The demand for Marketing Automation has vastly increased in the past few years and according to Marketo & Ascend report on 2015, 91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across channels.
It allows more targeted campaigns for different advertisers depending on the digital user group profiles. It also reduces cost of advertising, leading to an increase on Marketing Automation’s ROI at the same time.
What is marketing automation?
Marketing Automation is a set of software technology which helps marketers to automate the marketing action. All of these automated actions are designed to deliver relevant and personalised messages to the targeted customers via digital media. In other words, marketers are creating and automating types of content with the goal of actively attracting, qualifying and moving prospects through sales towards a purchase.
It also makes the marketing campaigns/adverts to be focused on increasing the chances that some of the targeted customers will progress towards a successful purchase. This also allows for different campaigns/adverts to be played to different groups at the same time depending upon the groups of the digital profile.
Benefits of Marketing Automation – All about Marketing Intelligence
Marketing automation is a system of recording the marketing activities. It’s the place where the marketers can collect and manage all the data and create a rich profile of their target audiences. With this intelligence, they can send out the right information at the right time to move prospects along on their purchasing journey.
It creates a more personal feeling towards the advertising campaigns which make the targeted users to be more engaged with the overall purchase journey. (rather than dictate the audience group)
It also enables the marketers to gather all their prospects leaving through digital interactions and identify when a prospect is sending buying signals so the marketer knows that prospect is ready to speak to sales.
For example, if a person is looking on certain sites, then it could trigger that they are looking for a new item and hence will trigger a targeted campaign. E.g. – Washing Machine, shoes, jackets and etc…
On the other hand, marketing automation systems can link into CRM systems allowing marketers to give sales revenue visibility into all digital strategy so sales can do a better job and close more deals.
(Telesales doing cold calls is not very successful but Telesales with intelligence can make the difference between a sale or not. If the right information is available to the sales person, they can help to guide the person forward.)
Read More: 4 Practical Use Cases for Marketing Automation: Here’s How It Works
Challenges that businesses might face – Compare information
The technology by itself is only an enabler. Although the marketing department can use automation to manage their database, send out campaigns and review the reporting, the company has to align and compare the marketing automation information to their sales departments. Marketers should strategically plan what kind of data to be collected, otherwise they might waste resources when dealing with vast amount of valueless data. Besides, automation needs to happen based upon tested processes that have gained good results in the past.
How to overcome the challenges? – Imagine the market
Nurture the users – Most of the marketers believe “data” is a key element, however it’s also about the strategy set up. It means thinking a step before understand who you wish to target, influence and create personas.
Building a strategy is the most important process. After that, you can design the systems to execute your desired outcomes before sending out to the public. A poor strategy may make potential buyers interpret the adverts as spam. It needs to be in tuned with the users and make them feel as if they are part of the solution.
Once you know your strategy, whom you are looking for, what data and how your data should look, it will be much easier to increase your marketing automation solution’s ROI.
In addition, you need to be imaginative and create pilot test groups to see if the marketing process or messages are correct or not, as everyone sees, feels, tastes, uses things in different ways based upon their personal mind set.
Knowing our strategy targets would also help us to overcome proving the ROI challenge. As the platform where all the marketing data and campaigns are created and executed, a good model of marketing automation allows marketers to see what is working and what is not working in terms of response. Once the marketing automation system is connected to the CRM system, marketers are then able to see how marketing is influencing pipeline.
With a good model and alignment with sales, marketers can get to the point where they can predict where certain investments in programs at certain stages of the funnel can create pipeline.
How marketers should interpret the data?
In traditional media, demographic information is all that marketers really have available to them. Today, the most valuable information a marketer can have is behavioural data.
The combination of ‘who they are’ and ‘what they do’ is what gives marketers the information they need to feed prospects with the right content to educate them along their purchasing journey.
Conclusion
Most marketers can probably benefit from all aspects of marketing automation which can offer them. Normally, there might be few ‘pain points’ they feel that compel them to buy.
The beauty is that once they have the system in place they can continuously improve and extend how they are using marketing automation. Most customers follow an adoption curve where they add sophistication as they master the basics.
Gathering the user data, ensuring it’s being maintained up-to-date with the services on offer and keep up the current market trends are the must for all the modern marketers.
Do you use marketing automation for your business? Check out our Marketing Automation Service page for more information.
