Top 5 Things to Consider in a Marketing Automation Platform
Inbound Marketing | Marketing Automation | association marketing | best practices | marketing
When preparing for your digital transformation, it is crucial to consider the role that a marketing automation platform will play, and the effect it will have on your marketing metrics. Features of a marketing automation platform generally include email marketing, landing pages and forms, campaign management, engagement marketing, prediction and scoring, customer lifecycle management, CRM integration, social marketing capabilities, mobile marketing capabilities, marketing analytics and more!
What initially was only a luxury utilized by businesses and companies, has rapidly turned into an essential piece for associations looking to scale. In today’s marketing technology landscape, marketing automation can help associations streamline, automate, and quantify marketing tasks and workflows, so you can maximize operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. Read through the following top 5 things to consider in your new marketing automation platform to recognize what your company is missing out on:
- Measuring at Campaign Level
An important component of a marketing automation platform is the delivery of analytic capabilities to measure the impact of an entire campaign through its lifecycle, giving insight into your customer base, ROI, and company revenue. The reporting and analytics capabilities in your AMS (CRM) and ESP (email service provider) house tools that only address automation in the email channel. Switching to a marketing automation platform gives your association the leverage of having much more than that. Your marketing automation platform will not just allow you to analyze and understand your data and the success of your marketing efforts, but to also make recommendations and behavioral predictions based on it.
- Automating Digital Touchpoints
What kind of touchpoints are you making with your members or prospective members to influence and create better customer experiences? Gathering all of your data on every digital touchpoint via email, social, website, blog, etc., and having it live in one place for easier analyzation is a crucial component in marketing automation that truly sets it apart. These basic steps lead to understanding what works and what doesn’t, and makes you understand where the customer is in their lifecycle. This leads to your association being able to identify and execute strategies that produce quantifiable results. Let marketing automation do the heavy lifting of tracking and reporting the touchpoints that are live and digital in one system, so you can do the creative, analytical thinking and focus on what’s influencing people, where they came from, and what made them buy.
- Hyper-Personalizing Your Interactions
Making every touchpoint one-to-one and personalized with the right offer, at the right time, allows you to make predictions as to what is the correct next step towards purchase. All individuals are in different places in their buyer’s journey, whether they are current members, prospective members, registrants, attendees, or donors. They all have distinct needs, so get to know them on an individual level and give them content that’s personally relevant so they don’t have to generalize their needs. Yes, emails do drive users. What happens to these users once you’ve got them where you want? How are you fulfilling the needs of these users? How are you giving them more in order to keep them coming back?
Bring in marketing automation to drive the results you need and make your users feel like you understand what they need by accepting the following new rules:
- The buyer has the power – you cannot make him or her do anything
- People research and make buying decisions via digital outlets and word of mouth
- Be there when they need you
- It is too expensive to target everyone
- Focus on growing specific type of people who fit into a known profile (persona)
- Realigning Sales-to-Marketing Communications
It’s important that there are better communications internally so that marketing is not just seen as a separate entity. If you are considering implementing a marketing automation platform, it’s critical that both marketing and sales are aligned with customer engagement strategies and that both parties can support each other. Sending emails alone does not drive sales and your sales team might not be satisfied with the quality of leads your marketing team is delivering. Marketing automation brooms all departments together to work and gather information needed to become data-driven and keep everyone in a constructive, synced mindset.
- Generating Growth
What are the obstacles that are stunting your association’s growth? The tools you currently have might be doing more harm than good or might be stale in today’s changing market. Old ways of growth, such as direct mail lists, email lists, cold calling, SMS campaigns, print advertising, and events, are either too slow, too expensive, or no longer legal. The typical association technology stack ranges from AMS, CMS, ESP, EMS (event), and PR & advocacy. Though these are all great features, they close the loop of being able to nurture your leads and increase profits. A marketing automation platform can set you on the path of advancement and give you the bottom-line results you’ve been looking for.
Let marketing automation do the repetitive, mechanical tasks that saves your marketing department from doing it instead. Let marketing automation give your company the ability to restructure, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows so that you don’t have to. Let marketing automation increase your operational efficiency and increase revenue more quickly. The right marketing automation platform, paired with the right team, makes it possible to connect the dots between your marketing efforts and the revenue your company can expect to see in the near future.
Interested in learning more? Check out this on-demand webinar to dive deeper.