This is the blog transcript of our video “How to Set Up a Marketing Automation Campaign”. If you’d like to see more of our videos, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel here.
A lot of people are scared away from marketing automation simply because it feels so daunting to set up. It doesn’t have to be, though. In this video, I’ll walk you through my simple process for creating my own marketing automation campaigns and that I use to help my clients set up theirs.
Hey everyone, I’m Ian Campbell, CEO of Mission Suite. Before we jump into today’s video, do me a favor and hit the subscribe button and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos.
After 10 years of helping Mission Suite clients create their automation campaigns for marketing, lead generation and sales effectiveness, I’ve gotten a feel for the easiest and most effective way to start building automation campaigns.
I’ve also seen and built some really complicated ones. But we’ll focus on the simple campaigns so that you can start seeing automation work for you quickly.
By the way, none of this is going to be done on your computer. Take out a piece of paper, find a whiteboard, use post it notes, whatever. Just make sure that you have some sort of “analog” planner that you can interact with. It’ll help the process a lot if you can physically interact with the plan instead of just looking at it on a screen.
Choose Your Strategy
Starting at the beginning, you have to choose the strategy you’re focusing on for this part of your campaign – are you building a campaign for marketing? Lead generation? Or for selling?
Yes, there may be some overlap between the three and yes, you want them all to play nicely together, but if you’re just getting started, trying to build a big campaign that swings back and forth between the three primary goals that I use for my campaigns can get really confusing.
So, for any of you out there who are new to marketing automation and just getting your first campaigns set up, keep them siloed for now. We’ll worry about connecting them all later.
Decide on Your First Step
The second thing you need to do is decide on your first step.
Let’s assume, for example, that you’re setting up a campaign to support your sales efforts – and even more specifically, you’re prospecting efforts. Now that we know our goal for this campaign, what’s the first thing that always happens when selling?
You make contact with a prospect, right? Great, now you have your starting point. No, this isn’t necessarily something that you can automate but knowing where you’re starting and knowing where you’re ending is the only way to actually create a map to get from A to Z.
Figure Out Where You Want to Go
Which brings me to step three – figure out where you want to go.
Keeping to this example of prospecting, I’m guessing your end goal for this portion of your automation campaign is to get a meeting.
If you’re building for marketing, maybe your end goal is to build your list.
If you’re building for lead generation, maybe your end goal is to create a full lead profile with titles and phone numbers.
Whatever your end goal is, that’s the last step of your campaign so mark it down on your board.
Before we get into the meat of your automation strategy, tell me what you’re using to plan. Are you using a whiteboard? Post it notes? Neon green posterboard?
Let me know in the comments what you’re using and, while you’re down there, give us a like so we know you’re getting something out of this!
Plan Your Action Steps
Now it’s time to fill in the meat of the automation strategy, which leads me to the fourth step – plan the action steps of the campaign.
Your action steps are the actual steps that need to be taken to get you from your starting point to your end goal.
If this is a prospecting follow up campaign, those action steps are likely going to be something like Follow up email 1 -> Phone Call -> LinkedIn Connection -> Phone Call -> Follow up email 2.
At least that’s what my follow up campaigns tend to look like.
If you’re trying to develop a lead profile, your action steps will probably involve a lot of content offers and forms that you want people to fill out with more specific information than the last form.
Maybe the first form is just an email address and name, the second form asks for company and title, and the third form asks for employee size. Write those out on your planning board, along with the content offers that go along with each form and the emails that you’re going to send to get them interested in that content.
Now that you have your planning board filled out, your last step is simple – decide how long you want between each action step of your campaign.
I hope it’s obvious but you definitely don’t want to fire off these action steps in rapid succession. There needs to be some sort of a delay between each step, otherwise it comes across as desperate.
So plan out your delays.
Going back to my prospecting follow up, maybe there’s three days between my first follow up email and my first phone call. Then another day before I send the LinkedIn connection. Then two more days before my second phone call. And finally three more days before my second follow up email.
If I’m looking at my lead generation campaign, oftentimes it’s a week between each email, but you have to decide what works for you, your company and the prospects you’re working with.
If there’s a natural sense of urgency that goes along with your solution, maybe your lead generation campaign can’t wait a week in between steps. That’s something you’re going to have to test and determine what works best.
So I know that’s a lot of information, but the good news is that what comes next is the easy part. Now that you have your campaign plan set up, all you need to do is transfer that information into your automation system and let it start working for you!
Hey I hope you got something out of this video. And if you did, go ahead and give it a thumbs up and maybe a share so that others can see it too. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell so that you’re notified whenever we post new videos and while you’re at it, check out these videos too!
We’ll see you next time around!