Every marketing position requires a different skill set. While some of these skills overlap with other marketing positions, understanding each skill specific to the type of marketing you’re interested in is foundational for becoming a successful marketer.

Social media marketers understand engagement entirely differently than email marketers. Social media marketing defines engagements as likes, comments, shares, impressions, and follows. But, email marketing looks at engagement through the metrics of open rates and click-through rates.

To figure out what skills you need for the marketing position you desire, you want to look at how that marketer spends their time and define success. 

But, before we go into the skills you need for each marketing position, we first have to talk about the 3 foundational skills every marketer needs (regardless of what type of marketing they specialize in). 

These 3 foundational marketing skills are:

Understanding the customer avatar: Marketers need to research customer avatars and turn that information into campaigns and strategies that convert. If you’re not showing the right message to the right person…your campaigns are doomed.

Knowing the customer journey: The customer journey is the 8-step process that starts at awareness, leads to conversion, and ends with a customer becoming a brand ambassador. Marketing is showing the right message to the right person at the right time.

Figuring out customer optimization: Businesses rarely rely on selling a product one time and acquiring a new customer immediately after—customer optimization is essential to create customer lifetime value (LTV) and a successful, sustainable business.

Once you’ve mastered these skills, you can start to build your marketing knowledge empire on top of them. Based on the marketing position you desire, here are the skills you need.

Content Marketers

Content marketers market…content. Their job is to turn ideas into high-quality articles, podcasts, emails, and social content. Content cultivates relationships with prospects, leads, and customers (increasing LTV!), making this type of marketing essential for brand longevity.

The skills every content marketer needs are:

How to create high-quality content: Publishing content that doesn’t stand out from the competition is like throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping a noodle sticks. Content marketers have to understand the content landscape of their industry and how they can write, create, or record content that makes their customer avatar engage with the brand.

SEO: Search engine optimization is a big part of content marketing because if people can’t find your content…they can’t buy your products. You don’t necessarily need to rank first for every article or video you publish, but getting a few of those top-ranking spots is important for driving organic traffic.

Organic reach: SEO can drive organic traffic, social media, partnerships, and collaborations. Great content marketers build a strategy that uses organic reach to increase their brand awareness while turning viewers into subscribers (and customers down the line).

Promotional content vs. organic content: Even as a marketer, you don’t want to follow a brand that’s just constantly promoting itself. You want to engage with brands who teach or entertain you. Content marketers need to understand this balance, posting some promotional and organic content only designed to nurture the relationship with their readers, viewers, subscribers, or followers.

Copywriting: What’s a great piece of content with a call-to-action? Most of your content should have some type of call-to-action written with copywriting strategies (but this doesn’t mean it’s always promoting your products or services). Call-to-actions can range from reading an article, listening to a podcast, filling out a worksheet, subscribing to your newsletter, buying a product, etc. 

Email Marketers

Email marketers spend most of their day inside Klaviyo (for all you agency or ecommerce business owners!), ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, or your other preferred email marketing platform. They understand content and the metrics that can lead to a predictable selling system, making email marketers an essential part of any business.

Funnels: Funnels start during the awareness stage of the Customer Value Journey and end once a customer has become a brand ambassador (well, kind of). Technically that customer continues into another Customer Value Journey since they’ve already ascended their way through the first one. With funnels, email marketers can turn content viewers into subscribers and subscribers into customers. They can also ascend those customers into higher-tier products. 

Landing pages: Landing pages take viewers and turn them into subscribers or customers using strategic copywriting. Every landing page has one goal and one call-to-action, and email marketers are proficient at making sure their landing pages are converting. (These are a big part of marketing funnels!).

Automations: Welcome email sequences, post-purchase sequences, and abandoned cart series are examples of automations email marketers are very familiar with. These automations are essential for building a relationship with subscribers by telling them what to expect from your emails and following up with them when they show interest in a product or service. Email marketers are all about automations (and optimizing them as time goes on!).

Copywriting: Email marketing involves lots of campaigns that are directly asking the subscribers to buy. This means copywriting practices, like the PADS formula, are an essential skill set for email marketers. Even if you’re not writing the copy, you still have to know if it’s following the right formula to turn subscribers into customers. 

