As online audiences grow and become more diverse, marketing automation software is becoming ever more important for brands to reach the right people in the right place at the right time. Ahmed Ahmed at Eloqua offers 5 ways that marketers can use these new tools to get the most out of your sales opportunities.
‘Marketing automation’ is one of those buzzwords at the moment, like ‘social CRM’ or ‘life-cycle marketing’. It seems you can’t go to a conference or do a blog search without these current terms popping up.
Already raking in $3.2 billion by 2010, the marketing automation industry is expected to grow to $4.8 billion in 2015. For the uninitiated, here’s a concise look at what it means, and how you should be using it to your advantage.
What is marketing automation software?
“A category of technology that allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows, so they can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster.”
“The art and science of automatically managing the targeting, timing and content of your outbound marketing messages in response to prospects’ inbound actions and online behaviours.”
Taken from two of the leading providers, these definitions together pretty much cover the technical aspect, but let’s get practical. What can marketing automation actually do for you as a marketer, a businessperson, or a company?
5 ways you should be using marketing automation
1. Start hyperspecific targeting
Targeting select groups of buyers with the right messages increases likelihood of purchase. But don’t limit yourself to simple demographics like age or job title; you could also target leads according to how they responded to your campaigns in the past, or what they do when they visit your website.
Jupiter Research compared untargeted campaigns with campaigns based on clickstream data, finding that conversion rates can be up to 400% higher for the latter.
2. Smarten up your email marketing
You’re already using email? Great. But is it a one-size-fits-all approach? A study by the Direct Marketing Association found that triggered messages have a click rate 119% higher than other messages.
That means marketers should be programming specific messages to be sent in response to visitor actions, such as purchase confirmation, anniversary or shopping cart abandonment
3. Nurture leads until they’re ready to buy
This is possibly the biggest advantage of marketing automation. You know that most people who visit your website are just browsing – they’re not ready to buy. But down the line, many will be.
As long as you can capture their details, with a piece of gated content for example, marketing automation lets you set up a series of communications designed to take them through the buying process. Based on their behaviour, you can score prospects from ‘cold’ to ‘warm’ so that your salespeople can allocate their time where it’s most likely to be fruitful.
4. Crack the Social Media Mystery
By this I refer to the lack of measurement that often goes with social media campaigns. Last year, a Satmetrix study found that 67% of companies do not measure or quantify social media engagement. For B2B companies, this figure rises to 75%.
The various marketing automation software providers try to solve this problem by providing integrated dashboards, which deliver analytics across all platforms including social media campaigns. As well as traffic, there is often an emphasis on displaying ROI, which helps you to judge which online marketing channels are working best.
5. Get More Personal with Customers
Yes, you read that right. The term ‘marketing automation’ might conjure up an idea of pushing prospects along through a standardised, dehumanised process. But actually, having access to a high level of information about individual behaviour, needs and interests should make it easier to personalise communications and service to your customers as well.
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By offering best practice advice, training or enhanced features, you let your customers get more out of their investment with your products or services. This can improve the value of your brand, customer satisfaction and retention, and is central to the 5 Truths of Modern Marketing.
By Ahmed Ahmed
Eloqua
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