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Sunday, May 17, 2015

The Basics Of Marketing Automation Systems

By Tammie Caldwell


When thinking of automating marketing processes, you are referring to technologies and some software platforms that would help your marketing workforce or the whole organization ( if it is a marketing firm) become more effective in pushing your products in various online marketing channels. Such channels may include the use of email marketing, landing pages on websites and various social media sites. They remove the need of having a human do repetitive tasks that require attention online. However, commands must be specified to trigger them to action. All these shows the essence of the Marketing Automation systems.

The marketing department and other marketing employees just specify the criteria the kind of outcome that they want for certain processes and tasks. The software interprets them, stores them, and executes the task as instructed. This reduces human error and increases efficiency. Nowadays Marketing automations includes analytical tools to anise some factors in that touch on the expected result. Most of these platforms are hosted on cloud and thus there no need for the client to install any software.

There are three distinct categories of the common Marketing Automation platforms. The commonest one does the work of collecting how the company is interacting with its online visitors. This function is called marketing Intelligence. Codes are set to track the behavior of visitors that interact with the products. They could have interacted with your firm on email, on social media or other online channel. The software goes further to measure the probability of buying the product.

A common scenario of such software in action is tracking and capturing the information of a client who clicks on an emailed link, checking which thread on forums is attracting more people or the social media group that has many followers. With the feedback, your team is able to develop better plans to target these areas of interest.

There are marketing automation platforms whose main aim is to move prospects down a retailing funnel. This turns prospects to hot prospects that are ready for sales proposals. The platforms score clients as they interact with the brand online and slowly create interest in the products until prospects become clients.

There are sales cycles used in the process. The most common ones include B2G (Business-to-government, B2B (Business-to-Business), and B2C (Business-to-Consumer). Marketers use these platforms to mix the traditional email retailing with a structured process of business. They do not have to chase customers that are not interested in a product, but keep in contact to those who are warming up to the products.

Finally, workflow automation is concerned with the internal bit of the sales cycle. When worked manually, this component tends to delay the whole buying process. Such activities as formulating a marketing calendar, internal collaboration, planning and budgeting can be automated with much ease.

A CRM administrator is needed to set up a series of rules so as to trigger internal processes and marketing professionals to do their work. For example, send email campaigns, letters and design relevant files. Marketing becomes easier when human effort is not required in most of those processes.




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