How is automation driving a new style of marketing?
Customers are gaining exponentially greater decision-making ability over their purchases. For businesses, this presents a challenge to sharpen their processes to make sure that their customer experiences are seamless. In today’s world of e-commerce, on-demand shopping and mobile retail applications, real success lies in the digital transformation of your IT environment to be less reliant on rigid technology.
A good example of this is where businesses who aren’t currently using marketing automation, are all planning to at some stage in the future. They want to maximise returns from their marketing budgets, while having the ability to scale up their most successful campaigns, and remove the silos between sales and marketing. But what exactly is marketing automation?
Unlike manufacturing automation, marketing automation doesn’t remove people from the marketing process. It simply uses software to streamline marketing processes while using analytics to drive faster insights from marketing data. So, which processes within your marketing campaigns could benefit most from automation?
Predictive lead scoring
These tools take into account a number of factors such as demographic and behavioural data, and then use this information to determine whether leads are adequately qualified or not. Marketing teams can gain invaluable insights from multiple marketing channels to show what kind of content their customers consume by looking at their interactions with:
- websites
- social media
- landing pages
- email marketing campaigns
- web tracking
Lead nurture
With properly qualified leads, you can begin to curate and personalise messages to the right customers through the most appropriate channel. Each lead is then nurtured and engaged before being routed to the appropriate sales channel, and this can occur before the customer has even purchased anything from your business.
Personalised content
Instead of sending offers to your entire market, marketing automation allows businesses to connect with their ideal customer. These days, the most effective ways to achieve this is through personalised content. New tools can collect and analyse data from social listening, broader consumer group behaviour, and previous purchases to generate the idea personalised content and offers.
Customer journey mapping
Automation also enables marketing teams to establish clear measures of progress through the customer’s purchase cycle. In the past, a particular customer’s readiness for sales approaches could have been decided by a marketer’s intuition, but it can now be based on predefined outcomes. Using these analytics, marketing automation tools can prioritise the time of sales staff while measuring the effectiveness of touch points to close sales sooner with prospects.
Measuring ROI
One of the most difficult and time consuming tasks for marketers in the past was calculating the ROI of each campaign and channel. With the right tools and software, marketing teams can now create automated reports that clearly identify metrics such as cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA). The ability to instantly generate these metrics for reporting enables marketing leaders to gain greater buy in with senior leaders and sales teams.
Ultimately, marketing automation is about asking marketers to rely less on guesswork and more on numbers. While marketing was once considered the dark art of the business world, marketers who can maximise the effectiveness of the tools available to them are more valuable to their business than in previous eras where “gut instinct” was the measure of effectiveness. With more effective and measurable results, automation tools give marketers to properly quantity their value.
About the author:
As the CEO and Chief Architect at Adita Technologies, my team and I work to understand our clients’ critical business processes and strategy so that we can develop a digital transformation roadmap towards implementing intelligent ERP, CRM and Marketing Automation within their business. If you’d like to discuss how your business can take the next big step in your digital transformation in order to discover a new competitive advantage, please feel free to get in touch with me via +61 405 981 679 or at kumar@aditatechnologies.com.