With B2B and B2C sales prospects and customers expecting you to engage them with an increasing depth of personalisation as standard, it can often feel like you’re running around spinning plates, trying to make sure the right messages are seen by the right targets in the right medium and at the right time.
This can often lead to valuable marketing resource being wasted on the many admin tasks required to co-ordinate each stage of the marketing campaign. Each time a target interacts/responds to your communications, you probably want to move them to the next stage of the campaign, so now you need to pull together the list of who’s in and who’s out, then work out which version of the next message they need, and get it delivered before the next wave of respondents needs to be dealt with.
This takes away from the marketing team’s ability to use their creative skills to plan new and great campaigns, or address new situations or respond to competitor moves, which ultimately will result in lost opportunity for the company.
But never fear, Marketing Automation is here.
Simplifying Marketing Campaign Management
In summary, Marketing Automation systems allow you to define the detailed structure of a single, or multiple campaigns, taking into account the personalisation requirements for the target audience. Your messaging can be managed across all channels (email, web, social, events etc), with the marketing automation system automatically recognising when a specific recipient has taken an action on your messaging and triggering the next stage.
These systems can seamlessly integrate all stages of a marketing campaign, which can include simple web posts, interactive online content and attendance at events, or visits to exhibition stands.
Something for Sales
Sales teams can also make use of marketing automation systems to send personalised campaigns to their contacts.
Let’s be honest, there are plenty of horror stories of where individual sales team members have created their own customer marketing emails, and got it wrong (over promised, off brand or similar). With marketing automation systems, you can create a bank of content for the sales team to use, and deploy themselves, while knowing that the message and layout is all on brand.
Relevant Communications for Customers
Marketing Automation systems have also been successfully deployed by some smaller companies to manage customer updates, such as contract renewals, payment reminders and product notifications (vehicle recalls, warranty updates etc).
Link with your sales and customer service systems
And finally, to make sure that anyone in your company can talk to a customer, while knowing what communications they’ve received or seen online, the details of campaigns and which customers they’re targeted at, can all be shared across your other systems, such as your sales CRM and customer care system.