With the advent of marketing technology, increasing customer engagement has been made a tad bit easier. Marketing automation has played a significant role in enabling companies to provide a better customer experience to their leads and acquire long-lasting loyal customers.

Marketing automation available on content marketing platforms has also enabled businesses to retain their customers, thus providing them with a source of recurring orders. In the MarTech landscape, also referred to as marketing technology, there are numerous MarTech tools that can assist companies in increasing their sales.

In Addition, with the everchanging MarTech trends, the choice of these MarTech tools changes as well. However, to be able to identify the right MarTech tool for your marketing department, one needs to identify how to utilize these marketing automation tools as well.

To help you out, here are five solid ways to leverage marketing automation and enhance customer engagement to drive sales:

 

If you are looking to build a business that endures, you need to provide benefits to your loyal customers. In other words, you should provide great benefits to customers who have been purchasing from you consistently. Rewarding them enables you to gain loyalty and helps you build a long-term relationship.

Loyalty programs or reward points for such customers is one of the most popular MarTech trends today. According to The Wise Marketer, 58.7% of customers feel that loyalty rewards are an incredibly rewarding part of their shopping experience. Identifying these high-purchase customers can be a tough task without any MarTech tools. This is where marketing automation comes into play.

Furthermore, Marketing automation tools can enable businesses to identify the right customer for loyalty benefits. These MarTech tools point out to all customers who have been purchasing from your business. As a result, you can also identify customers who tend to spend more than others.

One can then send out targeted offers, discounts, loyalty programs, and gifts to such customers. To sum up, rewarding your loyal customers this way not only enhances customer engagement but also compels them to recommend your brand to their friends and family.

This is especially true if you have customers in multiple time zones or are looking to target new international customers. The time at which your social media post gets posted plays an important role in determining who sees your posts and engages with it. If you are looking to expand your customer base, you need to familiarize yourself with the global time zones, which will determine the time you post a given post on social media.

Marketing automation tools can help you automate this by scheduling posts. Content marketing platforms like Buffer or Hootsuite enable you to schedule your social media posts. This way, not only do you catch people in different time zones, but also manage your post frequency. Consistent posts on social media are crucial when you are looking to enhance customer engagement.

Now, more than ever, omnichannel marketing is key in providing customers with a seamless customer experience no matter the channel they engage with you on. According to Invespcro, companies utilizing omnichannel marketing strategies retain 89% of their customers. MarTech tools can help you place a solid omnichannel concept in place.

Now, if a customer signs up on your website, marketing automation tools can instantly and automatically send them a welcome email. You might even want to consider adding a first-time discount!

Moreover, if a customer puts something in their cart and abandons it, your marketing automation tool will send a reminder email regarding their abandoned cart. You can even automate shipping confirmation and delivery messages using marketing automation tools, as well as integrate these messages with WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

By providing your customers with a smooth and seamless omnichannel shopping experience, you enhance customer engagement. Thereby boosting your sales without any extra efforts.

 

To enhance customer engagement, you need to know what you are doing wrong and change it. Marketing automation tools integrated with a content management system can help you out with this. An integrated content management system or CMS enables you to identify which type of content performed well and which didn’t.

You can also get automated reports on bad reviews, negative comments, and more. With an integrated CMS system, it can enable you to ensure that you are continuously improving on your social media engagement. Plus, you can avoid doing things that might negatively impact your business.

 

An important part of enhancing customer engagement is improving the customer experience. This is where UX comes into play. While an integrated MarTech stack mostly works directly in relation to increasing sales, an integrated web design content management system works differently.

Using marketing automation on content marketing platforms like Groove, you can send out automated emails to customers who have just joined. In this email, ask them what made them sign up on your website.

In addition, such feedback questions and surveys enable you to build long-term relationships with your customers. According to Finextra, 82% of companies believe that it’s easier to retain customers than acquire new ones.

On the other hand, you can use this feedback in your web design content management system, and utilize it to build a better user experience. Doing so makes your customers feel valued and treasured. This goes a long way in retaining your customers and receiving benefits from it via recurring orders.

