Why does Marketing need Automation?
If you are not so familiar with the marketing tools and especially the field of marketing automation. This article will hopefully give you a better understanding of what are the challenges from the marketing teams in 2018 and how automation can help them.
Moreover, this could become very complex as new touchpoints become available every day. (Here a non-exhaustive list of 120+ online channels).
What can Marketing Automation do?
Marketing Automation offers the capability to capture various sources of data and to consolidate them. Thanks to analytics mechanisms (and even sometimes predictive analytics), it will give the marketer an overview of the behavior of their prospects and customers.
From all the data, marketing automation can help realize what your audience is and what they are looking for.
Increasing customers engagement.
Having traffic on the website is critical.
Also, don’t get me wrong, it is as well challenging, but I won’t elaborate content marketing or SEO strategy today. If you want to know how to generate online traffic, better read these articles in the meantime, here and there.
Having traffic is one thing but then what to do?
Another challenge that marketing professionals are facing today is to convert that traffic into leads, resulting in new customers.
It is critical to understand the performance of your content marketing — the content that is generating significant traffic to lead ratio. Then delivering the appropriate message to the right audience at the right time.
It is called Lead Nurturing in proper marketing jargon.
What can Marketing Automation do?
Marketing professionals must make use of comprehensive analytics and segmentation of customers delivered by the marketing automation platform.
Use automation to deliver targeted and personalized content to increase the level of engagement of their prospects.
Lead-scoring mechanisms will finally help to identify the prospect to focus on, to succeed and ultimately gain new customers.
Closing the gap between marketing and sales.
Historically marketing and sales teams always had a gap in communication, but digitalization has made this gap bigger, especially in medium to large organizations.
In an ideal journey, Marketing departments collect information about potential customers, nurture them with content, make them Marketing Qualified Leads, then hand those leads over to the sales departments whose job it is to move them through the sales funnel and collect further information about the potential client until he becomes a customer.
What can Marketing Automation do?
Marketing Automation offers integrations and mechanism to push and pull information programmatically.
The data collected are automatically synchronized with the CRM. So Marketing can evaluate what has worked and what needs to be improved in the marketing strategy.
Time and budget are limited resources.
Having limited resources will limit the execution of marketing strategies. Therefore being performant is of the utmost importance. Primary activities such as aggregation of data cannot be done manually.
Marketing team must focus on activities generating ROI such as designing, implementing and monitoring marketing campaigns.
What can Marketing Automation do?
Overall Marketing Automation solutions were designed for this: Improving the performance of marketing teams by automating repetitive tasks.
However, it could sound paradoxical, but Marketing Automation could be a challenge on its own. Indeed, although it offers great possibilities for marketing, the tool itself will never deliver any value without the appropriate strategy and team structure behind.
Finally, automation is a fundamental requirement of modern digital marketing. We saw in this previous article that its adoption would continue to grow.
New technologies will also arise and offer even more capabilities to marketers. These new systems will affect the structure of the marketing department. Already, the emergence of the demand for data analytics professionals shows that new skill sets are required to tame the technologies and translate strategy into execution.
It is just the beginning.
Until next time.
Sam
