If you are a B2C brand, you sure must have a personal branding strategy, be it networking on Instagram or implementing email campaigns. One way or the other, either you or your executives do try to stay active to boost brand value.
A great way to increase brand value is to gain customers’ trust. And, an effective way to gain customers’ trust is by using personal branding campaigns. Personal branding campaigns are activities that involve direct interaction with consumers, such as sharing social media posts (IG stories), responding to comments and emails, and maintaining an email list. While they are indefinitely excellent marketing strategies, they sure take a lot of time, which most brands do not feel they have.
But, modern technology already has a solution: Marketing Automation. Using software technology to automate marketing activities is called marketing automation.
As per Gartner, marketing automation tools have been immensely benefiting the big brands since 2014. A whopping 89% of the brands use email marketing automation, 84% use lead nurturing, 82% use cross-channel campaign management, and 80% focus on integrations with other software for centralizing customer intelligence.
Marketing automation also helps in increasing sales productivity and reducing marketing overhead. B2C brands should use automation to make efficient and effective marketing efforts.
Social Media Automation
It has finally come to this: If you want to engage customers, establish brand loyalty, and build a brand, you must be on social media. The trick is to post enough so that customers do not forget you, but not enough to annoy them. While the recommended number of posts widely vary among experts, few data-driven studies have been conducted that suggest optimal numbers for posts on different social media platforms to ensure a brand does not go unnoticed. These numbers are quite high and require a lot of work for a brand to remain active on social media platforms.
This is where social media automation tools come in the picture. These tools help in scheduling and managing the posts for different platforms from one place. These tools also notify marketers about trending keywords and brand mentions. Such notifications are very helpful in posting the right content at the right moment.
Email Marketing Automation
Email marketing is still regarded as the best marketing technique among B2C companies despite its commendable competition, such as social media, SEO, PPC, and so on.
Due to high demand for personalization, many brands are opting for personalized email marketing campaigns, such as sending blogs and articles to their mailing list regularly, not as a marketing strategy, but instead as a branding effort.
Emails and greetings from executives and individual email ids can help build better brand value rather than emails from a company broadcast email id.
While writing email contents can be time consuming and exhausting, you can streamline the delivery process by sending the right message to the right person at the right time using automation tools. Automation tools divide emails into small groups, such as segregate your list according to your leads in your sales funnel, demographically, or any other criteria you wish to set.
Monitoring Automation Tools
An essential aspect of branding and marketing is to pay attention to what others say about you and your brand. You can set Google Alerts to watch for your mentions in your industry across the web. Monitoring tools scan the social media and web to provide real-time alerts about a company’s or brand’s mentions in the industry, in the news or otherwise.
You can also track your competitors’ mentions by setting everyday alerts. Setting alerts for competitors remarks can help you learn what they are doing that you are not and how you can reproduce or improvise their efforts. There are several good web and social media monitoring tools available that can discover brand names, even in Facebook conversations.
Measuring Automation Tools
It’s essential to measure the results of your marketing strategy and branding efforts in real-time, in proper figures and statistics. Top global brands do so by calculating the conversion rates and increase of mentions – how many of their visitors or audiences acted upon their marketing efforts, like filling in the contact form or providing mail id.
Automation tools come with analytical features that deliver crucial data, such as click-through rates, open rates, data about from where the website traffic came from, conversion percentage, etc.
Overall, marketing automation’s ability to prioritize leads is one of the biggest reasons why B2C companies are preferring automation software. Right from nurturing existing clients and implementing data-driven decisions to closing deals and retaining consumers for long-term, marketing automation has made B2C businesses invincible and inevitable.
