiently customize the consumer journey with automated marketing. You can determine your consumers' wants and preferences by using data and analytics. You can then utilize that knowledge to send them messages specifically tailored to their interests. This level of personalization fosters a close bond between your brand and your audience.
One of the key advantages of automated marketing is the ability to contact the correct customer with the appropriate content at the appropriate moment. For instance, you can utilize automated email campaigns to deliver clients personalized messages based on their online activity or past purchases. In addition to enhancing the consumer experience, this raises the possibility of conversion and recurring business.
To encourage client loyalty and keep their business, you must provide personalized customer service. You may give your consumers the individualized service they demand while also saving up time for other crucial facets of your business by implementing automated marketing.
- Better Customer Relationships
Increase your prospective consumer base and improve interactions with current clients by using marketing automation. Building trust and loyalty with your customers requires regular, targeted communication.
By segmenting your consumer base according to their tastes and interests, you can offer personalized messages that meet their requirements. For instance, you may send a consumer personalised advertising and informational materials about a product they've expressed interest in.
Moreover, automation enables you to monitor consumer interactions and actions, including website visits, social media participation, and email openings. You may use this information to improve your understanding of the tastes and demands of your clients and modify your communication approach as necessary. You can build a devoted customer base for your company, increase customer retention, and enhance your brand reputation by automating the improvement of your customer interactions.
- Omnichannel Presence
Given the increasing popularity of social media and online platforms, businesses must be able to interact with clients in a variety of ways. Thanks to marketing automation software, businesses may communicate with clients via various channels, including social media, websites, email, and more.
Managing several channels at once is simpler when automation is used to engage with clients. You can expedite your efforts by using automated procedures as opposed to manually updating each channel. This provides consistency across channels while also saving time.
Automation also enables you to monitor how consumers interact with your business across various channels. Your plan can be adjusted based on the channels most successfully reach and interact with your target audience. Additionally, this information may be utilized to better target and tailor each channel's messaging, enhancing the entire consumer experience.
Regardless of the channel, marketing automation generally enables organizations to communicate with clients in a timely, pertinent, and efficient manner. Businesses can streamline their marketing initiatives, boost productivity, and ultimately provide better outcomes using automation technology.
In Conclusion
Marketing automation is a potent instrument that simplifies business processes and enhances client satisfaction. Businesses may improve their consumers' purchase experiences by automating tedious operations, nurturing leads, customizing customer care, and connecting across numerous channels.
Consider working with Saffron Edge if you want to develop marketing automation for your company. We provide marketing automation solutions as a digital marketing firm that can assist in growing your company. Get in touch immediately to learn more about us and how we can help you enhance your buyer's journey.
5 Inbound Marketing Checkpoints To Verify Your Website Health
A good website is not that which has been designed to portray beauty but that which has the power to pull in incessant loads of traffic and conversions. If your website is not having these all-in-one characteristics, then it may not meet your demand in the meantime. Your website’s health is the degree of responsiveness of such the site. It combines the traffic ratio, bounce ratio, user engagement on mobile and desktop, and subsequently the SEO response rate. If your site has a YES to all of these main checkpoints, then you perhaps might be looking at only a few areas to improve on. Inbound marketing is productive, nevertheless, the ups and downs hit once the website health is in a poor state. And the only way to figure and curb this is rather through proper check up on your site in a timely manner. Understanding important areas to perform a routine check, alter and remodel. Some of these marketing checkpoints to verify your website’s health includes: Your Website’s Internal/External Linking It’s quite funny to notice that some websites have more that 500+ External links within it; But maybe before one would say “Jack Robinson” the links are nowhere to be found. What do you have to say about this, evidence of quality backlinks? I guess no. It's advisable to ensure that your internal links are factors that would not break your site into boundless strands. Ensure that your link structure is strong and genuine (both internal and external). On the same hand, using automated means to enrich your website with links will not help it grow or mitigate the problems, but would rather incur more search engine penalties. Also, splitting up your contents info into 400 to 500 pcs of non-related articles makes it difficult for search engines to categorize it. Duplicate Content Does your site have duplicate contents therein? This is another inbound marketing checkpoint to verify your website’s health status. A lot of businesses prefer letting professionals handle their website in their best practices while some believe magic would occur in a twinkle of an eye. Nonetheless, there are so many failure stories even so, more are flooding in by the day. Notify your website management on the issue of copied contents and give reasons why you wouldn’t tolerate the practice (these does not mean they engage in such practice, but it alerts them on your awareness). Your Website’s Page Speed No one likes to waste time on any non-informational article or piece. They’ll rather prefer taking a walk down to the next website or perhaps pinch the search engine for the second time. Here comes the juncture where the word SPEED comes into web development and inbound marketing. A website’s speed determines its conversion in general. Potential visitors are sure to leave immediately they noticed the sluggishness in loading speed of your site, and hence increases your site’s bounce rate. The solution is simple, optimize the usage of tools like Google Pagespeed Insights in analyzing your site’s speed. Hence, reduce the size of possible content components like images, page contents etc. Doing this will speedily improve your site’s performance. Practical SEO Understanding practical SEO is an added advantage, this helps to provide clarity to search engines crawlers as to what to translate. Bad SEO techniques aimed at maneuvering search engines crawlers with the quest to get top ranking is undoubtedly going to fail. However, you may enjoy it for a short period of time. This is an inbound marketing checkpoint where a professional business should combine to tackle. Crawler Issues When Search Engine crawlers fail to pick up your site on its routine indexing, this means your site is suffering from what is known as “Crawler Issue”. Why does this occur? There are so many things that cause crawler issues… Bad SEO Sitemap Blackhat SEO for your websites Refusal to submit sitemap to search engines Bad website structuring and mapping. ...
