Marketing is changing at an ever-increasing pace; marketing teams are stretched to the limit and the available channels to use for your marketing seem to grow each year. The key is to start integrating and automating your marketing to meet the unique segments in a personalized way. Let me break down how to do that down into three parts:
- Developing campaigns for each of your segments
Delivering the right message, to the right audience, at the right time sounds straightforward, but it is a mix of art and science to get it right.
Taking the data from your digital platforms and gathering all the insights is something that comes with experience. Of course, there is a high level of skill required in digital marketing, but the challenging element is the judgment that a seasoned marketing professional can bring to provide clear direction for the right messaging, call to action and creative for each segment.
The sweet spot for successful campaigns is the blend of expert judgement and a data-driven plan that factors in the unique quirks of human behavior; then using a system to deliver personalized communications to each of your segments.
Making objective, data-driven decisions has never been easier since the amount of data available is more accessible. But integrating all the channels so that you can continue to connect with your audience, no matter what channel they are on, is what you should be striving for. Also, allowing your prospects and leads to move through your selling cycle at their own pace and deciding what information they need at each step can give you the edge over the competition. After all, if you are giving them what they need, when they want it, there is no need to go anywhere else.
This also leads to my next point since it is important that we can integrate our marketing channels and data to be able to prove your ROI and make data driven decisions.
2. Integrating all your marketing channels
In marketing we say that someone needs to see a message 7 – 15 times before it registers at the conscious level. For years successful marketers have been carefully building all the touch-points to reach key audiences. There are more channels than ever to quickly reach the number of touch-points needed to capture the attention of your audience. Having a marketing plan that works on all digital and traditional platforms is key to ensure that each of those touch-points builds connection to your messages and calls to action. Being able to capture the data no matter what channel your audience is on is a separate challenge that leads to the next point: Marketing Automation.
3. Leverage Marketing Automation
Your marketing team’s job is to generate leads, qualify them and pass them to the sales team. To deliver high quality leads though, they have a ton of tasks to manage. With so many digital marketing channels to use now, the issue isn’t necessarily having the data, but capturing the data in a way that you can make decisions with it.
Adding head-count to do this work is one option. But the more sustainable method is to use a marketing firm to help you implement marketing automation. This way you can track engagement of your audiences no matter what channel they are using (email, website, social media, surveys, etc.). Also, it allows you to set up engagement points and the system automatically triggers the next personalized marketing event at the pace your prospects choose.
Even better, the system allows you to score your prospects and trigger notifications when a lead is ready to connect with the sales team. Giving the sales team timely, specific information that allows them to more easily connect with the lead and convert a sale is one of the greatest advantages of implementing a marketing automation system. There is a sense of “set it and forget it” with the ability to watch and adjust as you see how your prospects engage. A marketing expert can devise the engagement to pull prospects through to become leads that are ready for a sales call. They can also ensure that there is automated content to nurture your customers for retention purposes.
“We used to look at the analytics from search engines, our website, our email platform, surveys, CRM and social media and make decisions on each of these. The game changer was when we were able to use marketing automation to understand our users no matter what way they were engaging with our brand. Now make decisions that have a more global impact on our campaigns rather than channel by channel decisions”. Marketing Executive, Gabriella Hailmann discovered once she started using customized marketing integration and automation.
Enlisting the help of a local boutique marketing firm allows you to integrate your strategies, create valuable content creation, manage your audiences through social media, invest in SEO and pay per click that is more cost effective than hiring the staff full time to do this work in-house. The reason for hiring a full time staff is less cost-effective is that there are periods of time where you need senior level strategy involvement and other times where you allow the system to do most of the work for you. So, it makes more sense to use a marketing firm so that you can dial up and down the support you need to match your campaign cycles.
Side bar – “One of the most successful ways to automate your marketing is the set up drip campaigns that allow you to reach your users in a targeted was that set triggers to deliver more content and further engage your contacts without using staff time.” Sarah Calderwood, President of Stirling Marketing and Communications recommends.
Final note: The results will stand up to scrutiny
With the right senior level marketing experts at your side, you can maximize results without hiring more staff. By integrating and automating your marketing channels, you can prove your results and make data driven decisions. To the relief of busy marketing teams, you are also supplied with regular reports that prove your return on investment and include recommendations that can be used during internal meetings and at performance review time.
Do you have questions or comments about this article? Let me know your thoughts! Sarah@stirlingmarketing.ca
Stirling Marketing & Communications welcomes the opportunity to discuss your business needs and get a Free 5 Minute Assessment to see if Marketing Integration and Automation is right for you.
