Summary

• Cutting-edge martech tools are as much of a prerequisite for success in today’s marketing landscape
• Automation platforms are a cornerstone of new-age marketing strategy
• Promoting sales/marketing integration from the ground up is crucial to a future-ready martech strategy

From my own experience leading both marketing and sales teams, I have come to believe that a successful marketing technology strategy should always be focused on outcomes and led by use cases. Thoughtfully developed use cases deepen our understanding of how to deliver expected business outcomes and the martech tools needed to do it.

With the adoption of increasingly advanced digital technologies, brands are not only able to gather explicit customer data, including personally identifiable information, they can also collect a wealth of implicit customer information from different sources such as web logs, cookie data, session ids, click stream data, data from social media and mobile apps, device ID-related information and much more.

Brands today know the sheer value of the volumes of data they’ve collected over the years. To understand how it has the potential to drive transformation in every organization, large and small. Moreover, they know that if they capture the right kind of data and integrate it into all operational aspects of the enterprise, they can turbocharge business outcomes and have a shot at rising to the top of their category.

That last bit is where many brands still struggle. While tools and technology based in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are widely favored, most organizations’ ability to leverage it can be curtailed by poor quality and incomplete data.

Game-changing technology

Throughout their interactions with a brand, customers leave multiple footprints across a wide range of channels, touch points, and devices. Unfortunately for marketers, they don’t necessarily reveal their identities in every interaction. They do, however, often leave definite preference, propensity, and affinity signals behind. The onus then lies on the brand to piece together all these clues and establish a definitive identity to deliver the individualized experiences customers demand.

An automation platform allows you to consolidate all of your customer data across diverse systems within the organization. It enables you to orchestrate and deliver your brand’s communication through multiple channels such as web, email, SMS push, in-app, social, paid campaigns, QR codes, and digital assistants including chatbots and voice assistants.

The right platform also gathers and records crucial insights and analytics on a real-time basis to help measure and track performance across multiple campaigns at an individual customer level. This helps unlock the biggest opportunity that automation offers—the ability to deliver superlative customer experiences and optimize return on marketing spend.

As all CMOs know, one of the most prevalent challenges in marketing is cost justification. A well-designed automation platform allows you to obtain the end-to-end metrics and attribution for every activity that marketing entails. 

Ultimately, it’s about delivering the best business results at the lowest possible cost and being able to prove its worth.

How it works in practice: a case study

Before Resulticks came along, one of our banking customers used to require two to three days to create segments on a database of 50 million after taking data from multiple systems and Excel sheets. They’d spend a couple of more days uploading these segments into their campaign management tool, and an additional week to siphon campaign analytics.

With Resulticks on board, the same institution can now create segments within minutes, run the campaign, and get the analytics the same day, all from the same platform. Another example involves targeting lookalike audiences and personas. Identifying such segments manually and reaching out to them is nigh impossible without automation.

How automation fits in 

More than 75% of companies have implemented some type of marketing automation software. Nine out of ten marketers use more than one form of marketing automation software on a regular basis—not because it’s a fad, but because it opens up new opportunities for marketers and, according to some, can improve efficiency by 20%.

Integrating automation platforms into your marketing strategy is crucial to achieving your end objective, through a focus on trying to bring prospects or customers to the endpoint you have defined.

Of course, the path to purchase/conversion is non-linear; customers usually take multiple steps before making a buying decision. These steps may include several visits to the brand's digital and non-digital assets across multiple devices and channels along with many micro-moments of discovery before the purchase. 

Success depends on purposefully guiding prospects down this path by offering the right cues and the right offer at the right time. An advanced marketing automation platform can remove the guesswork in that endeavor.

The essential sales/marketing integration

Just as success in any enterprise requires the close integration of marketing and sales team efforts, marketing automation cannot work in isolation from sales processes.

Here, marketing automation shines by segmenting data into buckets and assigning a lead score—high value, high potential; high value, low potential; low value, high potential, or low value, low potential. Marketing automation enables executives to nurture low potential leads till they are ready to convert, before passing them on to sales.

An automation platform integrated with the contact center CRM can provide full visibility on the history of the lead including campaign data, the number of times the customer visited the website, as well as lead score and potential.

Overcoming implementation challenges

Aside from getting the data right, one of the biggest challenges in executing a future-proof martech strategy is cultural adoption across the entire organization from top to bottom. Officials at all levels across organizations need to understand the impact of marketing automation on their roles and processes, especially those that have direct customer contact or impact.

For one of our financial service clients, the challenge was to resolve the identity of a single customer who had multiple products with the bank and was considered a different customer for each. Solving this entailed a pure data-based approach.

A different set of marketing skills

A well-designed marketing automation platform will not require marketers to master any complex technical or coding skills. With an intuitive user interface, learning to use the platform should be about as easy as learning to use a smartphone.

Optimizing the value of marketing technology requires the ability to apply design thinking to visualize what a seamless customer journey looks like, and to build a communication strategy around it. It also requires an impetus for constant testing of as many campaigns, creatives, and customer journeys as you can to deliver optimal results.

Optimize your marketing strategy for pitch-perfect analytics and optimal conversions with RESUL at the helm. Schedule a demo with us today.