The old conceptualization of the sales funnel worked for decades, and while it’s still relevant, the shape and size of that funnel has changed dramatically. Your potential buyers aren’t passively waiting for your marketing company and sales team to feed them information; they’re going out and finding knowledge. That’s fundamentally changing the landscape of sales and marketing from a top-down model to a bottom-up one that depends on precision and accuracy to work.
Your audience is now doing much of the fact-finding for themselves, but what determines where they find their facts? They want trusted, knowledgeable sources that supply them with relevant content at just the right time in just the right way. Customizing marketing messages, developing tiered content, and learning about your audience so you deliver what they need would be a challenge to coordinate without help, but with marketing automation, you gain an unprecedented amount of control. Here’s how:
Centralized Marketing Platforms
You can’t fine-tune your marketing message if you don’t coordinate it, and marketing automation centralizes everything for you. From database management to audience development to content creation to omni-channel delivery, automation handles it all. You’re able to turn separate marketing channels into parts of the same organized whole, amplifying marketing messages and raising them above the level of background noise your leads encounter when they search for information. At Reach Marketing, we refer to this process of upgrading to automation and bringing every aspect of your marketing strategy as central intelligence alignment. It’s a powerful way to reshape the business landscape to let your message resonate.
Improved Lead Capture
It isn’t enough to know who your customers are; you need to know it sooner than your competition so you can start delivering the information they want immediately. Marketing automation identifies leads and starts giving you feedback about them even before you know their names. The first time prospects visit your site, a marketing automation system starts building a profile, first with general data such as location and firmographic information, and later with specifics such as job title and behavioral tracking as visitors return to your site. Contextualized lead data helps your marketing automation system deliver highly specific and relevant content – the kind of content your leads need.
Real-Time Campaign Execution
Responsiveness in real time is a game-changer for marketers. Instead of sending out campaigns, then collecting data that will improve your next campaign, marketing automation lets you course-correct with a current campaign. Essentially, automation allows your marketing team to pick and deliver the winning strategy every time. With that knowledge, you’re then able to serve up customized home pages, targeted email, and relevant landing pages that get results.
Complex Lead Nurture Strategies
Marketers sometimes refer to a sales pipeline as if it were entirely linear, but in the information-age landscape, we know that’s an over-simplification. The real patterns people follow when making buying decisions are branching. Automation allows you to take the journey alongside the buyer and provide information at those critical crossroads through lead nurture campaigns. Sending triggered and timed email messages to reach prospects at just the right time with precisely the information they want gives your marketing automation system tremendous power to control the flow of leads through a complex and nuanced decision-making process.
Detailed ROI Attribution
To repeat successes, you need to know what made them successful in the first place. Marketing automation tracks every choice your leads make and every step that led them to those choices so you know what works without guessing at the source of your success. Discovering what delivers the highest return on your marketing investment and putting it in an easy-to-understand dashboard format is a specialty of marketing automation.
Find out more about how marketing automation has the power to transform your business landscape by contacting our automation experts at Reach Marketing.
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