Article

John Terra
John Terra 5 January 2016

Generating More Leads Through Marketing Automation

Are some people putting too much faith in marketing automation? Let's take a look.

When it comes to advertising, the twenty-first century has given businesses more options than ever. Sure, there’s the usual suspects such as direct mailings, fliers, print ads, and radio and television advertisements, but today’s Internet-driven society offers so much more, and often for a lot less expense.

While the new tech is a good thing, it also comes with its own unique challenges. For instance, how do marketers reach all of these people across a broad spectrum of media? Is a magazine advertisement supposed to be framed and handled the same way as an email blast?

Marketing automation is meant to help with this vexing task. So how does it help your business? Are some people putting too much faith in it? Let’s take a look.

What IS Marketing Automation?
Automated multi-channel campaign marketing (MCCM) is a marketing solution that manages marketing campaigns and customer interaction, regardless of what media is being used to get the message out (and get feedback in return). The perfect marketing automation resource combines campaign management and optimization with analytics, reporting, budgeting, and planning. Bottom line, the best MCCM solution is one where you can bring everything together into one place. As the article "How to Nail Multichannel Marketing Automation for Awesome Online Lead Generation" puts it, "A multichannel dashboard will allow you to organize your campaign better and have more control over each different channel."

So, how do you generate more leads, then?

Sending Out One Unified Message
Regardless of how many channels you employ, it’s important to send out one consistent message. Such consistency helps your business to build and maintain a stronger brand, making it more recognizable to casual visitors and consequently more likely to convert those visitors into actual customers. You’ll attract more leads with a solid, recognizable brand.

Targeted Messaging
While it’s great having a unified message for branding purposes, any business that wants good results from its marketing campaigns needs to target the message to the right audience. An automated marketing platform automatically collects the results of your various campaigns, and you can see for yourself which channels are generating the most leads, and with which groups. SMS is extremely popular right now, for instance, especially among millennials. An automated platform can collect data that backs that fact up, and you can increase your efforts in texting, and perhaps not so much in groups that don’t seem to be responding to text message marketing.

Automated Event-Triggering
This particular element is very important, and should be a huge focus in any lead generating campaign. Event trigger marketing is when useful offers and other ad campaign material are automatically sent out to potential customers when particular conditions (triggers) are met. Examples include a customer buying a car, or registering an appliance or laptop purchase, or opening up a new credit card or bank account. If the proper event triggers are set up, then offers are sent out automatically, and there are your leads.

Naturally, to create effective event triggers, marketers need to find out as much about their customers as possible to ascertain which events are more likely to occur within a particular demographic. All of that information is hopefully being collected by the automated platform.

Too Much Reliance On Automation? When it comes to technological innovations, two extremes that must be avoided. At one end are the people who are stubbornly resistant to change, and so they’re slow to bring in new technology. The other extreme has the people who put TOO much faith in new tech and think that all they have to do is push the button and let the program do all the work. Avoid both of these schools of thought.

The fact is, getting an automated MCCM platform in place is a good idea. All of your content, promotions and outgoing blasts are found and controlled in a single location, and consequently, you can see how well they’re doing. But automation can only take you so far; you need to still assess the information, make decisions, and implement (or remove) campaigns depending on how well they’re performing.

For some additional insights into marketing, check out "How To Get More With A Marketing Mix".
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