Whether or not you believe in the old marketing mantra “customer is king,” as a business owner, you really have no choice but to accept this right now. We live in the information age, which means that customers have more power than ever before. Your customers come to you already educated about your product and informed about what your competitors offer. Customers now can choose the terms of engagement and your decision to engage with them on those terms could mean the difference between making a sale and losing a potential lead. Cold calls are a thing of the past. Customers get their information over numerous platforms, including social media, e-mail and company websites. You have to be able to connect with them across all of these different platforms seamlessly. Even if you have a great campaign, placing your content across these different channels is crucial. Marketing technology, or MarTech, can enable you to do this by ensuring the power of information works for you.
What is MarTech?
Any software or tool that helps marketers plan, implement and analyze marketing campaigns is referred to as MarTech. Such software can be used to automate marketing processes, collect data about consumers and deliver cross-platform messaging to enable businesses to interact with a wider audience. As its role is becoming more significant, the MarTech industry is seeing a massive boom as the internet plays a bigger role in influencing the buying decisions of customers.
How you can use it
Marketing has to be personalized, contextualized and dynamic. You need to know who your customers are and their needs in order to deliver the product, service or experience that best suits their needs. Marketing automation software helps you get the right message across seamlessly and in real time, across both physical and digital channels.
MarTech does this by first collecting data about your customers that marketing teams can use when creating campaigns. Right from the first time a potential customer visits your website, you can begin engaging with them through targeted ads. Let’s say a customer finds your website through Google and spends some time looking up a certain product. At this point you could offer to send them more details, updates and promotional content via email.
Marketers can use the collected data to determine who should receive an email, what type of email to send and the best time to send it. It allows for automation not just of emails but also the delivery of other message across various platforms. You could remind them about a product they were browsing a few days later through a Google ads campaign or further engage with them through social media platforms.
Marketing automation allows you to retarget your customer after every interaction they have had with your campaign. You can decide what they see next based on their behavior and craft a campaign that helps convince them over time. As a potential customer goes through the various stages of your campaign, you will be able to determine the right time to offer a promotion that will help close the deal.
The best thing about this is that it is all automated. Once you’ve determined your strategy and inputted it into the software, it can run on autopilot and you can sit back and fine tune the design and timing of your campaign messaging to improve results. As the software collects more data it becomes better at segmenting customers and understanding their buying behavior. This means you can make your campaign more personalized and shorten your sales cycle to generate more leads.
However, though there is no cookie-cutter solution to digital marketing, MarTech can drastically improve the way you design your campaigns. Digital marketing is growing in influence and online advertising powers some of the world’s largest tech companies. To be able to navigate and fully exploit the power of digital marketing in all its forms, automation of marketing processes is now not a luxury but a necessity.
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