It’s 2024 and things are going the speedo way in the world of automation technology. However, the Marketing world is facing its own challenges in a not so exciting economic environment across the globe.
Things are getting tighter day by day in terms of funding and business growth. Brands are fighting their way out by continuously evolving the marketing strategies by aggressive inclusion of automation tech to reduce the overall spending cost and simultaneously increasing the revenue.
Marketing Automation to the Rescue
The Buzzword for this decade in the world of digital marketing would unarguably be Marketing Automation alias Martech. So it is only obvious or you can say inevitable for Marketers to get their digital arsenals equipped with Marketing Automation capabilities to achieve the critical goals of Engagement and Retention for their business.
The story of the marketing journey so far
So what’s exactly the concept of Martech is? Lets start with the basics first. Marketing in itself has gone tremendous changes since ages to become what we are witnessing it today.
An Act of Awareness Campaign has seen changes from Physical modes like Word to mouth, Concerts, Pamphlets, banners, newspaper towards Electronic media like TV, Radio, Email, SMS and now to the world of Cloud based messaging, Social Media and other notifications.
The road ahead only becomes more tech savvy from heron. Digital Marketing in fact saw most of the trends being introduced and phase out in its lifetime so far than any other marketing methods. This is solely because every marketing innovation has its infancy and maturity stage, which keep on adding new tricks and trends along with tech disruptions.
End of Simple Batch and Blast Approach
The same has happened to Broadcast based Marketing strategy in the last 3 to 4 years, which has passed its maturity stage. There is tremendous competition to get customer attention along with same amount of pressure on budgets.
Every other CMO is having their campaigns loaded to be fired towards customer mailbox, message box etc. Thus, the chances of quality attention from end user is almost a Goldfish catch. This madrush has unknowingly created an Elephant in the room “Blind Marketing”.
3 Different ways to approach Campaigns for Marketing
For clarity, lets break the marketing approach in 3 parts.
1-> Blind Marketing – (Marketing done without database research and filtration, targets anyone, everywhere) Classic example: TV-Radio- Hoarding Banners etc.
2-> Relevant Marketing – (Marketing done with Basic segregations like demographics, offline customer sales data etc. Sends to somewhat relevant audiences.)
3-> Laser Point Marketing – (Marketing done with Relevancy methods as well as adding deep behavior analysis to target the customer with laser point focus approach. This includes Website data, App data, CRM, CDP etc as data pool.)
This is where you get the need to have a 360 degree Full stack Marketing Automation platform. Which carries out all of your campaign management actions round the clock 24/7 * 365 days without break, by a logic rule setup done by you at just once a year or more.
There is more to it than what it looks
Well it doesn’t stops at this definition. The Automation applies to all critical aspects of a Marketing campaign platform.
- Be it Automated data Import/Export.
- Be it Personalization of content for 1 : 1 connect.
- Be it timely delivery of communications.
- Or even the Report extraction and its scheduling.
Every challenge is facing a head-on from Automated solutions. Every innovation revolves around the idea to reach the customer at the earliest, with the most relevant content and on their choice of reachable communication channel.
This ultimately stands out for an end user to interact with a brand. The interaction leads to engagement and conversations, which ultimately leads to customer retention and growth marketing. The summary, it will make you aligned with the scale up process by reducing repeated manual activities with least chances of error.
Overall impact of Marketing Automation
This will help you connect all of your customer touch points at one place and help maintain a unified view across channels and digital assets.
So it is pretty safe to say that if you are not using Marketing Automation technology, then you are unknowingly risking a loss of your customer engagement and its consequential loss of business.
Know More about Marketing Automation
Now, the next questions that comes up to us. How to get this Magic ball rolling for us. How does it work. How much does it cost to purchase and to maintain. What are the prerequisites?
Well here are some to answer these one by one.
Most of the Marketing Automation Platforms in the market have easy to create workflow builders nowadays. They can be designed even by a non tech person who has absolutely no coding knowledge, thanks to the drag n drop technology. These are also called Journey builders, as this is where you design and curate customer life cycle journeys.
These workflow builders are well connected by multiple communication channel gateways like Email, SMS, App, Web, Whatsapp, viber, RCS, etc.
They can be very well integrated with digital assets like Website, App, CRM, CDP, webhooks API, for seamless data travel. The data could be an offline attribute or it could be activity of the end user.
The Better the data connectivity, better the relevancy. They also have Event and time based clock gaps to control the journey flow in order to have a consistent engagement practice in place.
How much of money it would cost me?
Now coming to the point of costing and expense. Most of good quality platforms are cloud based, so they don’t have any premise maintenance cost attached to them.
The price generally is based on Monthly Active User count (MAU) and consumables if applicable. The range is from 600$~6000$ per month approx. You can check online or consult any Martech consultancy firm for assistance to decide what would suit you the best as per your industry and budget.
What do I need to have as a prerequisite?
That brings up to the prerequisites now. It depends on the type of services you want, as it would need integrations to be done with various stakeholder applications. Ready plugins avoid you a lot of hassles, but are not available easily. So customizations do come with cost if complex.
Apart from integration effort, you would need resource planning, trainings and upgradation, in order to kickstart you Marketing Automation Journey.
Initiate your Growth Marketing phase
However, it suggested to not just Stop at Activation phase, but scale up and move towards growth peak, which would need some expert help. There are dedicated Marketing consultants to help you achieve this complex goal, who are also called as Customer Success Managers.
My Next blog will discuss more into what a Customer Success Strategy looks like. Till then have a nice read!
Alisha Limichana is a seasoned growth marketer and part of the MCG team at EnR Cloud, specializing in driving business growth through innovative strategies. She has a proven track record of delivering impactful marketing campaigns. Outside of work, Alisha enjoys exploring the mountains, travelling, and staying active and fit.
