Create Better Marketing Campaigns With Marketing Automation

In the face of increasing competition and cost pressures, companies are constantly looking for ways to improve the efficiency, reach and effectiveness of their marketing programs. In light the the tight budgets experienced today, companies try to focus spending on programs that are proven to work and cutting tactics that are yielding less desirable results. As a result, marketers are looking to technology to manage and track campaigns, customers and customer segments.

Marketing Automation refers the the use of software and technology that can automate key marketing and business processes like customer segmentation, campaign management and customer data integration or CDI. By replacing time intensive manual marketing processes with software and systems time and dollars are saved, while allowing marketers to focus on creativity, understanding their customer and developing rich campaigns.

Marketing Automation is more and more frequently being implemented as a complement to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. Combining CRM and Marketing automation, companies can build a database of effective strategies, tactics and consumer behavior that directly influence sales. Including key leanings from past campaigns and leveraging automation, companies can increase marketing effectiveness while lowering costs.

By automating key marketing processes these types of software help businesses reach campaign goals by defining, scheduling and tracking the execution of campaigns against those goals. In addition, marketing automation software can collect important marketing information, customer segmentation and other data that can lead to higher response rates and successful campaign execution. By feeding result data back into an automation system, it can further develop self-sustaining campaigns and targeted customer segments.

Choosing a marketing automation solution can be tricky because many have very similar offerings. The bottom line on marketing automation software is that it replaces arduous manual tasks with automated, machine driven tasks, freeing a marketer to focus on more important issues such as product development, customer interaction and market research.

Adding to the challenge of selecting a system is the fact that for each marketing tactic there can be dozens of software offerings each with their own personal view of the landscape. Integrating these solutions can be a monumental, if not impossible task. That being said, in our experience, software that has too many features can be equally unusable to marketers because so much work must go into configuring, maintaining and updating the software and systems. The key to successful marketing automation implementations is to focus on the top marketing challenges first and to avoid attempting to re-engineer your entire marketing process in one large project. If you do, the details and minutiae will bring progress to a halt.

Take your most pressing need that can have the largest impact on the business and focus on automating that first. You may find that tactics and marketing programs that do not warrant automation are not efficient of necessary within an organization and can be done away with altogether. This will free up resources and attention to focus on the most important and impactful marketing automation solutions within your organization.

By: T. Michael Rogers

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