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Sources:

[1] https://www.square2marketing.com/blog/how-to-leverage-marketing-automation-and-crm-to-drive-business-results

[2] https://www.omnisend.com/blog/omnichannel-marketing/

[3] https://www.marketpath.com/blog/things-you-can-do-using-cms-marketing-automation

[4] https://www.cloudways.com/blog/ecommerce-marketing-automation/#ux

Martech is part of the digital technology world which has become extremely volatile, especially with the new technology constantly evolving to help develop unique marketing strategies. Revolutionary new marketing technologies come up ever so often and prove to be highly beneficial. When it comes to the ad tech world, marketing automation has been all the rage lately. So we have compiled a list of 5 ways Martech can boost your marketing strategies.

According to the Marketer vs. Machine report by Adestra, 74% of marketers mentioned saving time as the biggest benefit of marketing automation. Other benefits included timely communications, upselling, and increased customer engagement.

Whether it’s integration with natural language processing (NLP) or machine learning (ML), marketing automation is helping businesses outgrow their competitors. In fact, the Lead Generation Marketing Effective Study by Lenskold states that 63% of businesses that are outgrowing their competitors are using marketing automation.

Now, marketing automation is part of a wider fusion of two domains called MarTech. MarTech brings together the concepts of marketing powered by top-notch technology. This marketing tech or adtech helps marketers execute digital strategies faster and more effectively. Here’s how MarTech tools can help you optimize and flourish your business.

 

1. Martech enhances customer engagement and experience

One of the biggest purposes of digital technology has always been enhanced experiences for customers. Digital technology, especially adtech, aims to provide customers with better products and seamless user experiences. With MarTech, businesses can take this purpose to an even higher level.

MarTech tools, with the help of natural language processing and machine learning, provide marketers insights into personal information, subscriptions, customer purchase patterns, demographic, past conversations, market demands, behavioural data, and more. Marketers can then use these insights to develop better and highly-targeted marketing strategies that come with high potential.

Imagine this:

A marketer has automated a lead generation email using a MarTech tool to be sent out to two-thousand subscribers. The content of this email is highly personalized and created by keeping the above insights in mind. Now, when a 30-year-old man receives an email about a good anti-ageing face cream in their inbox, they are more likely to follow through the purchase than a 16-year-old teenager receiving the email.

Clearly, personalized emails enable businesses to find high-quality leads with a higher probability of making a purchase.

With that being said, MarTech is not limited to internal automation but can be adopted into physical hardware to enhance the customer experience. Large financial institutions have utilised this by adding RFID technology to improve their users’ security.

 

2. Smarter content curation and creation with new marketing technology

Companies tend to bring out a new marketing technology after the other without first assessing their content. There are many instances where a company could come up with a great new marketing strategy but couldn’t get good results. They fail to understand that maybe it was their content that was lacking.

According to a report by Digital Trends, 73% of consumers prefer to do business with companies that personalize their shopping experience. MarTech tools powered by natural language processing and machine learning can provide key insights into customer preferences. Businesses can then utilize these to create highly personalized content that speaks very closely to the customer’s personality and needs.

 

3. Marketing automation improves productivity 

Marketing involves many time-consuming tasks, which in some cases can decrease work productivity, but with the recent shift to digitalisation marketing technology has enabled marketers to streamline workflows and processes using marketing automation tools.

One can now automate a particularly redundant task and focus on other high-priority tasks such as automated customer profiling, data collecting, or spreadsheet updating, marketing tech enables you to boost your time efficiency by leaps and bounds. The time saved also allows marketers to dedicate more time to developing new unique ideas.

4. Martech can boost excellent alignment between sales and marketing

A marketing strategy won’t work well unless there’s alignment between the two teams responsible for bringing customers and making sales – the sales team and the marketing team. Often, the company will receive below average results, owing to a choppy alignment between these two teams.

With MarTech tools, businesses can help these teams streamline their workflows and work in harmony. When the marketing team provides high-quality and sales-ready leads to the sales team, they have a better chance of converting them into paying customers. Thus, MarTech tools enable both these teams to work with reduced friction and increased efficiency.

5. Effective measurement strategies using adtech

Often, marketing includes a lot of guesswork. Marketers have to constantly play catch-up and assess which strategy is working and which isn’t. This guesswork is also not based on concrete and proven key performance indicators or KPIs. This is where marketing tech or MarTech tools can lend a helping hand.

