Marketing automation is the art and science of automatically managing the targeting, timing and content of outbound marketing messages. But what is driving interest in these techniques?
First, let’s look at our buyers. Over the last decade, their ability to self-educate and manage their own buying processes has increased astronomically. Whether through vendor websites, analyst websites, social media, or peer reviews, buyers can acquire the information that they need.
If we hope to guide them to consider, prefer, and select our products and services, we need to provide them with the information they need. If we are able to deliver information that is relevant to the buyer’s role in the buying process, their stage as a buyer, their level of interest, and the areas of decision making of interest to them, our message will get through. If not, it will be lost in the clutter.
Timing
Marketing automation gives us the ability to work on the buyer’s timeframe. For example, in downloading a free trial, the buyer has indicated that – at that moment in time – spending time with a trial is their most appropriate use of time. Your communications need to reflect this.
Without automation, if a marketer is to attempt this with batch communications, the more closely one tries to align with the buyer’s timing, the smaller and smaller batches must become, and the larger the workload grows. Yet through automation a marketer can effectively deliver a message on day one, 15, 30, and 90 to each individual prospective buyer.
Personalisation
Each communication should ideally contain content that is in line with the prospective buyer’s interests. Marketing automation, by letting you tie web activity into buyer insight allows you to understand buyer interests based on what they do, not what they say, which can be misleading.
It also gives you a platform from which to have insight automatically personalise outbound content. Manual processes to personalize the content could quickly prove impossible, and the impact of not personalising the content is a significant decrease in its relevance to the buyer.
However, the content itself is not the only aspect of personalisation that impacts the buyer’s likelihood of engaging.
Who it comes from is equally important. Recipients are 30 per cent more likely, in most cases, to interact with content if it comes from a known person, rather than from a company. A marketing automation system can automatically have each communications come from the appropriate member of your sales team.
Automation and sales
Buyers eventually reach the point when they would be willing to talk with someone in your sales team about pricing, contracts, or other elements of the purchase process. Knowing when they have reached this stage involves understanding their ‘digital body language’. Signs of buying activity can be seen and with the appropriate lead scoring algorithm, sales ready leads can be identified and passed to sales.
Using automation allows marketing teams to automatically score the leads in their marketing funnel in real time, identifying those that are sales ready. Those that are not yet ready can be kept warm through lead nurturing, again a process that automation can facilitate.
The new importance of data
What we’re seeing in the above discussion is a shift away from batch communications to one-to-one personalisation. However, as we do this, and we use marketing automation platforms, the importance of data quality takes on a new priority.
Data, in order to be used by rules for personalisation of content, segmentation of lists, and scoring and routing of leads, needs to be clean and consistent. Marketing teams are being tasked with ensuring this, even though marketing data may be touched by web forms, list uploads, CRM synchronisations, or sales input.
What can’t be automated?
Marketing remains as much an art form as it ever has been. Compelling offers, captivating visuals, great positioning, and elegant copy are as difficult as ever to create. Likewise, the understanding of market segments, buyer journeys, stages of a buying process, and what moves a buyer along their buying process still differentiate excellent marketers from merely good marketers.
By Stuart Wheldon, client services director, Eloqua
