Although Marketing Automation is certainly not “New” it’s also not a concept that is deeply engraved into the mind of every marketer. Net-Results provides one of the most effective and user friendly marketing automation platforms out there, but we too must send our own sales soldiers out to encourage consumers to shed the shackles of basic marketing and learn to love the web 2.0. In our efforts to spread the good word, we come across every size, shape and color of marketer, and gather quite a few interesting questions on the way. One of the most recent, which seems to be quite common, is the unsettling rebuttal to our pitch: “But I already DO marketing!”
To this we respond – Well yes, you are doing marketing, but are you really making your marketing do things for you? Are you utilizing your marketing strategy to segment out your audience, reach each of their pain points individually, and solve all of their problems by doing marketing? Yes, you can send a direct mail out to the contacts you gathered from cold calling, but do you know if they individually come to your website? Do you know exactly what they’re looking at, exactly what they need or exactly how interested they were in your products and services? Can you send them a follow up direct mail or email based on the knowledge that they received the communication, opened it, read through it, and were truly interested in it to the point that they came to your website, spent 20 minutes on it, and filled out a contact form? The answer is not really.
The answer is that with marketing automation, the difference between doing marketing, and making marketing do things for you, is that marketing automation enables you to do much more marketing, and much more with your marketing. Another simplification of marketing automation is the idea that you’re taking 3 tools you are most likely already using and investing time and money into, and integrating them. You probably already have a Google Analytics account, some kind of email service provider, and some method to organize your contacts digitally. Well, instead of managing 3 products, accounts and services, marketing automation does just that, automates your marketing, and combines these three products.
By customizing your marketing to your prospects’ pain points, continuing to communicate with them once they’ve elicited various behaviors, and contacting them immediately when they do visit your website, you are integrating marketing automation with all the marketing you are already doing.