Promotion calendars vs. organic content: Like content marketers, email marketers can’t only send promotional emails. That leads to decreased open rates and minimal click-through rates. Even an email list of 100,000 subscribers can’t come back from that. Organic content (like newsletters, free trainings, entertainment, etc.) is essential to cultivating a healthy relationship with your subscribers—and ensuring they keep opening your emails.

Data and Analytics Marketers

You don’t have to tell us—we know you spend your spare time in Excel. That’s what data and analytics marketers do. They love to let the numbers tell a story. Then, they use that story to create a predictable launch or campaign for their employer or clients. All hail the data and analytics marketers who make our marketing worlds go ‘round.

Metrics: Data and analytics marketers are professionals when figuring out which metrics are most important to a business. They also know how to use those metrics to figure out predictable ways to reach their goals. If you ask them, the answers are in the metrics.

Tools: If you’re looking for the tool junkie of your team, it’s probably this marketer. Data and analytics marketers, with good reason, know the best tools to compile the necessary information. Consider spreadsheets their best friends.

Visuals: A great data and analytics marketer knows that a spreadsheet of numbers doesn’t make sense to everybody. They take the time to create visuals (graphs and charts) that help the business owner or company leaders figure out what’s going on behind the scenes.

Strategy: Not only do these marketers figure out what story the numbers are telling them, but they also use that information to figure out a business’s North Star. They’re not just there to present numbers and pretty graphs. Their job is to show you what’s working well, what’s not working well, and where the best place to spend time, money, and resources is for the next quarter. 

Scorecards: Scorecards ensure a company is on track. KPIs and goals are great, but if you don’t have a weekly report telling you if you’re hitting them—what’s the point? Your data and analytics marketers can set this up.

Paid Media Marketers

Paid media marketers deal with all marketing related to advertising platforms. They’re the person who’s setting up your Facebook Ads Manager or building out your Google Smart Shopping. When you’re ready to put ad dollars behind your marketing strategy—this is your marketer.

Account management: Paid media marketers are experts at advertising platforms. They’re not always experts at every platform (for example a Facebook media marketer has a different skill set than a Google media marketer). They’ll be up-to-date on the latest changes (ahem, we’re watching you iOS!), understand what success means on that platform, and ensure you stay compliant with ad and privacy regulations.

Ad testing (A/B testing): As advertising platforms have matured, they’ve become good at figuring out which ads perform best with your target audience. You can test variations of headlines, call to action, and graphics and let the ad account AI figure out which is performing best and decide how much of your budget you want to put behind that ad. 

Graphic design: Paid media marketers don’t need to be expert graphic designers, but they need to understand what ad creatives are working best right now. They need to tell their design team the graphic variations they want to test out (and not let the design team creatively figure it out on their own). Design is just as much of a formula as copywriting.

Copywriting: Just like you don’t need to be an expert graphic designer, you also don’t have to be an expert copywriter. But, paid media marketers need a thorough understanding of copywriting best practices. They need to spot mistakes that decrease conversions and know where paint points and benefits should be placed on ads.

User-generated content: UGC is a huge part of marketing, not just because it means your team doesn’t have to create content but because it gets higher conversions than brand-created content. This makes sense considering we all trust recommendations from friends, family, and (thanks to the internet) strangers over a brand telling us how great their products are. Paid media marketers know how to utilize UGC in their ads to get the clicks they’re looking for. 

Search Marketers

Search marketers love Google. Or, maybe it’s best to say it’s a love-hate relationship. These marketers focus on search intent instead of interruption-intent (like paid ads). Their job is to get clicks from Google, Bing, and other search engines.

Ranking: The number one skill set of a search marketer is a deep understanding of ranking. Ranking is everything in the search marketing world. It’s the difference between page 1 and page 25—and we all know how many cobwebs are on the page 5 websites.

Keywords (and keywords by volume): Keywords tell search engines what your content is about and who to show it to. They’re essential to a healthy SEO strategy—but they’re not everything. Knowing which keywords to target to fill in gaps in missed opportunities is a search marketers’ jam.

Content for humans vs. content for SEO bots: Content can’t be created just for the SEO bots. If it is, all the humans that land on your content are going to bounce right off (and that will make you rank lower!). Content has to have a balance of optimization for humans and bots.

