Welcome to marketing automation! Here’s a question for you: if you could tweak your marketing efforts so more marketing and publicity is being performed with less effort on your part, that would be a good thing right? Marketing automation (we’ll also refer to it as MA) utilizes a variety of technology to coordinate and manage timely (and hopefully profitable) customer interaction.
Marketing Automation 101
Ok you ask, but what exactly is marketing automation and in the big scheme of things why is it important to my business? Well, marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online and automate repetitive tasks.
Tools like email, social media and websites are all good examples and on a bigger scale, cloud computing ties in a lot of the same tool under one roof. So hopefully you can see that the canvas that marketing automation paints on is quite large.
A real challenge
There’s no question that marketing technology is changing the way organizations strategize their efforts. And while there are businesses which have the right tools, or are simply testing them out, marketing automation is challenging for some.
According to a recent IBM survey, marketing automation was one of the leading challenges for marketing executives. Which means that the MA landscape in general and cloud computing in particular may be too vast for many businesses to wrap themselves around.
A winning strategy
According to ironpaper.com, at its best, marketing automation uses a variety of tool like workflows, lead scoring and segmentation lists to allow a business to nurture leads and have meaningful interactions with prospects on an automatic basis. Let’s say your company makes whistles. A potential client visits your website and clicks on one of the many different whistles you produce but doesn’t purchase it. He’s a recurrent buyer so thanks to automated marketing, your software would deliver a personalized message or social media ad to influence his/her decision. You can hopefully see that customer interaction of this type is less expensive than manual follow-up.
When executed properly, automated marketing’s approach is extremely effective. But managers and top decision makers need to spend the time, money and other resources necessary to put an intelligent AM plan into action.
Embracing what automated marketing has to offer isn’t just about working smart. It’s about survival in the business arena.
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Nearly three decades living and working all over the world as a radio and television broadcast journalist in the United States Air Force, Staff Writer, Gary Picariello is now retired from the military and is focused on his writing career.
