Optimizing Marketing Workflows: Best Tools and Practices

Digital marketing is among those industries that show zero sign of slowing down. With every passing year, more and more brands are investing in their web presence. According to a recent report, the global digital marketing market is to reach $786.2 billion by 2026.

With optimized workflows in the marketing area, companies can attract even more customers. However, workflow optimization can require some serious investment of time and money initially.

This post covers the best practices of optimizing your marketing workflows, and introduces  some of the top tools to help you.

How to Optimize Marketing Workflows

Optimizing workflows means doing a better job of achieving your business objectives. 

It is the process of adjusting your marketing efforts based on the gathered data. All these alterations and improvements are possible with marketing applications and strategies.

This section will cover some of the best practices and tools that can help you optimize your marketing workflows.

Best Practices for Marketing Workflow Optimization

Optimization of marketing workflow isn’t particularly hard. Simply focus on the following best practices and spread your products and services to even larger audiences:

Research Your Target Audience

If you want to increase your traffic and optimize your marketing workflows, begin with your target audience and buyer persona. 

It is quite probable that you already understand the nature of your target audience. However, it is important that your research on them is up to the minute.

While carrying out your research, data you might want to explore include:

• What your target audience prefers to buy
• How your target customers make purchases (through credit cards, cash, online payment portals, or in person)
• What related items does your target audience wish to purchase
• How your competitors reach out to your target customers
• What sort of entertainment and news outlets interests your target market
• The amount of time your target market spends on social media
• The name of social networking platforms your target audience uses the most
• The time of the year your target audience tends to buy the most

With all these details available, you can better grasp the purchasing patterns and preferences of your target market. It helps you determine the best channels to connect with them and their response to a certain marketing campaign. 

If you want to target audiences in different parts worldwide, learning about them can get tricky due to geo-restrictions. For this, you can switch to VPN to bypass geographical limitations and fulfill other marketing purposes.

Learn how VPNs work by comparing different options available in the market, like NordVPN with ExpressVPN, for example, and find a provider that would help understand your audiences’ needs. The more you learn about your target audience and their requirements, the more effective your marketing campaigns will be.

Fine-tune Your Efforts with Data and Analytics

Marketing data illustrates the performance of your marketing software and strategies. 

Collect related data and monitor the metrics of the marketing workflows to learn about any potential inefficiencies and ways to fix them. Track the performance of campaigns, analyze the data, and make adjustments as required with the help of different tools.

What’s more, during data analysis, look for patterns and trends that can help you with the optimization of workflows. 

For instance, you can analyze which type of content performs well, which channels drive the most traffic, and which content pieces create the most engagement and make data-driven decisions as a result.

Go for Automation

Although marketing demands a human element, you get the chance to focus on higher-level tactics by automating manual processes. 

With a little help from ready-made tools or custom-tailored solutions created by your development team, you can automate certain operations in just a few clicks.

Workflow automation enables you to:

• Obtain data about the success of your marketing attempts
• Plan the launch of marketing campaigns
• Monitor the email time and recipients
• Handle the arrangement of social media marketing (SMM) efforts
• Pick out and remove underperforming advertisements
• Generate analytics explaining reasons behind the success of marketing campaigns
• Collect feedback and customer reviews automatically

Improve Your Performance with SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a process of improving the website to increase its visibility to search engines. The higher a site ranks, the more likely it is to generate traffic, which increases engagement and sales consequently.

Search engines, like Google, look for content relevant to what people are searching for every now and then. When the search engine notices that your content addresses the user’s query, it scans the usefulness of your content. 

In order to rank higher on Google, make sure your website has the following:

• The right keywords within the post content, meta descriptions, alt text, etc.
• Optimized content for better readability, such as the use of headings and subheadings, numbered lists, bullet points, brief sentences, and paragraphs, etc.
• Video content related to what you offer
• External linking to websites with reliable content
• Backlinks
• Reviews and an active review schema markup

Focus on Conversions rather than on Leads

You can also optimize your marketing workflows by shifting your focus to overall conversions instead of leads. 

Tracking only leads or paying customers usually leads to a false sense of failure. Thus, it is important to understand that not every site visitor is going to be a lead.

It is always better to concentrate on conversions than on leads you get from a particular promotional campaign. This can include anything, from newsletter signups to whitepaper downloads and social media follower expansion. 

A marketing campaign can still be successful if it helps you expand a certain area of your digital marketing.

Do Not Abandon Remarketing

It costs you more to acquire new ones than to retain existing customers. So, it is always better to look after your current customers, which is called remarketing. 

Try to find different ways of keeping your current customers engaged. You can also display your ads to them when they visit another website. With remarketing, you get a specific target audience and help to improve ad relevancy.

One good example is Facebook advertisements. You can run remarketing ads to encourage visitors to revisit your site to continue shopping or invite previous customers to check out your website for new deals.