Almost all MarTech tools provide marketers with an insight into the KPIs. How many people added a certain product into their shopping carts? Which was the most common touchpoint in the customer’s journey where customers abandoned the purchase?

Now, when marketers know that the customer clicked on an Instagram ad, visited their website, viewed the product, but ditched the purchase at this point, they know their weak point. Once an analysed has been carried out they can choose to optimise the part of their customer journey to achieve business objectives.

Sources:

[1] https://www.sas.com/en_us/insights/articles/marketing/harness-martech-advantage.html

[2] https://www.way2target.com/blog/what-is-martech-and-their-benefits/

[3] https://www.widen.com/blog/what-is-martech

[4] https://martechtoday.com/the-benefits-of-using-marketing-automation-236408

This year, global businesses are looking forward to develop innovative marketing strategies for the coming year and multiply the number of clients while giving a boost to their sales figures.

It’s the best time for marketers to review the best B2B digital marketing strategies and tactics that could be used in next year and assess their approaches against other businesses in the sector. While marketing strategies for B2C sector can be quite simple, but for the marketers involved in the B2B sector, there are some particularly pressing issues which make marketing quite difficult.

A good starting point for reviewing the best digital marketing strategies and tactics that will make a positive impact next year is to think through innovation across all marketing channels. Here in the article, I’d like to demonstrate some of the most result-oriented business to business digital marketing strategies for 2017 to give you the biggest uplift on business the coming year.

Marketing Automation is one of the most preferred strategies by the global B2B marketing companies and stands atop the B2B digital marketing strategies. It provides an automated way of scoring and nurturing leads with appealing and attractive content along the journey to purchase. The strategy has been a great support for the global businesses to bring more sales and attract more visitors, however we came to know that not many businesses are fully exploiting marketing automation since they are at an early level of maturity. However, it’s going to be a great success in the coming year.

This has been used in B2B marketing campaigns for many years and is likely to gain more progress and success in the coming year as well. Over the past many years, readers of digital content have voted for the importance of content marketing amongst the marketing activities available. The success of content marketing lies upon the perfect balance of content quality, frequency and its quality of course. Remember that its future depends on shorter content and less content. Shorter and appealing content can be more effective in business-to-business blog posts.

There’s a reason that website personalisation has made its way to this countdown. This is a well-established technique for ecommerce websites, but traditionally has been less widely used within business-to-business marketing campaigns.

Also known as ABM, Account Based Marketing is an established approach in B2B marketing, particularly within larger organisations that have structures and processes to target key accounts.

Earlier, ABM was one of the digital marketing strategies and tactics which was poorly supported by most Marketing Automation services which focus on individual customer records.

Well, I don’t think I need to explain the important the tiny devices that are able to perform biggest tasks in our lives. Shift to the mobile is a key trend for B2B marketers. Because Google tells us that most businesses have responsive site, so it’s clear that mobile marketing brings great opportunities to almost every type of business. It’s no secret that Mobile Marketing is going to be a great success in year 2017.

With millions of people currently active on leading social media platforms, it’s no longer a secret that social media marketing has been a great technique for the B2B marketing and is going to gain more success in the future as well. Researchers show that B2B businesses tend to get the best results from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Youtube and Slideshare also stand out as particularly effective. If you want to grow your business in China, WeChat marketing is definitely an option you can’t miss.

Smart robots were once science fiction, but artificial intelligence (AI) is now turning into real strategy for B2B marketing that most digital marketers are utilizing. For example, chatbots on Facebook have helped the tech industry better serve customers without the assistance of an actual human being. Incorporating artificial intelligence can help brands a greater number of customers without expending costs on customer service.

With countless separate digital marketing channels available, there is a tendency of marketers to focus on individual channels, but an integrated nurturing process can reap dividends. One of the leading trends for successful B2B marketing campaign is the integration of different channels.

Ever wondered how many of your consumers that are actually looking (and responding) to your advertisements? If your answer is not many, then it’s the time that should start considering changing your strategy and implementing native advertising. It has been around for a while and while the concept isn’t new, expect to see them in abundance in 2017.

