Marketing is traditionally seen as the creative and hands on approach of driving your target audience to your product. Through promotions, market research and advertisements the company made sure to let the customers know that they have a great product. Today, there are many more avenues to reach people, especially the multitude of screens that we use as personal devices. With email, came email marketing and with social media, came social media marketing. Since the sheer number of people using these services rose, the volume of work around these new marketing tactics also rose.
What does it mean to automate?
The solution to this sudden influx of repetitive work is automation. A simple answer to the question ‘What is Marketing Automation?’ is that it is software designed to automate online marketing tactics and reduce the time humans spend performing repetitive tasks. The better answer is that along with saving time, it is software that also analyzes data to deliver targeted and meaningful ads, promotions and messages to the right customer. Personalizing every interaction is highly taxing on time and manpower, but automation makes this process… well, automatic.
Some tools of the trade that already exist in this regard are products such as: Pardot, SharpSpring and Hubspot. Pardot is a service provided by Salesforce and is a driver in B2B Marketing. SharpSpring is great for lead scoring and drip emails to converge customers down to sales. Hubspot specializes in inbound marketing: attracting visitors, converting leads and closing customers. With many companies specializing on their own unique aspects of marketing, implementation of the right tools is critical.
The Benefits
What marketing automation, done properly, can bring to your team is a conversion of prospects into customers and existing customers into truly satisfied customers. Traditional, time-delayed email barrages are a good way to find your emails in the spam folder. And often a prime example of failed automated marketing. Marketing automation that uses all known information about a prospect and delivers a personalized, informative message about what is needed, when it is needed is a sure fire-way to delight the customer. It is also the prime benefit of this process. It takes into account the needs of your leads, the way those needs evolve and interactions they have along your channels, not just email. With the multitude of platforms available to collect data and behaviour, all those available platforms should be used to get your message to the client as well. A seamless and informative experience for the lead will prove beneficial for both parties.
If you are thinking of taking your marketing process to the next level by taking advantage of what marketing automation can bring to your business, Contact us. ALM Corp has been helping businesses streamline their work by providing the right tools for the job. If you’re hitting roadblocks on the path to smooth marketing strategies, we’re here to help.