Copywriting: Search marketers are looking for conversion, and usually, that conversion is the click. They need a search engine user to click on THEIR page, not the competition. That makes copywriting an important part of a search marketer’s skillset.

Traffic: Search marketers are all about traffic. Either organic or paid, they’re looking to get more views on landing pages, sales pages, and product pages. They’re knee-deep in the traffic ocean looking for any opportunities they can find to boost their numbers.

Social Media Marketers

Social media marketers are not interns. Phew, glad we cleared that up. Social media marketing takes a lot of work and generally requires a team of people. These marketers are savvy in content trends and know just what to post to increase following, engagement, and, most importantly—conversions.

Organic content: Organic content is a huge part of a social media marketing strategy because it’s not focused on promotion. It’s just content to entertain or educate and build a relationship with followers. Social media marketers know exactly what content to post (thanks to the Customer Avatar Worksheet).

Engagement: Likes, comments, and shares are social media marketers’ ideal metrics of success. They’re looking for proof their customer avatar likes their content and an understanding of how to present promotions in a way that drives conversions.

Analytics (impressions, engagement, follows): Social media marketers are constantly in the backend of their accounts. They’re comparing what posts helped them get more followers and which flopped in engagement. These metrics are crucial to creating content their audience genuinely cares about.

Influencers, partnerships, collaborations: Trying to build a social media presence alone takes years. Collaborating with influencers and brands who already have an audience of your customer avatar takes a few weeks. This is like the cheat code of social media and why social media marketers are always looking for a partnership, collaboration, or influencer marketing opportunities.

Copywriting: Copywriting shows how well a brand knows their customer’s pain points and the after state they desire to be in. Social media marketers create strategic content that shows how well their brand understands their customer avatar, so their audience chooses their products. 

Ecommerce Marketers

Ecommerce marketers know their stuff. They understand the entire Customer Value Journey and don’t mess around when it comes to customer optimization. They know their success is in customer lifetime value—and they’re prepared to do what it takes to increase it.

Google Shopping: Ecommerce marketers understand intent-based marketing (when someone searches specifically for a product or solution). They know that Google Shopping is an essential part of their marketing strategy because it makes their products appear in the search results—ready to purchase. 

SEO: If you’re not ranking as an ecommerce brand, how will your customers find you? That’s why ecommerce marketers have a thorough understanding of SEO and make sure to read a few articles every time there are new algorithm changes. They have to know what they can do to increase their ranking because a higher ranking means more views.

Social media: Ecommerce and social media are two best friends. Social media can drive traffic to your ecommerce website (or you can set up shopping directly on the apps). Ecommerce marketers work closely with the content marketing team to publish high-quality content that promotes their products and cultivates brand relationships.

Email marketing: What’s an ecommerce brand without an email funnel? Non-existent. Email funnels turn followers and viewers into customers, but they also turn them into repeat customers. Email funnels are an essential part of increasing customer lifetime value. 

Metrics: And we’re back to the spreadsheets. Ecommerce marketers know success is in the numbers. They have to keep a close eye on their ROAS and LTV to make sure their client’s business or their business is profitable.

Do you have the skills you need for your desired marketing position?

Even though every marketing position requires a different skill set, you can see how much overlap between skill sets and positions. (It might be extremely clear that you should have a really solid understanding of copywriting to find success as a marketer).

Regardless of the marketing expertise you choose, remember that your skillset has to build on top of the 3 foundational marketing skills: 

1. Understanding the customer avatar
2. Knowing the customer journey
3. Figuring out customer optimization

Once you’ve mastered these skills, you can start to build your marketing knowledge empire on top of them. And that empire starts with knowing where to get your marketing education from. You want to be taught by the best marketers in the world, not the people who strategically placed a Lamborghini in the back of their Instagram post.

Learn from the world’s top marketers with proven track records of multi-million dollar campaigns and expertise in different marketing positions. Inside DigitalMarketer Lab, you’ll get access to Workshops and Insider Trainings from these top marketers, as well as Playbooks and Certifications. 

Join DigitalMarketer Lab to start building your marketing knowledge empire—so you can become a world-class marketer in whatever position you choose. 

