Marketing agencies have a ton on their plates. Not only are they responsible for delivering effective strategies and campaigns that grow their clients’ businesses, but they’re also tasked with expanding their own book of business while cultivating new relationships and improving existing ones. And as digital marketing continues to evolve and become more nuanced, adaptability and scalability have become the name of the game.
If agencies and marketers don’t have the right tools and resources to help them adapt to the rapid pace and extreme demand of modern consumers, they’re going to struggle to win new clients, expand existing relationships, and grow their customer base. But by partnering with a proven marketing automation vendor that prioritizes product innovation specifically for agencies, you and your team can exceed your clients’ goals.
To that end, in today’s blog, we’re going to examine how agencies of all shapes and sizes can use marketing automation to improve their existing engagements and grow their business.
1) Stay on Budget and Meet Your Deadlines
When dealing with clients, nothing is more important than executing deliverables, content, and campaigns on time and under budget. But if you don’t have the right systems in place to ensure you are properly allocating funds and meeting your deadlines, you could easily go off the rails and find yourself in hot water with your customers.
Marketing automation makes it easy to create manageable workflows that outline the entire customer journey, along with specific dates and potential contingencies based on user behavior. This means you can set your programs to run like clockwork with minor alterations for improved performance. And by allowing your clients non-admin access to their marketing automation accounts, you can give them a bird’s eye view of everything that is in the works and on the horizon (without jeopardizing the integrity of your efforts).
Further, when you’re able to map out all of your projects and all of your active contacts from a single source, you can accurately project your quarterly and annual spend for each of your marketing initiatives. Better yet, by reviewing your previous metrics in your marketing automation platform and CRM, you can forecast future success and plan your budget and your deliverables accordingly!
2) Track User Behaviors and Leverage the Data
The ability to accurately track user behaviors is one of the most effective and powerful marketing automation use cases available. By placing a tracking pixel on your clients’ websites and other digital properties, you can understand how, when, and where your target audience is interacting with your brand. And with the right marketing automation tools (Act-On included!), once these anonymous visitors become known leads, you can automatically trace all of their previous engagements at the contact level — which leads to more relevant and personalized prospect outreach.
For example, let’s say someone visits the pricing page on your client’s website. They don’t request a quote, but they continue browsing and eventually enter their contact information in exchange for an eBook. From there, you can automatically enter this individual into a personalized program that will deliver a series of highly relevant content and messaging via social media advertising, SMS marketing, and automated email programs — all depending on their specific engagements and preferred method of campaign delivery.
That’s marketing automation at its finest!
3) Create and Share Branded Templates and Assets
Your clients are proud of their brand, and they are rightfully concerned with maintaining brand integrity with all of their campaigns — especially when they have multiple business units. It’s the essence of who they are and represents their ambitions and aspirations as an organization. So failing to achieve continuity across every channel and medium could represent a major issue for your agency.
By adopting a federated model using marketing automation, however, companies of all shapes, sizes, and structures can better execute campaigns while maintaining brand consistency and maximizing conversions. Create, share, and re-use approved email, form, and landing page templates — as well as entire email automation programs — to improve efficiency and maximize your resources. This helps reduce the burden on your creative team while keeping branding consistent, further inspiring client confidence and satisfaction.
4) Deliver Personalized Marketing Experiences
This is where the rubber really meets the road. Understanding your clients’ pain points, anticipating their needs, and delivering highly targeted lifecycle experiences are the three pillars of immediate and long-term sustained success. Marketing automation allows you to do all three with fewer resources and better results.
Whether your clients are marketing to businesses or consumers, you can use marketing automation to tailor the entire experience throughout their buying journey. By collecting valuable contact profile data via dynamic web forms and tracking user behaviors on your website and landing pages, you can create a clear picture of your target audience and develop accurate personas. From there, you can customize all messaging and content to match your clients’ end users — driving better engagement, improving sales, and ensuring brand affinity (and advocacy).
5) Highlight Your Success
The only thing worse than having to report poor performance to a client is having nothing to report in the first place. Marketing automation platforms like Act-On allow you to create accessible and scannable dashboards for client review and also deliver in-depth reporting and analysis of all your marketing programs.
From website performance reporting to Act-On’s Data Studio feature, our platform has everything you need to understand what your clients’ prospects are looking for, why they’re visiting their websites, and how they’re engaging with the programs your agency is executing. Not only does this inspire client confidence in your agency, but it also helps you understand what’s working, what isn’t, and where you can improve your efforts along the entire customer lifecycle.
Automate Your Marketing Agency With Act-On!
If your agency is new to marketing automation or looking for a more supportive, effective marketing automation vendor, we would love the chance to speak with you about your current situation and your plans for the future. Please click here to book a demo with one of our marketing automation experts.
Or, if you’re not quite ready for that discussion, you can click here to take our Interactive Product Tour to get the full rundown on how our marketing automation solution can help you and your clients expand your business!