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How Do Google Reviews Mean Business For Family Lawyers?
With everything moving online, people have gained access to a giant pool of reviews and ratings related to the type of service they will choose, and you can say the same thing about the family lawyer business. Nowadays, customers are trying to make more informed decisions, especially when working with a legal expert like a family lawyer. They are doing so by reading reviews and ratings given to a specific family lawyer. Reviews related to cars and mobile phones have become very common, so you should never be surprised if your potential clients check your reviews before confirming their final family lawyer. And with 92% of the searches being made on Google, it has become the most important place for improving your reviews. So, in this blog post, we will walk you through the importance, working, and benefits of Google reviews for a better family lawyer business. Google Reviews: The Most Crucial aspect of Your Online Reputation In recent years, we have witnessed a rise in the need for Google reviews among family lawyer firms. Nowadays, it has become necessary as more than 54.9% of the customers check reviews before choosing any product or service. Lawyers have understood the Importance of Digital Presence With time, family lawyers have understood the importance of podcasts, working with family law marketing firms, online advertising, and official websites. Thus the concept of having good reviews has become more familiar among them. Family lawyers now know that just having satisfied customers is not enough. They have understood that making a business successful requires you to inform the world about their client satisfaction. Even the trust for reviews is increasing as nowadays, around 79% of customers admit that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Source: Pexels The Three Important Factors of Google Reviews Just because you have understood the importance of Google reviews doesn’t mean that you should just ask your current and previous clients to start posting reviews. First, you have to understand the three critical factors of Google reviews before working with any family law marketing firm. Quality Any Google review has three essential components; average star rating from all the reviews, star rating from every review, and people’s comments. The most prominently displayed part of the Google review is the average star rating, and to have a better average star rating, most of the reviews should be four to five stars. Quantity The quantity of Google reviews shows many customers have spent time reviewing your services. But don’t be afraid of poor reviews as it is impossible to maintain a 100% customer satisfaction rate. If you have 50 good reviews, then 2 of the bad reviews will be watered down. Recency You can never feel good about a company whose recent review was posted two years ago, and therefore, you must take care of the recency of Google reviews as well. Recency is an essential aspect of the family law digital marketing approach, and the same concept is used in the case of Google reviews as well. Google reviews surpass testimonials in terms of trustworthiness Almost all the family lawyers with good family law digital marketing planning have testimonials on their official website. That is a great approach, and you can keep using testimonials to showcase clients’ experience with your service. But the people checking the testimonials have already found your website. Therefore, you also need to take care of people who haven’t visited your website yet and are still looking for ways to authenticate the quality of service. It is where you can use the power of Google reviews. With Google reviews, you can influence potential clients who haven’t visited your website yet and then use the testimonials and all other aspects of your website to keep them there. That is how an ideal family law digital marketing plan should work. Different ways to gather more Google reviews Begin at the first meeting You should let the clients know the importance of 5-star reviews and ratings at the first consultation. You should also let them know that the 5-star reviews act as a validation of the service you are going to offer. Ask for feedback before the case is closed Never wait for the case to be closed before asking for reviews. It is necessary because many clients don’t find posting reviews once the service is over. During the case, the clients are more interested in interacting with the firm, and therefore, their chances of posting a review are more. Source: Pexels Conclusion The best time to ask for reviews from the clients is when you have done something great for them and when they are pleased with your service. So, always try to strike when the iron is hot instead of when everything has been completed. Personal recommendations have transformed into Google reviews because of the influx of the internet. People have started trusting these reviews instead of considering them as a scam. You have better chances of attracting more potential clients from simple Google search to your website through better reviews. Saffron Edge's marketing team can help you verify your business on Search, Maps, and other Google services. We offer online reputation management services to legal firms that enable them to showcase their online identity, authority, and expertise. It allows them to convert more leads and win more clients. ...