The post The 5 Skills You Need Based On Your Desired Marketing Position appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

You just wrote a brand spanking new blog post! And it’s a doozy!

Now what?

What processes are in place to distribute this wonderful new resource on social media to maximize its impact? And, more importantly, what processes are in place to get LONG TERM impact out of this wonderful new resource?

The truth is that most blog posts have the lifespan of a mayfly.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

With the 6-step social sharing process I’m covering in this case study—your blog post will live a long and fruitful life.  

Our process not only notifies social connections as soon as a post is published, our strategy ensures that the post will continue to cycle through our social feeds days, weeks, and months after it’s been published.

We’ve got an infographic version of this post as well as a text version and video! You can download a PDF version of the infographic here, check out the video at the end of this post!

View the text steps of this article by clicking on one of the links below to view the explanation for that step:

• Step 1: Splinter
• Step 2: Visualize
• Step 3: Broadcast
• Step 4: Tag
• Step 5: Monitor
• Step 6: Schedule

Let’s start with the infographic… (Click the image to enlarge or download the PDF version)

And here is the text version…

Step 1: Splinter

As you know…

Product Splintering is the process of breaking off bits and pieces of your core product and selling them a la carte.

But splintering isn’t only for core products—the same process can be applied to any piece of content you create.

When your piece of content is published and ready for sharing, you have all the source material needed to splinter shareable content for social media posts.

Look to splinter the following from your blog post…

• headlines
• quotes
• images
• questions
• statistics

(It’s not necessary to use all 5 for every post, but if the opportunity presents itself, take it.)

For example, this is a recent article (written by CRO expert Justin Rondeau) with the headline “[Checklist] 5 Image Elements Worth Testing on Your Landing Page“…

Here are 4 splinters we pulled from this blog post for use on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc:

1. [Checklist] 5 Image Elements Worth Testing On Your Landing Page >> LINK
2. “An image is only as powerful as the value it communicates.” – Justin Rondeau >> LINK
3. Is Justin Rondeau spitting in the face of best practices? Find out now >> LINK
4. The elements on your website need to do 3 things. What are they? >> LINK

Ok, now that we have some text content to share on social media, it’s time for…

Step 2: Visualize

If you don’t know, now you know—visual content is necessary to drive engagement and clicks on social media (Buffer saw an increase of 18% in clicks, 89% in favorites, 150% in retweets using images!).

We’d be leaving a lot of distribution reach on the table if we didn’t incorporate images into our social strategy.

The feature image (which appears at the top of our blog posts) is always the first guaranteed visual asset to share on social media channels.

But one image isn’t enough. Create a visual asset for every possible splinter.

We use quote images on sites like Facebook and Twitter…

We created our own branded quote boxes for organic content distribution (and gave you the templates to make some of your own), but don’t think you’re hindered by a lack of graphic designer or templates.

Canva.com is one of our favorite tools for creating images you can share on social networks. Check out this same quote from above created using all standard options from Canva…

The beauty here is that we’re able to share content and engage with our audience… all for free.

If you plan to use the “Boost Post” function in Facebook to throw some paid traffic at your post, create the images with the 20% text rule in mind.  You can check your text % using this tool.

Ok, now we have our visuals locked and loaded.  Time for…

Step 3: Broadcast

Now that you have your splinters and visual assets, you need to create your social sharing links, and share the post on social platforms.

How to Create Your Social Sharing Links

You cannot optimize what you don’t measure, right?

UTM parameters are simply tags you add to a URL — when your link is clicked, the tags are sent back to Google Analytics and tracked.

Creating UTM parameters to track your post performance will give you great insight to how your post performs with different audiences and the journey they take once they read your post.

These are the UTM parameters we use on every post we share—you’ll notice there’s a different UTM link for each platform and distribution method.

For example, here are the UTM parameters for Twitter organic traffic…

Twitter Organic

• utm_source= the social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc)
• utm_medium= the distribution method (is this organic/free distribution or paid?)
• utm_content= We add the “slug” or extension here to differentiate the performance from post to post
• utm_campaign= This is the largest bucket and remains constant for all organic and paid traffic respectively

The slug is the extension on the post…

So, for example, this is what some of our other UTM links look like…

Facebook Organic

LinkedIn Organic

Facebook Promoted (These are the links we use when we use ads to send traffic to our content)…

Using UTM parameters allows us to track the performance of our campaigns in Google Analytics…

To build links with UTM parameters, use Google’s URL builder tool.

