Marketing automation is all the rage these days, and for good reason: it frees up humans to do things humans are good at, and automates repetitive and mundane tasks. With marketing automation technology improving by the day, it’s easy to see why it’s become so prevalent.

A word to the wise, though: just because you engage with and implement marketing automation processes doesn’t guarantee you marketing automation success. It’s like anything else in life, you need to put in time and effort to hone your skills in order to generate the best results.

To help you avoid turning what should be a time-saving process into an inefficient and confusing mess, we put together an infographic outlining the 5 Steps to Marketing Automation Success:

Want to see the full infographic? Skip to the bottom of this blog and check out the full image!

Successful marketing automation boils down to one simple concept: knowing exactly what your customers need and the reasons why they need it. In order to understand the what and the why of your customers’ needs, however, you have to truly understand your customers. This is why even though marketing automation is a an automated process, it only works as well as you set it up. And to properly set things up, you need to understand what causes your customers pain so you can help ease it.

Once you know exactly how to meet the needs of your customers, the automation process begins. The first step is to set reasonable goals by delving into your site’s traffic numbers. If you know you need 500 incoming site visits to generate 5 new leads, make that your goal and drive headlong toward it.

Upon first blush, marketing automation might seem drastically different from the digital marketing strategies of the last few years, but that’s not the case. Marketing automation uses the same tried and true tactics – content, social media and email – it just organizes them better. Think of it like the wrap jobs you see on Christmas presents; you can use the exact same wrapping paper to wrap a present, but if one is wrapped with more care and expertise, it absolutely glows below the tree (while the poorly wrapped present lays crumpled to the side).

The content that functions best within an automation strategy focuses on answering customers’ question while offering your products and/or services as potential solutions.

The worst thing about most lead generation processes is internal communication within a business or company. Small businesses often have so much work piled onto not enough people that leads fall by the wayside. And within larger companies, a misalignment between sales and marketing is often the culprit of too many leads left unconverted. Neither of these situations is a case of not enough leads being generated, it’s about leads being mishandled. If you can treat your leads properly – something marketing automation demands – you may not need to generate more.

Another issue with many marketing strategies is they are so disconnected it’s nearly impossible to tell whether they are working. With the amount of access we have to data and information in today’s word, not knowing is never acceptable. If you establish a closed-loop reporting process that tracks your leads as they travel along your funnel, you’ll always know.

Yeah, yeah, testing is another thing we talk about all the time. But the reason we harp on some of these things so much is because they make that much of a difference to your success! Landing pages, blog posts, emails and social posts all need to be tested and tweaked until they are delivering optimal results. There’s no reason to settle for less when a little bit of effort can help you maximize the dollars you spend on digital marketing!

As Porky Pig would say, “That’s all folks!” But please, share this infographic with vigor, and come back in December to see what we come up with for the holiday season. Here’s the full infographic: