How to turn marketing processes to your advantage

Marketeers are under increasing pressure to deliver. Whether it’s driving traffic, generating leads, proving the ROI of marketing campaigns, securing sufficient budget or leveraging the power of technology, we all face the same daily challenges in our marketing processes. Research shows that 45% marketeers are already expressing concern about their ability to keep up.

The shift away from channel-specific marketing to omnichannel efforts to engage with customers whenever, wherever, and however they choose is only putting marketeers under more pressure.

According to a survey of 4,000 marketeers by Econsultancy, the top two digital trends in 2020 are going to be focused on customer experience (24%) and personalisation (23%). But achieving a more personal experience isn’t as simple as adding someone’s first name to your email campaign. To personalise your customer experience effectively, you need to combine data at infrastructure level: taking data, applying business logic and delivering it back to customers and prospects.

So how do you achieve this effectively?

Achieving a personal customer experience on a large scale requires substantial time and resource – things that are likely to be outside of a marketing manager’s control. Therefore, in recent years marketing automation software has grown in popularity as a cost-effective way to deliver this experience. This idea of ‘marketing-as-a-service’ is allowing marketeers to drive value into their campaigns using the power of process.

By knowing that your prospects/customers follow a certain path (ideally guided by you!) to perform a specific action, you can work out a flow of communication. If you know what they’re doing/where they’re going, you can eliminate the donkey work of monitoring them on this journey. Furthermore, by setting ‘triggers’ you can get the system to notify you when something happens so you can perform a specific action at a given time.

For example:

• You drive traffic to land on a specific page on your website. The main call-to-action is to request a demo. Either the person requests one or they don’t.
• If they don’t, you need to capture their details, perhaps using live chat functionality, which would also notify you to someone on your website.
• If they do request a demo, you can schedule an automatic email saying their request has been received. You can then nurture that lead, sharing a steady stream of useful information, relevant to their job role or industry sector with them until the demo takes place.

Throughout, your prospect feels they’ve had a personalised experience, but at no point have you actually had to do anything. The power of process has enabled you to free yourself of the administrative burden – and expense – of targeted marketing. It’s given you your time back to focus on the creative, value-add activities – like how to get more leads into the sales funnel, how to make your customers happier, and how to boost your ROI.