Once we have all our tracking links created, we put them through…

Bit.ly

Once each link is set up with its UTM parameters, they can be posted into Bit.ly to make shortened sharing links. These don’t give us the same information that Google Analytics will, but they’re a speedier method for regularly tracking performance based on clicks and sharing—more on that in just a minute.

Label your links by platform to make it easier when scanning through bit.ly’s reporting…

Create a document (whether it be a Word document, Google Sheet, or—DM’s personal favorite—a .txt doc) easily referenced and keep all of your content links in it.

Broadcasting on Facebook

When we have all social sharing links ready, we broadcast our content.

We create our Facebook content copy based on the benefits and point of the article, and we close with a hook or curiosity based question. Maintain a consistent personality and tone on your pages—where possible.

If you’re usually fun and address them with banter, appeal to them with your content the same way.

If you’re usually more serious and to the point, don’t waste their time being wordy—give them the goods straight up.

During your first broadcasting of the content, utilize the feature image:

Do you have other pages or handles?  If so, share wherever it is appropriate.

For example, we utilize the Ryan Deiss Facebook page and Twitter account to distribute DigitalMarketer’s content. He’s a personality associated with our brand and it makes sense for him to distribute our content to his followers.

We create different sets of copy for the DigitalMarketer and Ryan Deiss page, even if it’s just a small variation, so that people don’t become accustomed to just scrolling by one of our updates because they think they’ve seen what we have to say in an update from the other page.

For the second broadcast, we use a different visual asset to distribute the content.

When sharing for a second time, make sure to change copy to remove any “today’s” or “new on the blog” and condense copy to make for a shorter, more direct post.

(NOTE: If you’re a DigitalMarketer Lab member, you can learn more about how we do Social Media Scheduling on this Office Hours call.)

Broadcasting on Twitter

We use Hootsuite Pro as one of our social media management systems so that our entire content team can be logged into all social accounts, publishing, monitoring, and networking throughout the day.

(We don’t use Hootsuite to broadcast to our Facebook pages because we’ve found that there’s much more control for specific time scheduling, monitoring, and formatting directly on the Facebook platform.)

On the day of publishing, we create 3 tweets that will be published every couple hours:

1. Headline >> LINK
2. Quote >> LINK
3. Question the post answers >> LINKS

Tweets are scheduled to publish from the DigitalMarketer account and Ryan Deiss account at different times. We currently only schedule the headline tweet to go out from Ryan, and once #2 and #3 publish from DM, we retweet them from his account.

Broadcasting on LinkedIn

The beauty of LinkedIn is that posts shared on LinkedIn have a habit of continuing to be shared long after after they’re posted (even if they’re not using the link you provided). When you share with your connections, you’re sharing with a smaller audience of people that have already indicated they’re interested in your happenings.

We also tag the author in our LinkedIn status update to give them the nudge to share it on their stream as well. It’s a free and low-effort way of saying, “Here’s what I’ve been up to, here’s the content I just created.”

But how do you keep your content on your audience’s mind once you’ve broadcasted it the first time? We’ll be talking automated scheduling in just a bit.

For now, you need a good way to people’s attention with your post, especially if they’re mentioned in it…

Step 4: Tag

When we’re broadcasting a post, we tag people and brands wherever it makes sense.

For example, Justin Rondeau doesn’t have a Facebook fan page, so we didn’t tag him there – however, he has a Twitter account so we tag him in the tweets, giving him an opportunity to retweet and share the link.

But check out another post by Justin that gave us ample opportunity to tag others — and without having to ask them to contribute anything!

We were able to tag the owners of these blogs (and automate this distribution so that we’re driving traffic to the post, while continuing to drive traffic the owners’ blogs).

Step 5: Monitor

Most of the social media action will occur in the first 48-72 hours.

This is where Bit.ly comes in.

