July 14, 2011

Automation Strategies Propel Marketers

By Crystal Uppercue

Ad Age magazine predicts that interactive marketing will soon be synonymous with marketing. This prediction comes in spite of a new Forrester research study that suggests chief marketing officers are way behind the cross-channel engagement curve. Forrester’s somewhat unsympathetic advice? Catch up.

Unfortunately, Emily Riley, Forrester’s principal analyst and research director, says many CMOs lack the resources, necessary skills, and technology to meet consumer expectations. She’s talking about mastering “collaborative customer relationships” via what Forrester calls “C.O.R.E.”: customize, optimize, respond, and empower). “The interactive marketing organization needs to be actually responsive to address consumers’ concerns in real time with people and technology,” she says in the magazine article.

Improved marketing automation offers one solution for marketers who are struggling to stay on top of the integrated/cross-channel freight train. Start by assessing your organization’s capability to influence the stages of buying – awareness, comprehension, consideration, preference, and loyalty – then apply automation capabilities where you can, for example:

  1. A database that links marketing and sales, and tracks prospects from initial engagement through revenue.
  2. A lead management system that allows you to nurture leads based both on what the prospect says (for example, his/her job role, industry, lead source, identified need/pain) and what the prospect does (click here or click there, download high-value content, attend industry events, etc.).
  3. Demand generation strategies that employ a range of relevant messages (data sheets, white papers, newsletters, industry trend reports, etc.) to pull the prospect into the buying cycle and then track the progress he/she goes through in becoming a loyal customer.
  4. Metrics and analysis that allow you to rank one prospect against another to identify where a given prospect sits within the buying cycle. For example, is the prospect: a) the right customer, but not interested; b) not the ideal customer, but very interested; c) a good fit and very interested; etc.?

“We’re looking back at the last decade as the decade of consumer empowerment,” Riley concludes. “The next decade should be the decade of marketer empowerment.”

Source: Marketing Automation 101 webcast sponsored by Rubicon, DM News and Eloqua, April 6, 2011.

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