The corona crisis's acceleration of digital transformation is putting marketing automation high on many companies' agendas. After all, it promises that you can do more with fewer people, use your customer data smartly, and continuously improve your marketing. But putting marketing automation into practice goes far beyond simply implementing new tooling. Here's how to successfully deploy marketing automation in 2021.
Corona drives digital acceleration
The digital acceleration is leading to a veritable eruption of online content and behavioral data. Companies dependent on physical contact had to rapidly build up their online presence last year. Branches where no more business was possible, such as the travel industry, were looking for complementary business models and new ways to stay in touch with their target audience; planting seeds for a better future.
This growth in content is resulting in a huge increase in their online reach for many companies. Additionally, customers are now more willing to purchase products that were previously physical, such as events, digitally. However, online competition has also increased. You will have to distinguish yourself smartly with relevant marketing and an optimal customer experience. So that also means pioneering to discover what does and doesn't work in the next normal. According to Forrester, marketing automation was already on the rise, and now the corona crisis has added urgency to that.
From the market, all kinds of low-threshold tools have therefore been added to make marketing automation increasingly commonplace. However, the success of marketing automation depends on more than just tooling.
The basis of marketing automation is process thinking
As many companies will have noticed last year, creating and publishing relevant, valuable content for your target audience is already very difficult. You need all kinds of competencies for that, internally and often externally. Especially with that working from home, it can be challenging to keep the lines of communication short, collaborate efficiently and spar about complex issues online. Content creation requires planning and strategy to pay off in engagement and ultimately business. You'll need to capture and pull together behavioral data to drive the potential customer to a purchase through a marketing funnel or marketing wheel.
This won't be a new story, but actually putting it into practice remains difficult. The biggest challenge of marketing automation lies in orchestrating people and data flows in the organization into new, efficient processes. The software can do it, it's all about getting processes like personalization, lead generation and lead nurturing up and running.
Other industries and companies, these marketing automation processes often differ, and they are now also shaken up considerably by digital acceleration. A well-known pitfall is to want to collect all the data and only afterwards see what you can do with it. Or putting too much emphasis on personalization at the expense of automation, which means that a marketer actually spends longer than before setting up email campaigns.
In addition, companies now have to pioneer and innovate much more continuously. Which product or service can you market entirely online and where will you have to come up with a hybrid form? What process do you use to determine what works and what doesn't?"