Monitoring campaigns (using UTM parameters) are the key to tracking long term performance, but Bit.ly is our favorite tool for immediate performance tracking.

• Who’s clicking?
• Where are they clicking?
• Who’s sharing?
• Where are they sharing?
• Which broadcast performed the best?
• Which platform performed the best?

Bit.ly tells us all of that.

During the initial 24-48 hours broadcasting of links, you can use Bit.ly….

• To see how many people are clicking your link from each platform.
• To see what time your post performed best.

• To figure out where in the world your content is reaching (and % of clicks they contribute to the total) — you want your content to broadcast when the people who are reading it are awake and active.

• To see which of your tweets performed best (helping you determine which copy speaks well to your audience and giving you ideas to test).

• And to see which platform it performed best on.

However, Bit.ly is only good for short term tracking here. People tend to click Bit.ly to read posts, but then share the post with either a basic URL, or directly from a sharing plugin — especially on LinkedIn.

So while it’s good to track who’s clicking your link on different platforms, don’t count your post as a loss if you don’t see tons of clicks on your shortened link.

Engagement

After the first 24 hours a post has been broadcast, one of the best ways to increase engagement is to check and regulate comments. Whether that be…

• On your blog post on your site.

• Comments on the Facebook posts you broadcasted the post on.
• Tweets sent out SHARING your post.

• Tweets sent in reply to your post.
• Comments on your LinkedIn update.

Tweets have a short lifespan, once you’ve published them, they’re already being buried by someone else’s content. The perks of retweeting someone who shared your content, or replying back to them, is that it puts your content in front of your audience with the added social proof that other people in your audience like the content you’ve been sharing.

Finally, we take Step 6 — the step that ties all your efforts together and ensures that your content stays alive and kickin’ for days, weeks, months (and sometimes YEARS) to come.

Step 6: Schedule

This is the behavior of a normal piece of content on social media…

Big spike… then vanishes from the face of the social Earth.  

That’s why long term automated distribution (scheduling) is necessary.

This what a piece of content looks like in a 6 month snapshot with scheduling and automation built into it.

Scheduling your content into a social media management tool results in perpetual sharing and content distribution with no action needed from you after loading it into your library.

We use MeetEdgar for our scheduling and automation across Twitter and LinkedIn. We’re able to make categories, and choose what time content publishes using those categories — the library will randomize itself and post content in rotation so that you’er not bombarding people with the same tweets day after day.

When you’re broadcasting your content, you have everything you need to schedule your content. After we’ve loaded our three tweets into Hootsuite the first day our content is published, we take those same splinters and immediately load them into MeetEdgar.

The other feature that’s really helpful is similar to what Bit.ly does in short term monitoring. Using MeetEdgar, we can track tweets performance over time.

This tells us when copy is getting fatigued and if we should update it—it’s also where quote images come into play. Content blurbs get tiring and are easily ignored. Image based tweets will keep your followers on their toes and clicking your content.

And that’s that! Use this 6-step distribution system to keep your content in front of your audience and give your content everlasting longevity—and don’t forget to swipe the infographic for easy reference!

Want lifelong longevity for your content, but reading isn’t your thing? Get a quick run through of our 6-Step Distribution Plan in this video:

The post How to Splinter Long Form Content appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Here’s The Big Challenge

The clients we work with at ICE Accelerate want to know…

• Which automation tools should I use…
• to automate and accelerate growth…
• that stay within my budget.

That’s exactly the question we will address in this article.
Let’s start with the…

5 Types of Business Automation Tools 

Ready for a statement from Captain Obvious?…
There are A LOT of business automation tools out there.
But the truth is, they all fall within one of five major categories…

• Email Marketing Tools
• Marketing Automation Tools
• Contact Relationship Management Tools
• Shopping Cart Tools
• All-In-One Solutions

And here’s the good news.
You don’t need all of them. In fact, chances are you’ll only need one or two of these tools to put the majority of these tedious manual tasks on autopilot.
(Don’t worry, there’s a downloadable Business Automation Tool Comparison spreadsheet you can download at the bottom of this article to compare 30+ tools in the marketplace)
Let’s take a look at each of these types of solutions in turn…

Email Marketing Tools

What are Email Marketing Tools?