Regardless of your thoughts on the highly advanced Apple Watch and its usefulness, wearable technology is gaining traction. However, it’s not too late to start thinking for digital marketers to consider about how wearables can benefit their brand. Make it a part of your B2B digital marketing strategies and you’re ready to explore the benefits without having to worry about the failure.

The desire to understand customer journey can lead marketers and business owners to search for more effective methods in their marketing strategies to increase in sales and customer satisfaction.

In accordance to Thunderhead Blog and some researches, Customer Journey Analytics (CJA) will be the one of the main focus for marketers in 2017. Why is that? In our previous blog post, Integrated Marketing Stack ( IMC) has introduced the benefits for setting up Customer Journey profiles, highlighting ways of data implementation and process methods. Bearing the common motive with the previous post, this article will aim to run through ways of integrating the customer journey analytics with their marketing plans.

Customer Journey Analytics refers using a CRM and marketing system data to find out a group or individual customer journey over time.

Firstly, by understanding the basis of a customer’s journey, marketers will be able to predict an individual customer journey patterns, so the marketers can tailor specific marketing campaigns or promotions to what may appeal to the targeted customers.

Communications with customers always comes as priority for business owners and our society becomes more driven by the web and social media, so it drives the marketers to reach out to bigger audience group by placing their brand/business on the web. The web has become competitive as the real world, and by making your services/products available online simply isn’t enough. Marketing campaigns and advertisements remains essential, yet to stand out from different competitors, marketers need to have some effective strategies in maximizing the business’ exposure. Social media marketing have proved to be a major factor in boosting brand exposure and sales, and many marketers aim to reach out to more potential consumers by adapting social media.

Marketers will need to pinpoint their consumers’ thought process prior the purchase decision, i.e. what made the customer search for this particular service/product, what are their alternative choices and considerations? In many cases, longer customer journey usually revolves around products with a higher price point, whereas shorter customer journey belongs to single purchases usually with a lower price point. Through comparison, customers who are motivated by desires instead of needs tend to spend a lot more.

For example, Ben wants a new car, his current one is rather old but still fully functional. At this point, what motivates Ben of his purchase decision as his car is still fully function. At this point, what motivates Ben of his purchase decision even his car is still fully function. Before making the purchase decision, he began to research what are available on the market. Thought the process of the research, he needs to consider whether he wants to go for something different that will suit his lifestyle or go for his regular choices. He will weigh in the pros and cons of whether to go for electronic or petrol, hybrid or regular, finance, rent or lease etc. Every time he sees a pro, he will weigh in the con to see which is the best cost for his money, and as natural consumers we all go through that. With CJA mapping out customer profiles, marketers can appeal to consumers like Ben before he even begin his research.

Based on the previous example, from mapping out individual customer journeys like Ben’s marketers are able to predict future interests and patterns of Ben’s life cycle as customer. For instance, marketers may be able to predict when is the best time to appeal to Ben, based on the information of when he had purchased it. This prediction depends entirely on the product, therefore when applied to other products such as mobile phones, the life expectancy of the product is much shorter.

Through identify segment groups and gathering more customer profiles, marketers can set up dashboards that not only summarized groups of individual customer journeys, but also with insights and comments that allow marketers to customise and generate solutions that appeals to individual customers. Based on these touchpoints, marketers will be able to get an update and further understanding of their target audience, allowing them to re-position themselves in the market to appeal more.

Consequently, with all the information gathered through CJA, marketers can adapt the appropriate methods to their customer groups. These insights are pivotal to future marketing activities, and the more you gathered the more connected you customers will be. At the end of the day, all marketers have same goals in maintaining and strengthening customer relationship in maintaining customer bonding and their loyalty.

In the coming year, an increasing number of businesses are looking at new integrated marketing automation system – Integrated Marketing Stack in order to look into “customer journeys” in order to understand their customers’ needs, allowing possibilities for their businesses to re-position themselves in the market. By understanding their customers’ needs, business owners can offer better services to their customers through a series of strategy based on their researches. A study by Gartner showed that 89% of marketers expect the knowledge of customer journey in 2017 to be the main differentiator for their businesses.

Integrated Marketing Stack is a Customer Experience Journey Management (CEM) system for tracking, organizing, and managing all interactions between the business to groups or individual customers. By tracking and maintaining this valuable information, the marketers will be able to customize and generate solutions that feels authentic to individual customers.

