The Basics Of Marketing Automation Systems by Tammie Caldwell When talking of marketing automation, one normally refers to software platforms and technologies that are geared towards assisting the marketing teams and the organizations at large increase their effectiveness in promoting their products in various online platforms. Products may be promoted by email, through websites and social media platforms. The platforms take over repetitive online functions from being operated by human beings. They require a command that triggers action when the required task is achieved online hence the importance of the Marketing Automation systems. Your marketing team will define what outcome they need from the platforms. They then specify the route the task that will lead to the desired outcome. The software takes in the commands, interprets them and implements what is required. The software is very efficient unlike human effort. Recent developments have made the platforms even better in analyzing visitors behavior and how to influence them to reach marketing goals. These software are normally hosted on cloud and used as a service. There are three distinct categories of the common Marketing Automation platforms. The commonest one does the work of collecting how the company is interacting with its online visitors. This function is called marketing Intelligence. Codes are set to track the behavior of visitors that interact with the products. They could have interacted with your firm on email, on social media or other online channel. The software goes further to measure the probability of buying the product. A common scenario of such software in action is tracking and capturing the information of a client who clicks on an emailed link, checking which thread on forums is attracting more people or the social media group that has many followers. With the feedback, your team is able to develop better plans to target these areas of interest. There are marketing automation software that take over from the above. Its principle work is to guide the prospects down the funnel until they become hot prospects. Using set stages, they pick interested prospects and selectively gives them information until they get to warm up to the product. Prospects are scored by their behavior and the right mix given to nurture them. Commonly used sales cycles include (B2B) Business-to-business, B2C (Business-to consumer and B2G (Business-to-government). In essence, this is a mix of typical email marketing enjoined with structured business processes. This helps avoid following clients that have no intention to buy from the company and follow those that have shown interest in the products and services that the company is promoting. Finally, workflow automation is concerned with the internal bit of the sales cycle. When worked manually, this component tends to delay the whole buying process. Such activities as formulating a marketing calendar, internal collaboration, planning and budgeting can be automated with much ease. A CRM administrator is needed to set up a series of rules so as to trigger internal processes and marketing professionals to do their work. For example, send email campaigns, letters and design relevant files. Marketing becomes easier when human effort is not required in most of those processes. Read more about The Basics Of Marketing Automation Systems.
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