Email marketing tools allow you to…

• set up web forms
• auto responders
• and give you basic email marketing reports (open rates, click-through rates, etc)

Autoresponders are singular sequences of emails that go out automatically after a web form is filled out.
Here’s an image of a web form from Active Campaign that, once filled out, would trigger an autoresponder. The email tool builds the web form and manages the sending of the autoresponder sequence.

They also have flexible API interfaces so you can integrate with the other systems we’ll discuss, such as contact management systems and shopping cart solutions.

When to Use Email Marketing Tools

At the very least, you’ll need a basic, free email marketing tool.
Mail Chimp has a free, no obligation plan so businesses can start to use email marketing in their business early on.

Marketing Automation Tools

The next step up from email marketing is Marketing Automation.
Marketing Automation does everything email marketing does but also gives businesses the ability to set up dynamic rules for when actions or behaviors are shown in your follow-up email marketing process.
They are also powerful in their ability to segment contacts dynamically as well. This allows companies to drill down their marketing efforts to the right segments at all times, automatically or on a whim.
The benefits of Marketing Automation allow companies to maintain strong email deliverability since contacts receive messages that are relevant to them instead of receiving emails that are irrelevant, which results in low engagement rates or emails which can easily be reported as SPAM. Both low engagement rates and SPAM effects a companies’ email deliverability rate, which is the rate at which emails sent end up in the inbox vs. junk.
Furthermore, when companies adapt Marketing Automation, they also have the potential to drastically increase conversion rates since they are sending relevant content, offers, and more to their contacts.
Altogether, Marketing Automation allows companies to adopt the philosophy of providing the right message at the right time to the right contacts, a benefit that cannot be understated.

What are Marketing Automation Tools? 

Marketing Automation tools are powerful digital marketing platforms that allow companies to..

• Do everything that the majority of email marketing solutions allow you to do
• Segment contacts dynamically
• Implement an “if, then” automated email campaign
• Maintain strong email deliverability rates
• Send the right message at the right time to the right contacts

When Marketing Automation tools are adopted and implemented effectively, it can create a wealth of success for businesses.

When to Use Marketing Automation Tools

This should look familiar to many of you. This is a basic build of the CVO process in an Infusionsoft campaign.
(NOTE: If you’re not familiar with the CVO process, you need to read this right now.)
This can be powerful for a small business since it allows you to automate the right messages going out at the right times to the right people. In addition, Marketing Automation platforms typically have a breadth of reports so businesses can make more data-driven decisions than ever.

Contact Relationship Management Tools

Using a contact management system, or CRM for short, has many values for a small business. With that said, when talking with other small business owners, many do not incorporate the use of a CRM in their business.

What Are Contact Relationship Management Tools?

A CRM can be instrumental for storing prospect or customer data, managing workflows, managing sales processes, and much more.
The benefit of incorporating a CRM solution cannot be understated. When you have a CRM solution in your business and you actually use it, you decrease the chance of human error (simple forgetful-ness for example) in regards to managing workflows and sales pipelines.
Just like the email marketing solutions mentioned above, CRMs typically have flexible API interfaces as well so you can integrate it other platforms, such as email marketing and shopping cart solutions.

When to Use Contact Relationship Management Tools

You should use a CRM as soon as possible. They allow you to keep track of your contacts, update them, create sales pipelines, and just store valuable information on a consistent basis with your contacts. This is why they are so beneficial in a business. Every business needs a filing cabinet to keep track of contacts, this is your filing cabinet.

Shopping Cart Tools

For the type of businesses that need to set up a store front on a website, accept payments for products or services, and do it all with the utmost encryption or security, then you need a shopping cart solution.

What are Shopping Cart Tools? 

There are many shopping cart solutions out there so there can be a lot of confusion around which shopping cart solution is best for your business.
Just like the CRM and Email Marketing solutions mentioned, most shopping cart solutions have open API interfaces too so you can integrate them with other platforms.

