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14 November 2014Last coalition in the cloud
14 November 2014Marketing automation process can be defined as a category of technology that allows companies to streamline, automate and measure marketing tasks so that they can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster.
There are so many reasons as to why people stay up late. Most, probably because of insomnia while to others the mesmerizing idea that for just three easy payments of $19.99, they have the power to purchase for all of their kitchen, bathroom or garden problems.
It could be your marketing-automation system does not belong in an infomercial, however there is no such thing as “call-now-and-we-will-double-the-offer” solution that lets you attract and capture visitor’s data and immediately funnel it over the sales.
Maybe it is time to give up the dream of incorporating shortcuts which nevertheless do not work. Marketing automation is after all a repeatable system. Take for instance for mapping buyer activity with messaging through an ongoing online conversation. If it is well executed and therefore goes well, you are able to earn the trust of the previous buyer and the whole process thus repeats itself.
It also allows you to scale the marketing efforts being made. This can be can be executed by you writing rules that exempt the human element of getting eyes on each lead. The energy and effort that you fuel into the system saves you time and money while it is of no concern where things run themselves.
A good set up of your system, correctly and efficiently from the start can lead you to creating better online conversations with buyers and therefore you can learn how your potential clients behave. This will much prepare you in the future to analyze the strategies that you will have to incorporate to win them.
The rules of your online conversation should however not be different than any offline discussion, therefore while doing it is much recommended that you keep it relevant. You can chime in, but only when appropriate, you should as well respond in the same manner or channel which the conversation is taking place. It is important that you do not try to generalize or cheat the system. It can lead to you being kicked swiftly to the buyer’s control.
Try for instance to imagine this kind of a scenario, when your grandmother sends you a card she would love and expect you to give her a call in response right? But would she ever want to receive a call from a telemarketer simply because she visited a website? Of course the answer is no.
To gain successfully the elusive buyer’s trust you must set up a system in which every part can easily scale as your company grows. This then can be achieved by using the marketing the marketing automation effectively. The beginning of hard work sets off here, after all anything worth building is worth building.
Three ways of optimizing your marketing automation system for best result:
Determine your process
The first step toward this is determining a process for segmenting your buyers. This is because process always comes before technology. After determining the process, you can then proceed to applying it to your system of marketing – automation. Define and explore the stereotypes of your best buyers. Understand what they need and expect. After the determination of their pain points and what they need best so that you can earn their trust, it is now time that you ask yourself how you will identify segments in real time based demographics and behaviors.
The criteria that you will determine will therein be the rules that you will build and adopt into your marketing-automated system. Doing this you can also develop the processes for lead nurturing, sales alignment and customer life management.
Capture data
Make it of prime importance that you capture data about behavior over sending email and other short-term goal. The biggest mistakes companies make in marketing automation is the failure to capture data, doing so they miss the opportunity that sooner or later requires substantial catch up. There is an important need for you to ask intelligent questions on intake forms, have your sales team enter critical data and use data scrubbing or append tactics to learn as much as you can about buyers.
Establish baseline goals
Making baseline goals is one of the successful elements of marketing, but is often overlooked. You cannot hit on the target if you do not know where you are aiming. Though this is well known, some marketers will make the grave mistake of hesitating to establish the baseline goal, reason being it may cause failure.
You obviously will fail, of course if you do not establish your baseline goals. As is universally known, marketing isn’t science. You are therefore dependent on the ever changing variable- the buyer. It is true that campaigns may fail but the real failure is not having a mechanism in place to capture results, and makes changes based on feedback. If you set your goals and document your process and results, you can always learn from your mistakes.
Marketers are often use the technology of marketing automation to define their processes, however if you are using the technology to force you to create a process, you can consider yourself to have failed.
You can succeed if you are willing to put in the necessary work and effort. There is no shortcut to success.