I’m sure you’ve heard the term “marketing automation” before. In today’s business world, it’s a buzzword that has been dissected and analyzed hundreds of times. And for good reason, too. According to a Forrester report, 58% of all top performing companies use marketing automation softwares to aid their marketing efforts. Clearly, we’re well on our way to standardizing the use of marketing automation. With that mind, we’ve determined to go one step further than all of the other articles out there. We want to know, what are the consequences of marketing automation and how will they affect the average marketer?
Using Social Media In Tandem
Often, marketers forget that marketing automation is meant to complement their already established marketing efforts, namely their social media marketing campaigns. Social media permits marketers and salespeople to slowly nurture a relationship with their prospects, so that their prospects can learn about their brand and eventually become primed for a phone call. Thus, analyzing social media is a great way to gain insights on the type of customers you’re attracting, where your customers are in the sales cycle, which emails are working best, which tweets are bringing in the most traffic, and more. And, this is exactly the type of information you receive when you marry social media management platforms and marketing automation platforms. Essentially, it allows marketers and salespeople to create user-specific information, which they can then analyze to perfect their lead generation and sales nurturing techniques.
Shift from Personalization to Prediction
Lately, many marketers are talking about the rising importance of personalization in their marketing campaigns, but we’re also seeing an incredible increase in automated predictive analytics platforms. Essentially, simply personalizing content and score leads in real time isn’t enough in today’s tech oriented sales and marketing environment. Rather, marketers should be proactive use marketing automation to predict consumer interactions before they actually take place. This way, by visualizing each customer’s interaction and conversion cycle, marketers can stay one step ahead.
In specific, marketing automated predictive analytics enables marketers to easily discover which prospects are about to buy and which have the greatest revenue potential. It does so by reading and analyzing buying signals all throughout the sales cycle and process. That way, marketers can target the customers they know for a fact are primed and ready to buy – easing their job and taking out time wasted on stubborn prospects.
Cross-Channel Campaigns
Single channel marketing, be it mobile, digital, or offline can not stand on it’s own today. Customers are used to interacting with their favorite consumer brands on any given channel and they expect this same type of business interaction in B2B. When new channels are popping up out of nowhere each and every day, marketers can use their marketing automation platform to incorporate each of these channels as soon as they hit the scene.
By utilizing a marketing automation platform marketers are able to handle all of your marketing communications and you can ensure all messages, regardless of the channel originated, are from one place. This way your brand’s message stays highly consistent and relevant throughout your entire campaign.
Of course it’s relevant to utilize your email, mobile, social, and web channels but the offline channels are heard about less frequently. Marketing automation solutions effectively allow you to bring together your online and offline channels so the messages are no longer obsolete and competing against one another, but rather managed and measured effectively in one place as a part of one campaign.
Marketing automation is changing all of the time and as the marketing industry innovates, new techniques keep arising to make the lives of marketers easier. What other trends have you noticed in marketing automation? What changes would you like to see made in the future?
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