Gone are the days where marketing plans are made without the consideration of quantity in addition to quality. What am I talking about here? Marketing automation – its kind of a big deal. Lately, it’s getting harder and harder not to notice it. In fact, the marketing automation industry is expected to grow 50% by 2015.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is all about providing your customers with a personalized experience. When a customer returns to your website for the second, third or fourth time, they will be given an experience created specifically for them according to their needs and interests. Sounds great, right? But, what does this accomplish for the marketer? First and foremost, marketing automation reduces some of the repetitiveness we see with the marketing process. It does this through what is called customer segmentation. Automation software will use information such as age, gender or education to classify customers browsing your website. At this point, you’re able to create a target population and measure how effective your content is – this means you can your allocate resources to the right people!
What Makes Marketing Automation Great?
Currently, this is our biggest initiative at BAM. We are constantly looking for ways to grow in the digital world – and this is the next big thing for our team. In our industry, we want to provide our customers with the right kind of information at the right time. Which means we have to make sure the content is highly personalized to each buyer. The goal is to learn about them – their age, demographic, number of kids and so on. Are they a family of five? Then we will show them exclusively homes that suit those needs. It’s all about nurturing our customers to improve their online experience, which in turn creates more leads.
Team BAM is also thrilled at the opportunity that marketing automation provides to set measurable objectives for each of our campaigns. We can also deliver segmented emails and track how customers react to them – which means we can further personalize future web content and emails for them. As we seek to deliver the right content at the right time, we will be able to determine what’s working and what isn’t. And really, what’s more valuable than that? Another bonus is the inclusion of social media – this means additional platforms for us to engage and interact with our customers and prospective customers.
As we shift from sending out mass, random content to understanding and personalizing each customer’s experience, we close in on a marketing strategy that makes sense. Marketing automation guides the conversation, timing and personalization that we need to make this important shift. What’s your opinion on it? Tweet me, I’d love to hear it.
JohnAmardeil.com 