How do you choose a direction for your marketing strategy? What do you use to navigate past unforeseen obstacles such as market shifts, increased competition, or disruptive new technology? To steer and stabilize a ship, it needs a rudder; marketing automation acts as your rudder in a sometimes volatile marketplace. Technology that gives you a predictive edge, improves lead generation, and fosters better retention by consistently meeting your customers’ needs is a clear advantage even in the choppiest professional waters.
Get the Fundamentals Right
Every business wants to delight its clientele, but before you can achieve that, you need to get the basics right, a job automation is well suited to achieve. That means ensuring that you have their customer data correct, formatting emails properly, delivering useful content, and recognizing prospects’ state of sales readiness. Giving customers what they need, not just what they want, confers a baseline level of trust that no amount of promises to delight can achieve.
Understand Your Customer Base
To know what leads want, you need to know more about who they are. Leads are lost when they sense a disconnect between the problem they need to solve and the solution you’re offering. You can be the best financial advisor available, but if they’re looking for an attorney, you aren’t going to hold their attention. Address your campaigns to the leads you have, not the audience you imagine you have, to earn their attention and become relevant to them. Marketing to an audience you don’t have is tantamount to calling the wrong name at a party: You might initially turn heads, but you won’t get the attention of the people you want to find.
Develop Buyer Personas
Marketing automation technology gives you insight not only into the leads you’re currently working with, but also future leads. Buyer personas are representations created from aggregate data, profiles that represent market segments as a whole rather than as specific individuals. Personas are useful because they remove confounding variables that could lead you farther from where your most valuable leads are. With buyer personas in place, you gain greater predictive power and can avoid costly errors in content marketing or retargeting.
Show Them You’re Listening
Think about your last visit to a shop and how it went. Did an employee greet you and offer help as you walked in, or were you on your own? Could you find what you wanted? Did you feel welcome as you shopped? You might not have noted these customer service essentials consciously, but market research tells us they make a major difference in how likely you are to buy and now much you’re prepared to spend.
In the B2B sector, attentive service is even more important because the buying cycle is long and the decision-making process is more complex. Marketing automation gives you a way to be attentive to your customers all the time, even when your storefront is digital, through triggered email and nurture programs.
Correct Course Quickly
How distant is your marketing horizon? Are you able to predict what will happen next week? Next month? Next quarter and beyond? Being able to spot nascent trends and new developments while you still have time to prepare for them is key to maintaining stability during the inevitable shifts every market undergoes. Marketing automation’s ability to offer predictive insights and adapt to changing behaviors makes it a mission-critical marketing element.
© Reach Marketing LLC 2016 All Rights Reserved.
