How to Start a Marketing Automation Strategy with @todcordill #vcbuzz

Marketing automation helps scale your digital marketing and focus on more complex and creative tasks.

But there’s more: Marketing automation comes with more in-depth analytics and personalization capabilities allowing you to reach your customers at the time when they are more inclined to buy.

However setting up a marketing automation campaign takes time and patience, so let’s discuss how to start.

About Tod Cordill @todcordill

Tod Cordill @todcordill is the owner of Moderno Strategies.

Tod helps small and midsize companies integrate digital marketing channels into existing sales and marketing efforts to more effectively drive business growth.

Tod combines his P&L perspective with an engineering problem-solving structure to help clients grow their business.

Connect to Todd on Linkedin

Questions we discussed

Q1 How did you become a digital marketer? Please share your career story!

I became a marketer when digital marketing made logic and analytics marketing imperatives. My progression:

Engineering degree
Design Engineer
MBA
Mfg leader
S/W product manager I got deep into marketing when leading a small eCommerce mfg company.

I’ve been consulting/freelancing for longer than I held any “real” job. I like to keep learning and mixing things up.

Yes, I’m more focused on the left brain side. Things like:

? Technical SEO
? Marketing automation logic
? Analytics
? Demand gen strategy

I like to collaborate with designers, writers, and branding folks and do as little as this as possible. #vcbuzz
— Tod Cordill (@todcordill) May 24, 2022

Q2 What is marketing automation and how can it help a small or medium-sized business?

Marketing Automation is automating personalized communications to individual people based on their actions and data you know about them. Communication channels include:

Email
Social media
SMS (texting)
Direct mail

Automated, personalized messaging can be a mix of behavior-based and calendar-based messaging. Communication channels need to work together. You can also integrate with sales processes by adding leads, tasks, and opportunities into the CRM system.

It can help businesses of any size gain insights and scale personalizing, localizing or targeting communications, among other things. This can help smaller businesses with lean staffs, and to larger businesses due to the size of their organizations and customer bases. #vcbuzz
— Courtney Rogers (@CourtneyMRogers) May 24, 2022

The thing about marketing automation is that it automates marketing communications and processes, but it doesn’t automate the art of marketing.

Marketing automation drives the need for more design and copy creative.

Q3 What is the best way to start with marketing automation?

Keep it as simple as possible when starting a marketing automation program. First look at the autoresponder emails you’re sending from the form software on your website. You can customize the notification email based on selections made in the form.

Then integrate the form with your CRM system and automatically add leads. Clean CRM data is critical – review new leads daily. Next, integrate a marketing automation platform with your CRM. Start sending a “drip series” of emails after a form fill.

More importantly, keep your customers’ data secure. Marketing automation includes a lot of data management and storage, so you need to make sure your process is perfectly secure. Hari Ravichandran explains cybersecurity in much detail.

Identify your goals and requirements that align with your business strategy and branding, and conduct market research on tools that can meet your needs within your available budget. #vcbuzz
— Courtney Rogers (@CourtneyMRogers) May 24, 2022

Fix the things you can fix quickly, but I wouldn’t delay submit to Google. Google proceeds at their own pace and won’t immediately index your site.

You’re playing the long game with #SEO. #vcbuzz
— Tod Cordill (@todcordill) May 24, 2022

Q4 What is the end goal of a marketing automation campaign? In other words, when do you know that you are done fine-tuning your tools?

There is no end goal. It’s a journey. You know you are on the right track when you’re spending more time on A/B testing and refining messaging to improve results than you are spending setting up new workflows.

You need to ensure you are always measuring results and that your analytics reflect progress towards the goals your strategy was designed to achieve. #vcbuzz
— Courtney Rogers (@CourtneyMRogers) May 24, 2022

A4 Coming from a place of not utilizing marketing automation, I believe the end goal would be to “make things easier” and get the data organized into a portal where it can be easily obtained & implemented.

Just guessing here….. 🙂 #VCBuzz
— Debi Norton (@BRAVOMedia1) May 24, 2022

I’ve found that most of the time marketing automation is implemented it’s doing things that couldn’t be done before, not automating mundane tasks.

But if you’re manually sending many templated emails that can definitely be offloaded. #vcbuzz
— Tod Cordill (@todcordill) May 24, 2022

Organizing and maintaining data is key. You need to have your CRM data in good shape before you can get sophisticated in marketing automation. Do you have a contact form on your website that sends an automated email? Do you schedule social media posts?

Since you’re sending automated form emails and scheduling social media posts you are doing #marketingautomation!

A lot can be gained by having good form fill notification emails.

Don’t think you need a 5 figure annual s/w budget to get started. #vcbuzz
— Tod Cordill (@todcordill) May 24, 2022

A4. We continually seek to learn and improve ways to get the same thing (or better) accomplished more efficiently. The end goal at each stage is always to learn. #vcbuzz
— Jeannie Hill (@essentialskill) May 24, 2022

Q5 What are your favorite marketing automation tools?

There are many great marketing automation tools out there. My main advice is to start small and don’t blow the budget on s/w. My current go-to tools are: Form s/w: @gravityforms Integration s/w: @zapier, @Cazoomi MA: @ActiveCampaign

Don’t forget about CRM!

A5 I’d like to also include @narratoio to our list because it is a great tool that automates content marketing tasks, like creating a brief (using SEO data)! #vcbuzz
— Ann Smarty (@seosmarty) May 24, 2022