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SMX East 2018: Here’s What You Need To Know
Even if you have a fleeting interest in SEO, you’d already know what ‘Search Marketing Expo (SMX)’ is. If you live under a rock and don’t exactly know what it is, don’t worry we’ll give you a brief before diving deep into what this special event had in store. So, what exactly is ‘SMX’? SMX is the brainchild of the most authoritative and respected voices in the SEO & SEM industry - Search Engine LandMarketing Land (which is just Search Engine Land themselves but focusing entirely on SEM). We all know how dynamic the SEO industry is and how confusing it can be for marketers to figure out, with little to no direction from Google, the exact strategies that will land them on the top of search engine results. ‘The SMX Conference’ was created to change all that in 2007. It is an year-long series of events held at different venues with an aim to bring the best of the best in SEO & SEM together and share their views about the future of this dynamic industry with deep insights you’ll not be able to see or hear anywhere else. It is undoubtedly the best place to go for some fresh search engine marketing wisdom to tackle the search engine challenges you face every day in your business life. We just loved it! And we dig SMX! Our co-founder and Business Head, Gaurav Sabharwal, recently went to attend the ‘SMX East’ event in Manhattan, New York at ‘Jacob K. Javits Convention Center’ (23rd October to 25th October) and came back a lot wiser when it comes to understanding the latest in SEO & SEM and the whole marketing industry in general. Here’s what he had to say about it - ‘“It was my 2nd time going to an SMX event and it just gets better with each passing year! The industry insights I got to hear, the expos I attended, the industry leaders I personally met and the overall networking experience there doesn’t even come close to other SEO events and conferences and every bit of information I soaked in at the SMX East will definitely help us serve our clients a lot better in the time to come” Top Highlights Out of a bunch of industry leading keynotes, here are a few top highlights of the event that you should definitely have a look at as they will greatly help you plan your SEO strategy for 2019 - Bing is going to be more important than ever for SEO Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, had organized two opening keynotes on 24th October about their future plans for SEO (featuring Christi Olson & Frederic Dubut) SEM (featuring David Pann, general manager of global search business at Microsoft). Source: Search Engine Land Talking about the SEO-related keynote first, the search experience Bing is striving to provide us is intelligent, personalized, pervasive, predictive and conversational. And the primary interface they are focusing on is voice. With the help of their digital assistant Cortana, they plan on increasing their search engine capabilities marginally and help searchers in new ways that no one has ever tried before, not even Google. You can read more about this keynote here. Source: Search Engine Land On the other hand, the SEM related keynote which was presented by David Pann was huge. With Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Linkedin, they are trying to make use of the massive social professional networking platform by letting marketers target three attributes from Linkedin in their Bing search Ad campaigns. The three attributes being company, job function & industry. Considering the fact that the user base of Linkedin in 550+ million strong, this new roll-out will put the 26.2 billion acquisition to good use and give a lot of advertising and targeting advantage to bing marketers. Also, Bing is actively working on an AI-driven solution called Bing Advisor designed specifically to give valuable insights to marketers that would help them greatly in planning their marketing campaigns. You can read more about this keynote here. Source: Search Engine Land The opening keynote on 25th October was of the other search engine - Google, presented by Jon Diorio, group product manager for Google Ads. In the keynote, Jon Diorio talked about a lot of upcoming updates that would make advertising via Google Ads a lot easier but impactful for advertisers. The updates are as follows - Click-to-message Ads updates Texts that users send from click-to-message ads can now be delivered directly to advertisers via email. This would kill the need for advertisers to provide their phone number in order to use message extensions. Advertisers can now set up automatic replies to respond to users immediately with preset messages. Store Visits in Google Analytics out of beta To enable marketers to track the offline impact of their marketing efforts on other digital channels beyond Google Ads, Store Visits data will be rolling out in Google Analytics in a coming few weeks to all eligible advertisers. Along with that, Google is also releasing a few store visits tools with the help of Data-driven attribution and Smart Bidding that would help them greatly in determining what is bringing them the most foot traffic. For more information, you can read the keynote here. Source: Search Engine Land No SEO event is complete without talking about probably the most important ranking factor for Google - Backlinks. The next highlight is all about that and a lot more. In a keynote presented by a panel of experts including Ali Brenner (Senior SEO Manager, Sapient Razorfish), Lisa Baron (CMO, Overit) and Paddy Morgan (Co-founder, Aira), they talked about writing the type of content that attracts links and each one of them had their own 2 cents to share. Here are the types of content that people love to link to, according to Ali and Lisa - Evergreen Content Content with exclusive data Content with engaging videos, images or comparison Content that has a story behind it Content with actionable insights Content with simple words & catchy structure with hooks To know more about what they had to say about link-building, you can read the story here. For Gaurav, ‘SMX East’ was truly a remarkable and refreshing experience and we would suggest you to go attend it once if you are dead serious about learning something meaningful in the SEO & SEM industry, you’ll get to know stuff that actually works and not just noise! If you can not make such type of commitment, we would suggest you follow their Youtube channel because there’s a lot that is yet to come. Interested to know more about what happened at the ‘SMX East’ event? You can have a look at their agenda to know exactly what happened when and who made it happen. ...
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