By mapping the customer’s  journey allows you to predict how the consumer may travel through their life-cycle as a customer. In initial stages, through identifying the segment groups the marketers can create multiple customers’ journeys, and based on these touchpoints, the marketers can therefore identify their target audience groups.  The more customer journeys gathered and defined,  signifies that more content can be discovered. Essentially, mapping out the gathered journeys will allow you to detect any gaps in engagements, pain points, and other potential breakdowns within communications at an earlier stage.

Integrated Marketing Stack is a combination of Target Architecture and Agile Transition process.  To deploy an Integrated Marketing Stack for business, we can have multiple suites and can redistribute it all over a period of time starting with the highest impact system, so that we can strategically progress towards the ultimate goal.

The deliverable shall be provided according to the following methodology, as we would want this project to maximize the benefits of the system, as well as minimizing the cost of deployment.

Target Architecture is a process of defining of our needs and here are the following procedures:

After defining our needs, we can then follow the SCRUM Model – Agile Transition method to consolidate and filter the data.

SCRUM Model – Agile Transition

After those process, the system will be segment a group of customers’ or even a single customer views. Multiple APIs from different platforms will all be connected into this data infrastructure system.  This component is what allows the system to remain agile, by permitting individual platform solutions to be replaced, as marketing needs change over time.

After gathering the data into a central database system, the next step is to analyse the results of the customers’ journeys. The mapped insights allow the marketers to make effective adjustments to their customer journey strategies, which could also maximize their time and costs with a higher efficiency.

Thus,creating loyal customers who are willing to make sales continuously will always take time and commitments. As marketers are running long term businesses, you must know how to build trust and confidence between your brands and your consumers. This type of relationship require you to engage with consumers at various touchpoints from social media and digital platforms, through to the login journeys to their purchases.

Creating some level of responsiveness can mean the difference between making a purchase decision or not, and most importantly  it can turn loyal customers into ‘die-hard fans’ for your business.

Do keep in mind that as marketer, your main goals are to foster customer relationships and to construct brand confidence which will lead to an increase in loyal customer following.

Get in contact today if you want us to help building a right ‘customer journey’ by using Integrated Marketing Stack.

The demand for Marketing Automation has vastly increased in the past few years and according to Marketo & Ascend report on 2015, 91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing across channels.

It allows more targeted campaigns for different advertisers depending on the digital user group profiles. It also reduces cost of advertising, leading to an increase on Marketing Automation’s ROI at the same time.

Marketing Automation is a set of software technology which helps marketers to automate the marketing action. All of these automated actions are designed to deliver relevant and personalised messages to the targeted customers via digital media. In other words, marketers are creating and automating types of content with the goal of actively attracting, qualifying and moving prospects through sales towards a purchase.

It also makes the marketing campaigns/adverts to be focused on increasing the chances that some of the targeted customers will progress towards a successful purchase. This also allows for different campaigns/adverts to be played to different groups at the same time depending upon the groups of the digital profile.

Marketing automation is a system of recording the marketing activities. It’s the place where the marketers can collect and manage all the data and create a rich profile of their target audiences. With this intelligence, they can send out the right information at the right time to move prospects along on their purchasing journey.

It creates a more personal feeling towards the advertising campaigns which make the targeted users to be more engaged with the overall purchase journey. (rather than dictate the audience group)

It also enables the marketers to gather all their prospects leaving through digital interactions and identify when a prospect is sending buying signals so the marketer knows that prospect is ready to speak to sales.

For example, if a person is looking on certain sites, then it could trigger that they are looking for a new item and hence will trigger a targeted campaign. E.g. – Washing Machine, shoes, jackets and etc…

On the other hand, marketing automation systems can link into CRM systems allowing marketers to give sales revenue visibility into all digital strategy so sales can do a better job and close more deals.

(Telesales doing cold calls is not very successful but Telesales with intelligence can make the difference between a sale or not. If the right information is available to the sales person, they can help to guide the person forward.)

Read More: 4 Practical Use Cases for Marketing Automation: Here’s How It Works 

The technology by itself is only an enabler. Although the marketing department can use automation to manage their database, send out campaigns and review the reporting, the company has to align and compare the marketing automation information to their sales departments. Marketers should strategically plan what kind of data to be collected, otherwise they might waste resources when dealing with vast amount of valueless data. Besides, automation needs to happen based upon tested processes that have gained good results in the past.

