Ryan Bonnici continues his three-part series on mastering the art of marketing automation by going ‘Beyond the Basics’. Catch up on Part One ‘Marketing Automation 101’ here.

You’ve mastered the basics of marketing automation and have begun reaping the rewards of your initial efforts. At this stage, your triggered and auto-response emails are going out like clockwork. You’ve streamlined your marketing efforts by integrating all of your email, social, search, CRM and web analytics systems into one platform.

You’ve built a strong foundation for sophisticated marketing automation and data aggregation – but how do you take it to the next level?

Here are nine steps to take you beyond the basics:

1. Continue to take online training classes and attend free webinars. This will help you get a few fresh ideas for using marketing automation to streamline daily processes.

2. Identify at least three marketing tasks or programs you perform on a recurring basis and brainstorm ways to automate them. You can also begin using automation rules to automate manual tasks like lead qualification, lead assignment and segmentation.

3. Start building up your content inventory. Think about the content you’d want to send in drip campaigns or the long-form content you can place behind a form to help gather prospect information.

4. Start experimenting with more advanced drip campaigns. Look for feedback from your sales team to see what they’d like to see in their prospect drips, and start thinking about how you can nurture leads from upcoming events like trade shows.

5. Build more robust prospect profiles. Using the data gathered on your forms and landing pages, you can start creating prospect profiles to make your marketing campaigns successful. Many marketing automation platforms feature social profile lookups or integrations with prospecting tools like Jigsaw to import publicly available data like company name, industry, and size into your system.

6. Empower others within your organisation to engage through social media. Using the social posting capabilities of your marketing automation platform, you can integrate multiple Twitter handles for other members of your team—like your CEO, CMO or the head of your support team.

7. Go beyond the default settings with lead qualification. Evaluate how much various prospect actions should be worth, and then determine which criteria or actions you’d like to weigh most heavily and which should result in negative scoring. This will help ensure that your sales team doesn’t waste time on leads who either aren’t a good fit for your company, or aren’t ready to enter the buying cycle.

8. Start concentrating on the metrics that matter. Start thinking more about your cost per lead (CPL), cost per acquisition, number of leads generated, conversions and lead quality to really see how your campaigns are performing.

9. Identify all the points of conversion on your site. Marketing automation reports can typically tell you who is making it through your online processes and who is bailing out early, giving you the insight you need to optimise your site and identify points of improvement.