How Marketing Automation Can Grow Your Business
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation provides a useful way to get multiple marketing channels working together as a single system. Now, social media, content marketing, and email campaigns don’t need to be treated as isolated efforts. For example, a customer may find your company through an Internet search. She then decides to 'like' your company on Facebook. It’s practically impossible to chase down all of these individual conversation paths. This is where marketing automation can help. It allows you to do a better job of tracking potential customers’ behavior, so you can better understand their interaction with your company. This helps you to nurture prospects more effectively, so you can focus on turning as many as possible into long-term customers.
Is Marketing Automation Impersonal?
Many people assume that marketing automation has to be cold and impersonal. This is not true. Marketing automation is actually a great way for business owners to send personalized, targeted messages. Most marketing automation software platforms, such as Marketo, Pardot, Silverpop or SharpSpring, can actually give a marketing team the ability to spend more time focusing on the quality of their campaign and messaging. When the software collects data on a prospective customer's interests and goals, the company can tailor future offers for each customer, making those offers more relevant.
Is Marketing Automation Spam?
When you use marketing automation, you are not blasting vast audiences with advertising messages day after day. It is a user-friendly marketing tool, as it is geared to focus on each user's personal experience.
What Can Marketing Automation Do For My Business?
Marketing automation has several strong benefits, both for business owners and for their customers.
- You can send targeted offers based on a customer's website usage and patterns.
- You can segment your customers by categorizing them based on their demographic details, interests, and behaviors. This helps ensure that customers don’t receive communications about offers or news they’d never be interested in.
- You can test marketing variables like emails send times, personalization ideas, and email subject headings.
- You can integrate marketing channels for a seamless cross-platform experience.
What do Services Do Marketing Automation Software Platforms provide?
- Consulting services: Most platforms offer consulting services. This provides the business owner help with implementation, marketing strategy, product consulting, and technical issues.
- Managed services: While marketing can be a big job, many marketing automation software companies offer assistance, either on a full-time basis or simply as needed.
- Custom engineering: With guidance from the software's custom engineering service, business owners can achieve quicker results using custom product extensions, application development, and systems integration.
- Support and training: In order to help business owners better understand an automation platform, most offer customer support, training, and deliverability services.
How Can Marketing Automation Software Create More Personalized Experiences?
The goal of most marketing automation software companies is to make marketing more personal. There are a few ways that they can achieve this goal.
- Marketing platform: Software companies can help you turn an impersonal marketing platform into a behavior-based platform. The software captures customer data from many sources, allowing it to create responsive interactions in real-time.
- Marketing automation: This software automates personalized interactions. It allows business owners to deliver highly relevant and meaningful messages to customers, all prompted by specific customer behaviors.
- Email marketing: Marketing automation software allows business owners to do away with random email blasts, in favor of messaging that’s much more personal, relevant, and well-timed. These messages will be sent to users based on their preferences, recent browsing behavior, and more.
- Mobile customer engagement: Most software programs provide a suite of tools that make it simple to integrate mobile devices with other digital channels.
What is the point of marketing, if you’re simply sending out the same information to every customer in every demographic? These untargeted messages are unlikely to resonate with all but a small percentage of your audience. But when you begin using marketing automation, you can make sure potential customers receive appropriate information at the appropriate time, based on what they’re reading and sharing on the Internet. This approach is far more respectful of your audience. It gives them the sense that you’re listening, and that you care. And on top of all this, it’s a way more efficient way to spend your precious marketing dollars.