Today we all live in a digital world. Marketing Automation is the tool that paves your way to success, in a fast track process. This is a concept that is beyond tools, optimizations, keywords and all other such paraphernalia. Marketing Automation provides you with endless possibilities to get best results in business.

What is exactly meant by Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation is the practical use of software and other platforms to automate the repetitive tasks in business.

Marketing Automation helps you to streamline, simplify and measure approximately all tasks and workflows, related to your marketing activities. Marketing Automation is targeted to increase your marketing operational efficiency, to help you grow your business revenue.

Marketing Automation automates the process of delivery of your marketing contents to your customers, in a precise manner. But this process of delivering marketing contents to your customers needs to be analyzed for their business outcome. Marketing activities are aimed at the service of Revenue Delivery.

How does the customer view the technology?

You have to be conscious about what your customers think of the technology of marketing automation. You must know how you can best engage your customers, so that they turn into your advocates. Similar to how the marketing and sales should be interlinked, service to customers should also be in step of these two. All these strategies are equally important and complementary to each other, when you sell your product or your service to your customers.

Marketing is no longer a demand generating or lead routing process. It is now doing more than managerial and administrative tasks. Nurturing relationship with a customer has become most important now, because that can transform all aspects of your business, starting from service to sales, to marketing.

The point where humans meets machines, in marketing automation

Planning and development of marketing campaigns are totally human efforts. You are selling your products or services to your human customers, through your marketing efforts. You have to keep in mind the terms of business preferred by your customers first, to be able to reach to them successfully.

The solutions offered by marketing automation do not necessarily have your brand’s unique selling points, brand’s message or your product vision, in the beginning. It is a human thing deciding what message you want to give to your customers and where you would like to deliver it. How your customers are going to be engaged with you is also a human thing. You have to yourself understand the individual personalities and realize truly all the factors that can motivate them. If you analyze the metrics of your customers reach, just the large number of contacts does not mean that you are reaching the right customers, at the time and places they prefer best for getting engaged with you.

Marketing Automation will provide you data, tools, and resources that will help you to make informed decisions regarding making your marketing strategies and designing its related campaigns. But it is necessarily a human effort to execute these marketing plans and learning the factors that motivate people to engage with your platform. You have to understand how to tailor and differentiate the brand experiences for your customers. You need to own your contacts to convert them to be your customers.

A very great example of this is Amazon for Business. How smart the company is to recommend to you what you need for your personal life. It is a very human message and concise with your business needs too.

By delivering content value to those customers, who are already well informed

The current consumers and buyers do a lot of market search and research, before they make their purchases. They themselves make their buying decisions, based on their own market findings, before they meet with any sales person. There is an abundant bunch of information available to the buyer that they get from different social networks, from product reviews, from word of mouth publicity, before the buyer eventually meets with your sales team.

Most of the customers are of the opinion that modern technology keeps them well informed about product choices, than ever before. You have to think ahead of it and change your marketing tactics accordingly. You need to open up more opportunities for your buyers to engage with your brands, before they make their buying decisions.

Customers have now become self educated. You need to move beyond on boarding and teaching customers about the product only. You have to offer them with contents and other resources, which will teach them the strategies and skills they need for making their buying decisions in a brand agnostic way also.

An example of this is the initiatives of Salesforce’s educational contents. The company is thriving Trailblazers community that sits on the Trailhead learning platform. The community members use this platform to evangelize Salesforce’s products and they also organize local meetings to provide helpful user’s tips. They share honest feedbacks to others, to make the others benefit from their in depth knowledge and firsthand experience with the brand.

By planning for Successful Technical implementation of Marketing Automation

The following steps are suggested to be followed for successful implementation of Marketing Automation:-

You need to align your sales and marketing teams from day One. You must also be internally synchronized, if you want to offer your customers a seamless customer experience.

You have to ensure data cleanliness and hygiene. You have more options from having your data cleaned and updated, current and in your Customer Relation Management system. It effectively streamlines productivity, to have all your data in the same place, motivating your entire team to be focused on accomplishing the same objective.

You have to adopt a policy of account based marketing. It helps the sellers to prioritize account based selling tactics. It helps to improve the customer’s experience.

You need to make your business Customer Relation Management centric. It needs to be in place to successfully implement Activity Based Management. Customer first thinking needs to be prioritized by sales and marketing and work with an open data model, where data does not remain locked in a website. You have to have process and strategy to operate effectively.

By finding the real meanings inside the metrics

Proliferation of data can not necessarily guarantee the insight needed for you, to drive your business ahead. You may not that trained as a data scientist. The analysis paralysis issue can be tackled by harnessing artificial intelligence to inform the most effective marketing decisions.

Artificial Intelligence helps you to scale access to predictive analytics and recommendations, which will help you to deliver the maximum business value. It can also answer questions you may not be knowing, you ought to be asking.

Artificial Intelligence and analytics, when used in a meaningful way, by your sales team on the same platform can augment their work and will help them deliver more tailored informed and experienced needed, to close deals positively. Your objective is ultimately to make sure that the Artificial Intelligence and analytics is leading your business towards actionable insights, while analyzing data.

You need to start with an end goal in mind to develop a strategic and focused approach first, before you start digging into slicing data to uncover insights. Be clear about what the question is that your business would like to answer, which would steer you towards the most impactful performance data insights. Artificial Intelligence can help you capitalize on data. But having a thoughtful strategy of how your business would be using Artificial Intelligence would be driving more actionable insights for you.

Do you now think marketing automation is for you? Do you need to have additional information on this topic? Do you like to share your view on this subject? Share with us.