When to Use Shopping Cart Tools 

If you have any type of business, there is value in having a shopping cart.
Through a cart you can track purchases, frequency of purchases, average customer lifetime value, and give prospects the opportunity to purchase on their own through your funnels or website. Who doesn’t like to make money automatically?
If you are a small, service-based business, that handles a few transactions per month, then the argument can be made that you can get away with not having a shopping cart. Instead you can lean on solutions like Quickbooks, Freshbooks, or Paypal.
Other than that, just about every other type or level of business, can find use for a shopping cart. Also, keep in mind, to automate the entire sales cycle in a business, a shopping cart is essential.

All-In-One Solutions

This is a rarity in platforms for small businesses. Many of the solutions mentioned above have some sort of cross-list of features but there are only a few, true all-in-one solutions. All-in-one solutions allow you to automate much more than single-featured solutions mentioned above but they also have higher costs associated with them.
The value that offsets the higher cost is the fact that these all-in-one solutions, can handle multiple functions typically derived from multiple solutions which saves money from having to purchase multiple solutions and saves time by minimizing the time drain that can occur from having to bounce from system to system. When you are managing a growing business, this is a massive challenge that impedes growth and also takes businesses away from opportunities.

What are All-In-One Solutions?

The two main all-in-one solutions on the market today happen to be Infusionsoft and Ontraport.
Ontraport doesn’t have a true full slate of eCommerce functionality so if you need a shopping cart, Ontraport does not have one. Ontraport does have order forms so you can still automate the sales process. They both include full CRM functionality and rules-based, robust, marketing automation.
Essentially to duplicate the set of features that both platforms have, you would have to adopt Salesforce, Hubspot, and 3D Cart, which can easily cost you over $500 per month, to be able to match the same features that both Infusionsoft and Ontraport offer.

When to Use All-In-One Solutions

Infusionsoft and Ontraport both have a full CRM and Marketing Automation list of features.
Where they differ is that Infusionsoft has a fully-featured E-Commerce set, a more intuitive campaign builder with an easy to use graphical interface.
For example, if you need to set up a shopping experience on your website for when prospects want to add products or services to a cart, Ontraport does not allow this to be built out.
Infusionsoft also has a much larger pool of plug-ins to add additional features and functionality.
However, they are both powerful all-in-one solutions and fantastic.

Ok, now for the fun part…

Let’s take a look at some advanced automated processes that can be built out.
Keep in mind that these processes can be built out with a combination of platforms above through API, “out of the box” with the Marketing Automation Solutions or the All-In-One Solutions.

1. Track lead sources and produce ROI reports that show cost per visitors, lead, and customer.
2. Webinar registration and follow up
3. Interest or behavior-based offers
4. Affiliate registration and follow up campaigns
5. Sales process targeted follow-up and scheduled tasks
6. Dynamic marketing based on actions, behaviors, purchases, and more.
7. Full internal workflow processes
8. Full billing and purchasing support; automated billing, emails when billing errors occur, assigned tasks
9. Retention processes
10. Responses when actions occur in membership-website based products
11. Targeted up-sells, down-sells, or cross-sells

The possibilities are endless, especially when you are working with all-in-one or marketing automation solutions.
They are designed from the ground up to be very flexible, robust, and to work with outside platforms, plug-ins, and software solutions to create automated systems for your business.
When you are working with the stricter-featured platforms that focus solely on…

• email marketing
• contact relationship management,
• shopping cart

… you’ll often end up “gluing” a bunch of solutions together resulting in a business that looks like this…

There’s significant value in using marketing automation or all-in-one platforms because they build systems that…

• create efficiencies
• scalability,
• and additional revenue streams

… automatically within your business with a singular solution instead of a hodgepodge of API-connected solutions.
But these Marketing Automation and All-in-One systems are not for everyone.
Once a business starts to generate revenue and experience growing pains, that’s the ideal time to move into a Marketing Automation or All-In-One solution.
At the end of the day, keep in mind that the #1 priority as a business owner is to put systems in place for your business and ALL of the solutions do that to varying degrees.

Where to start with Business Automation? 

I’ve created a spreadsheet that compares the functionality and cost of over 30 business automation tools.
It looks like this…

Click here to download the Business Automation Tool Spreadsheet.
Use the comparisons in this spreadsheet and the information in this article identify the best solutions for your business.
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The post 5 Types of Business Automation Tools: How To Automate Your Business and Compete With The Big Boys appeared first on DigitalMarketer.