As the new year approaches, sales and marketing professionals start to think about next year’s targets and goals and how to achieve them.
Is 2017 the year to take your Marketing Automation to the next level?
Marketing Automation has been around for a good few years now, in different forms and at different levels. This includes basic Email Platforms through to integrated CRM and Marketing solutions. Many companies have started to explore Marketing Automation – but a full and effective Marketing Automation program is constantly developing and evolving.
Whether you have taken the first steps in Marketing Automation already or will be doing so in the new year, there are some key areas to consider when developing your 2017 plan.
Customer Relationships
At the end of the day it’s all about the customer – finding the customer, getting the customer, customer service, keeping the customer and engaging with the customer.
Customers have certain expectations when it comes to communications – they largely expect to be treated as individuals. Your sales team can achieve this through the effective use of their relationship building skills and a powerful CRM tool such as Salesforce.
Marketing also needs to be in line with this Customer centric approach. Use Marketing Automation and the data you have on your customers to communicate with them about appropriate subjects or products, at times and through channels they are the most responsive to.
The more relevant you can make your communications to the individual, the more effective they will be. You will drive ROI as well as improving customer relationships.
Relevant Content
So what is relevant content? The key is that it will vary depending on your audience – so you define different audience groups with different areas of interest.
Think about it as taking segmentation a step further – so each segment may be a large sub-group of clients, just a handful or even a single customer who fits a set of criteria to trigger particular (relevant) communications.
A telecoms provider works with companies of all sizes, they have just launched a new product ideally suited for large organisations with over 100 staff. Communicating this product launch to their whole customer list including their Start-Up and small business clients is not going to be appropriate.
Stay relevant to your audience and use your data and CRM to ensure this.
As well as promotion you can use Marketing Automation to nurture leads at different stages of the sales-cycle. Use content to ensure your business or relevant products stay in front of them, even if they are not actively engaging with your sales team at the time.
Timing is everything
Back to our Telecoms company – sharing testimonials about their great customer service and support could indeed be relevant for all their customers – but they may want to optimise this piece and send it a week or so prior to the individual customer’s support contract renewal.
Making sure you communicate the Right Message at the Right Time is key.
Marketing Automation can help you manage this based on the individual’s interactions with your website, recent activity with your team, contract factors and many other aspects of the data you hold on the person you are communicating with.
Automation & CRM Data
As we touched on at the beginning of the piece Marketing Automation is available in many different systems and can be used in very basic or very advanced ways.
So if you’ve not used it all yet – then it’s worth making a start next year.
If you’re looking to use it more effectively then the ultimate solutions are those that connect with your CRM system and make use of the customer data within, to enable a fully personalised Customer Journey.
We work with clients using Salesforce CRM to implement Pardot Marketing Automation and are seeing great examples of enhanced Marketing Communications using the data the clients already have in their CRM.
So whatever CRM you use, consider how to make the most of the data it holds to be relevant to your customers as individuals through your Marketing.
Join the conversation
- What stage of Marketing Automation are you at in your business?
- Where do you want to get to with it in 2017?
- Any other thoughts or questions – please comment below
