Make Social Media a Core Part of Your Marketing Automation Strategy using these 4 ways

A VB Insight study states that 80 percent of businesses who use marketing automation strategy get an increase in leads while 77 percent get increased sales conversions as a direct result of marketing automation.

A report from PR20/20’s Marketing Score also revealed that high-performing companies who use marketing automation have at least a higher 60 percent lead to sale conversion rate compared with other companies who don’t use marketing automation strategy.

Marketing automation’s importance in business operations is indisputable. Today, people’s attention spans are heavily declining. This is because people are bombarded with useless information on a daily basis, and so for businesses to get noticed, they have to perform better than their competitors.

The only way to stand out and capture people’s attention nowadays is by making sure that you deliver targeted and tailored sales messages that are based on your audience’s interests. Marketing Sphera states that delivering tailored sales messages boosted the company’s sales by 208 percent.

How To Make Social Media a Core Part of Marketing Automation Strategy

Here are the good ways of making social media a core part of your marketing automation strategy. Without social media, your marketing automation strategy is not complete.

1. Integrate social media into your email marketing efforts.

Research data from the Direct Marketing Association revealed that you can expect a ROF of $37 on every $1 spent on email marketing. Naturally, email marketing is always expected to be a core part of all marketing automation campaigns.

However, very few people are effectively benefiting from social media in order to boost their email marketing efforts. When used right, social media significantly boost the reach of your emails while also maximizing email subscriptions.

Here are a few ways that you can integrate email marketing and social media:

Make your email content easily shareable on social media:

With appealing content, you can reach a lot more people on your email list. A lot of marketers feel that putting a share button or share link in their emails is not essential. It is very essential. Try including a share option that leads people to your landing/opt-in page.

Add opt-in forms in key places of your blog:

Your blog is the biggest social channel that drives lead to your marketing automation system. If it is properly optimized and opt-in forms are put in strategic sections of your blog, you can expect that a lot more leads will pour in.

Share links to key excerpts of your emails on social media:

Put gated access forms or content lockers in order to require people to subscribe and join your automated mailing list in order to read the full content on your blog.

Use Twitter cards and web forms on your Facebook page:

Take advantage of social media to boost your mailing list subscriptions. It is important that you realize the ability to implement depends on your marketing automation tool or your email service provider. Most email service providers and marketing automation tools today equip you with the necessary capabilities in order for you to achieve your marketing goals. For example, Infusionsoft CRM enables embed links to your emails in order to facilitate social media sharing of your content.

2. Use social media to create more attention to your product launches.

If you have not actively used social media for a product launch. You have probably missed out on a lot of potential sales.

There is a good reason why there has been a lot of emphasis on social media selling: Most people who are on social media have bigger budgets.

Research data from Sales for Life state that marketers who use social media to engage their customer base have 84 percent larger budgets than marketers who do not have a social media presence. And so if you don’t make noise on social media during your launches, you are missing out on a lot of potential sales.

More importantly, you can take things one more level up when you actively engage people who are interested in your product or topics concerning your product. Doing this can augment your sales by up to 84 percent, so why not do it?

3. Establish thought leadership with content curation.

85 percent of people agree that curation of content helps establish thought leadership according to a written blog. Thought leadership is a core factor when designing marketing automation campaigns. While it is difficult to measure, data shows that perceived expertise and thought leadership can indeed significantly boost conversions.

Milgram experiments show that what extent thought leadership and authority can influence people’s actions. The experiments which were conducted in the 1960s showed that the majority of people are willing to obey authority to a major degree, even if it means electrocuting someone else.

The same principle explains why social curation can be very effective as part of a marketing automation strategy.

4. Actively re-purpose your content and spread across social channels.

You do not always need a large budget in effectively distributing content which is aimed at increasing the number of leads which pour into your marketing automation funnel. You should simply repurpose your existing content and distribute it far and wide, this will be more than enough. Blog posts can be repurposed into infographics, video content, tweets, slide presentations, Facebook status, and other social media updates.

A piece of content which is re-purposed into eight different forms of content can potentially help you achieve eight times the reach compared to a single piece of content alone. That’s a potential of 800 percent in an increase of leads. Those leads will then be nurtured by your marketing automation system.

Re-purposing your blog’s content can help you achieve content unity by making sure that your content is highly related with one another while significantly maximizing the reach of your brand message all across different channels.