Want to make sure you are not behind the times?  Ask yourself this:

Are you also providing a customized experience for your customers no matter what channels they are engaging you on? For instance, does your data track your customer interactions with your organization on email, website, social media, events, etc. as the same user?

If you are personalizing your customer experience across marketing channels, I promise you, you are not engaging at a level that people expect and are now used to receiving. At worst, you are seen as tone deaf or “spammy” and at best you are seen as cold and uninterested in engaging with your customers (“that organization is talking at me not to me”).

There is no excuse for marketing to not be customized to the interests of your customers with the availability of marketing automation tools available on the market. The price points for these systems have come way down and the playing field has been leveled for functionality to a few minor assets that one has over others. Integrating your engagement across platforms has never been easier and more cost-effective.

Even if you have a marketing automation system, you may not be using the full power of its functionality. In this article we focus on segmentation, but we will have other articles soon on lead scoring and proving the return on investment (ROI) of the marketing departments efforts. Let’s talk about how you can intelligently use your system to get your customers to segment themselves.

Most of us start by mapping out our customer journey with knowledge from the marketing and sales teams. We capture the pathway(s) from start to finish and develop materials, tools and incentives to move your customers through their journey, and your sales funnel. With a marketing automation system, you set up algorithms that are triggered by the action of your customer at a pace that they determine through their action/non-action. Those actions trigger more options that are relevant and meaningful to the customer based on their previous action. This is the part that most organizations do well within their Marketing Automation systems.  (If you want a fast, free demo of this, email me at sarah@stirlingmarketing.ca)

But here is where the value of your automation system really comes into play: The system will initially be set up to bring your audience through the sales cycle. But you adjust, tweak and invest in ways that your customers decide with their engagement, what your TRUE sales cycle is. In this way, you can use the data to start to see how customers differ in their interests and needs and you can start to invest quickly in filling gaps and divesting from areas that are not being used. You can superpower this up by strategically planning out your lead scoring system and triggers (stay tuned for a future article).

You might be saying “We have done this for years”. We see where the traffic is high and low and make decisions based on that.” But what organizations with marketing automation systems understand is exactly what mix of channels results in sales and resales.

Examples always help: In one organization, they realized that a landing page, an email offer and a handful of articles were responsible for 83.5% of customers that went on to buy. In fact, that landing page was not very appreciated at all up to that point and was slated to be deleted during a future website overhaul. One article was hard to find from their home page, buried deep in the site. Further digging into the multi-channel data-sets revealed that one action by a sales rep and one offer were responsible for 75% of re-sales within 30 days!

If you have a marketing automation system but you fear you are not using it to its full potential, give us a call for a free consultation and we can share ideas and strategies.

If you are unsure about how to get started with a marketing automation system, book a free call with us and we can give you a quick run-down of the available options and benefits. We don’t sell these systems, so can you get our honest opinion. You can also email me directly at sarah@stirlingmarketing.ca.

We want your customers to have the most positive, personalized experience possible and the investments you make into marketing and sales have the most impact for the least amount of budget.

For more marketing tips and tricks, visit www.stirlingmarketing.ca and sign up at the bottom of the page for free emails that we send out about 10 times a year (you can unsubscribe at any time with one click).

So how do organizations with the mandate to support Canadians in being healthy, managing their health conditions or support patients in their self-management at home?

The answer is to provide the right information at the right time to the right audience. Which I think everyone can agree is the simple truth, but to do this in the health sector is anything but simple.

So, if no two cancers are alike, or two heart or lung or digestive conditions are alike and everyone’s health risk profile is unique and their attention and interest in making changes is different, how can we possibly meet the needs?

The answer lies in the hands of Canadians themselves: with a click of their mouse, they are able to tell us where their attention and interest lies. The challenge until now is how do we take the data across platforms and create an integrated picture of what patients want and then being able to serve up the right content at the pace and diverse interests of our audiences.

This requires a shift in how we see ourselves as health organizations.

We are no longer the ones deciding what our audiences should be reading or what self-management our patients should be doing. We can now put the power into the health consumers hands to decide what they are ready to engage with and how. Our role is to be the careful creators and curators of information that is credible and trust-worthy.

I think health charities and companies have done a great job of providing carefully developed health content that is trust-worthy, but less great at ensuring the people that want and need that information the most get it. It doesn’t matter whether they are on the web, email or social media, we should be reaching out and allowing them to engage with us, even when they switch the channel they are on.

What is a game-changer now is that there are software options that allow us to reach audiences across platforms. So whether they are in the web, social media, search engines, email, advertising etc. and no matter what information a user clicks and at what pace they click at, we can provide them with an instant source of tailored information that is built on algorithms to serve up content that matches their interest and level of desired engagement.

For instance, the information and tools useful for a patient that is newly diagnosed vs a patient that has been self-managing for a year vs a Canadian interested in prevention, the interests are completely different. For that matter the information that a patient, caregiver or healthcare provider wants and needs is vastly different, even thought it may be for the same health condition. 

Is it possible to serve them all, at the pace they are interested in, without needing staff time to answer calls, send emails or book appointments etc.?

The answer to that is yes. Now more than ever, we are able to provide opportunities to reach, engage and service our audiences about their health through automation systems.

There are many options for platforms and literally thousands of options for automation. What is now firmly in the power and control of health organizations, is to provide the strategic elements on the right platform to serve the needs of thousands a day without needing to add to your payroll.

Stirling Marketing & Communications does not endorse any platform, but we use our decades of experience to help our clients find the solutions that best meet their needs. If you are interested learning more, please contact us to book a free consultation, with no strings attached! We guarantee you will learn something new that you can use. You can reach me at sarah@stirlingmarketing.ca

1. 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.