Picture this - pulling off a marketing stunt as huge as Taylor Swift's $200M Eras Tour. Millions of fans reached, crazy hype generated, and stadiums sold out faster than you can say "Swiftie". Now, imagine yourself doing all that with a tiny team and not much marketing spend. Sounds crazy, right? Well, welcome to the world of 'Marketing Automation'.
Â
At Flywheelr, a marketing tech startup, I've seen firsthand how powerful marketing automation can be when it comes to reaching our customer at the right place and right time. Let me show you how we used these tricks for our own growth, and how you can do the same for your startup.
What's Marketing Automation Anyway?
Basically, marketing automation is using software to handle boring and repetitive marketing tasks. It's like having a robot team working 24/7 to nurture leads, talk to customers, and boost your brand - all while you focus on the big picture stuff. And even though these are robots doing your repetitive marketing tasks, they necessarily don't sound robotic to your customers.
If you have any doubt on the scale of impact marketing automation can have on your startup's growth, Think about this: Taylor Swift's team didn't personally message millions of fans about the Eras Tour. They used fancy automation to reach the right people, at the right time, with the right message. And guess what? Your startup can totally do the same.
Â
Why Should Startups care and why now?
Â
As a marketing tech startup I am still looking for one zoom call where we didn't mention chatgpt, claude or other AI technologies. As these technologies become advanced in learning our customer's behavior and process of discovering the product or service, it will become inevitable to overlook the benefits they provide. Now as a startup, I think of following factors that matter most to me and why marketing automation tools should be considered:
1. Efficiency: Let robots do the boring stuff, so your team can do the cool creative work.
2. Scalability: Reach way more people without killing yourself trying.
3. Personalization: Make every customer feel special, every step of the way.
4. Data-Driven Insights: Get tons of useful info to make your strategy even better.
Â
But can a small team at a startup adopt marketing automation? Well, "If Taylor Swift's tiny marketing team of 4 can make $200M from just one tour, then any startup can punch way above their weight." Marketing automation is that secret weapon.
How to build your marketing automation plan ( 6 step process)
Â
1. The Secret Sauce: Obsess over your Ideal Customer Profile
Before you jump into automation, you gotta know who you're talking to. One of the most important step in this whole process is to define your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) or Target Persona really really well. At Flywheelr, we obsessed over understanding our ideal customer for 3 days non-stop, just to understand our customer's day-in-the-life.
Our basic premise was "the better we understand our customer the better decision we will make in terms of marketing automation tool and its features". Its incredibly important contextualize your ICP from any other startup. e.g. Let's compare two totally different customer types for Taylor Swift's vs our marketing startup:
2. Automation Across the Customer Journey
Now, check out how we at Flywheelr use automation to guide our customers from "never heard of us" to "can't live without us":
By mapping out our customer's journey like this, we made automated touch-points that feel personal and really click with our B2B crowd. You can download this editable customer journey template to build your own.
3. Picking the Right Tools
Choosing the right marketing automation platform is super important. Think about stuff like:
How much you can spend?
What features you need (email marketing, social media posting, CRM hookups, etc.)?
How easy it is to use"
Can it grow with you?
We evaluated lot of common and niche automation tools include HubSpot, Mailchimp, Loom and ActiveCampaign, but do your homework to find the best fit for what you need.
5. Start Small, Dream Big
Remember, you don't have to automate everything at once. Start with one or two key areas where automation can make the biggest splash. At Flywheelr, we kicked things off by automating our content sharing on LinkedIn, which was perfect for our service of creating custom thought leadership content for B2B brands. For you it could be as simple as enriching your customer database with tools like apollo or draup.
6. One last thing: Measure and Tweak
Â
The cool thing about marketing automation is all the data you get. Set clear goals for each automated process and check how it's doing regularly. Use what you learn to keep making things better.
Â
How Flywheelr made a Marketing Automation Strategy
Â
At Flywheelr, we practice what we preach. Our subscription service gives startups custom thought leadership content that's perfect for B2B channels like LinkedIn, and we even auto-schedule and post it to the social media channels. Marketing automation for us isn't about getting rid of the human touch – it's about making it bigger. Here is how we research and mapped each marketing automation tool to a specific stage of our Target Persona:
Bottom line is, by really getting to know your ideal customer, mapping out their journey, and smartly using automation, startups can reach and engage same number of people as any fortune 500 brand with huge teams.
So, Whether you're selling out stadiums like Taylor Swift or providing B2B marketing solutions, the tricks to good marketing automation are pretty much the same. It's time to put your marketing on autopilot and watch your startup take off.
Commentaires