Nurture the users – Most of the marketers believe “data” is a key element, however it’s also about the strategy set up. It means thinking a step before understand who you wish to target, influence and create personas.

Building a strategy is the most important process. After that, you can design the systems to execute your desired outcomes before sending out to the public. A poor strategy may make potential buyers interpret the adverts as spam.   It needs to be in tuned with the users and make them feel as if they are part of the solution.

Once you know your strategy, whom you are looking for, what data and how your data should look, it will be much easier to increase your marketing automation solution’s ROI.

In addition, you need to be imaginative and create pilot test groups to see if the marketing process or messages are correct or not, as everyone sees, feels, tastes, uses things in different ways based upon their personal mind set.

Knowing our strategy targets would also help us to overcome proving the ROI challenge. As the platform where all the marketing data and campaigns are created and executed, a good model of marketing automation allows marketers to see what is working and what is not working in terms of response. Once the marketing automation system is connected to the CRM system, marketers are then able to see how marketing is influencing pipeline.

With a good model and alignment with sales, marketers can get to the point where they can predict where certain investments in programs at certain stages of the funnel can create pipeline.

In traditional media, demographic information is all that marketers really have available to them. Today, the most valuable information a marketer can have is behavioural data.

The combination of ‘who they are’ and ‘what they do’ is what gives marketers the information they need to feed prospects with the right content to educate them along their purchasing journey.

Most marketers can probably benefit from all aspects of marketing automation which can offer them. Normally, there might be few ‘pain points’ they feel that compel them to buy.

The beauty is that once they have the system in place they can continuously improve and extend how they are using marketing automation. Most customers follow an adoption curve where they add sophistication as they master the basics.

Gathering the user data, ensuring it’s being maintained up-to-date with the services on offer and keep up the current market trends are the must for all the modern marketers.

Do you use marketing automation for your business? Check out our Marketing Automation Service page for more information.

Not using marketing automation today is a crippling setback for businesses.

Marketing automation helps your small business tap right into the power of technology, and systematize lead generation. For business owners continuously strapped for time, cash, and resources, it’s a blessing.

IDC group, in fact, opines that if you don’t use marketing automation, you are already behind the 8 ball. See Source.

Marketing automation is an interplay of a set of processes, systems, and strategic concepts all working together to meet the goals of your business, without you ever lifting a finger (at least, that’s the goal of every business that seeks to automate the marketing function).

Marketing automation is not truly hands-off, “set-it-and-forget-it” endeavor:

• It demands development of systems and processes.
• It requires onboarding of team members, employees, staff, and vendors.
• After it is set into motion, it needs testing, tweaking, and re-deployment.

If you manage to do it right, however, marketing automation truly works wonders for your business. At best, here are four different practical use cases that it has the power to influence:

According to Email Monday, a lead generation survey (2014) reveals that more than 26% of marketers surveyed use marketing software to automate and manage lead generation.

Also, more than 36% at least tried using marketing automation software.

The Aberdeen Group’s State of Marketing Automation report 2014 states that at least 70% of businesses, however, swear by the efficacy of marketing automation and are in the process of using a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP).

Marketing automation bring efficiency into your sales processes, aligns marketing efforts with that of sales, and obviates the need to do many tasks manually.

By automating most of the digital marketing channels where manual labor is either enhanced or removed completely, the entire digital marketing engine gets to run smooth, efficiently, and relentlessly.

Blog posts happen on schedule, social media accounts are flush with content, and emails go out automatically based on user-generated triggers.

Since manual input is not necessary and because systems and processes are more reliable with automation software taking over, brand awareness is more pronounced and continuous.

What price do you pay for that?

One of the most critical areas of marketing where automation really shines through is lead nurturing by engagement.

Since not all your customers are ready to pay the moment your ad shows up, email marketing is the best way to keep your leads nurtured.

Why, you ask? Nurtured leads are more sales ready. On average, DemandGen reports that sales opportunities increase by 20% compared to non-nurtured leads.

The more nurtured your leads are, the more “trusted conversions” you are likely to see.