Top Tools to Optimize Marketing Workflows

A marketing tool can be a method or application used to promote products or services to drive sales. 

Here are the top five tools that can help you facilitate your marketing responsibilities and optimize marketing workflows consequently:

Hotjar – User Behavior Analysis Workflows

Hotjar is a specialized tool trusted by over 350,000 organizations across 184 countries. It enables you to analyze and understand the behavior of users visiting a site or using an app.

One of its key features is heatmaps that help you better understand what users find engaging on your site. The feature also offers the assessment of visual representations of their taps, clicks, and scrolling interactions with the pages.

It also allows you to see how users interact with your site with real visitor recordings. Other notable features of Hotjar that are useful for optimizing marketing workflows include surveys, user-generated feedback, and form analysis.

All in all, some useful features of Hotjar include:

• Creating heatmaps to visualize user behavior
• Narrowing down session recordings to see real-time user interactions
• Providing feedback about the site’s layout and identifying potential areas of improvement or great performance
• Connecting directly with users through interviews
• Choosing participants to take part in user testing on the site

Mailchimp – Sales & Marketing Workflows

Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform known for its capability to create and analyze ad and email marketing campaigns. It offers tools for content creation, insight, and automation.

Mailchimp lets you draft professional emails for your clients, customers, and other interested parties and boost sales. You can use its pre-designed email templates and drag-and-drop builder to create engaging emails. Furthermore, this tool enables you to manage multiple email campaigns and monitor all of them.

Here are the key benefits of using Mailchimp for workflow optimization:

• Drives more traffic and sales by setting up automations that trigger emails based on customer behavior
• Uses pre-built journeys to help users cross-sell their products, re-engage current customers, get new ones, and recover abandoned carts
• Sends customized emails based on customers’ purchasing patterns, survey responses, chat interactions, and support tickets to increase loyalty and development
• Provides data-driven suggestions for improving content, imagery, and layout

Trustmary – Review Marketing Workflows

Trustmary is a marketing tool that helps you use all your social proof to the maximum advantage with reviews and testimonials. Social proof is an important factor in lead generation and conversion optimization, as customers are most likely to trust you after reading authentic reviews or recommendations from other people. 

Trustmary lets you collect reviews automatically and showcase them in a way that has the maximum effect on conversions. The intelligent algorithms find your best reviews and highlight them on your website in the smartest ways.

Advanced users can even automate the whole feedback collection process and turn positive feedback into public testimonials.

Using Trustmary eliminates many tiring tasks, such as:

• Sending feedback surveys manually.
• Requesting reviews from customers personally.
• Asking if you have permission to use a customer’s review in marketing.
• Figuring out how to use reviews effectively on your website.
• Having to constantly update fresh social proof to your website manually.

HubSpot CRM – Accounting & Sales Workflows

HubSpot CRM is a marketing platform for marketers to help streamline sales, customer service, accounting, marketing efforts, and management. It comes with software, integrations, and resources required to connect marketing, sales, content management, and customer service.

The solution has many features, such as live chat, email templates, dynamic lists, and forms for lead capture. These powerful features enable users to improve their connection with customers and increase revenues based on various interaction channels.

Here is how HubSpot CRM helps optimize marketing workflows:

• Tracks all details of business relationships in one place
• Manages sales pipeline with full visibility by adding deals, assigning tasks to start deals, and monitoring the progress of projects
• Transforms site visitors into leads and create more personalized customer experiences with free marketing tools
• Keeps the teams focused on customers with live chat and help desk and ticketing

SEMrush – Online Marketing Workflows

SEMrush is among the leading digital marketing tools you can leverage to plan and run SEO strategies. It enables you to search relevant keywords for your site, track competitors’ SEO strategies, and generate SEO-optimized content. What’s more, SEMrush helps you with PPC (pay-per-click) advertisement campaigns and drives your business sales.

The tool also maintains your current traffic, looks for better advertising opportunities, and designs a more effective link-building strategy. It also meets your search engine marketing (SEM) needs, like organic traffic insights, backlink analysis, competitive research, etc.

The main features of SEMrush are:

• Generates traffic to your website by finding the optimal keywords
• Brings new ideas to boost the site’s health and SEO performance
• Increases site traffic and improves performance using your competitors’ successful strategies
• Creates a robust content strategy with data-driven solutions
• Improves brand awareness with social media posting and analytics service
• Monitors daily changes of target keywords in target location
• Builds paid search campaigns with keyword research tools

Read more about the tool and its pros and cons from this SEMrush review.

Summary

No matter what your business is, optimizing your marketing is necessary to expand your audience and drive your conversions. 

Without a proper workflow, running your marketing campaigns can lead to missed deadlines, communication failures, and other problems. 

By optimizing your marketing techniques with dedicated workflows, you’ll get the ability to generate higher revenue and customer retention.

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