We are constantly looking for new and innovative ways in which we can benefit our client’s businesses through their digital efforts. Yes, we’re particularly confident with SEO, PPC, CRO and Analytics amongst other channels, but this doesn’t mean we’re going to rest on our laurels. We’re an inquisitive bunch with a thirst for knowledge and a desire to be top of our digital games.
As such, we’ve always got our ear close to the ground to listen out for digital tremors that we feel are worth taking note of. One of these tremors has been occurring over the last couple of years more and more. I give you… Marketing Automation, Huzzah!
Marketing Automation is the utilisation of a software suite that enables you to scale personalised marketing communications. Essentially, marketing on steroids.
Marketing automation is a phrase that you may or may not have heard before, but you definitely need it in your digital vocabulary as of today. If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, then you really need to get smart about how you communicate with potential customers.
Advances in technology mean it is no longer effective to distribute a general marketing message to your entire audience, we need to get a lot more granular than that.
We will shortly be making a Marketing Automation software suite available to our clients, but what can you actually do with the software?
We’re certainly going to be implementing marketing automation techniques for the Attacat site (there’s a shiny all singing all dancing new website coming soon, stay tuned!) in the coming months. Here are a few examples of the wonderful things you can do with the software with specific Attacat-based examples:
- Personalised website content – By tracking how a user interacts with your website and indeed with your business as a whole, we are able to personalise a website to make it more tailored to each visitor’s needs. For example, if you are regularly looking at the PPC page on the Attacat site, we can safely assume that you are interested in PPC. We can then look to tailor our homepage to have more of a PPC focus. Or, we could provide different messaging to users we know have visited the site before. Getting super geeky, we could even have an overlay welcoming a specific client to the site.
- Ridiculously targeted email campaigns – You know how frustrating it can be to receive a super generic email newsletter or sales promotion that is not really that relevant to you or your purchasing behaviour. Frustrating emails result in unsubscribes and/or a negative opinion of your brand or business. Marketing Automation makes it possible to tailor your email messaging and content to what your customers are actually likely to want to receive. In the context of the Attacat site, looking again at the example of a user being particularly keen on PPC, we can ensure that all email communications have a strong PPC focus. We will of course want to talk about other channels, but we can ensure the focus is around the channel we know they are interested in. A really interested and effective feature of the software is being able to setup drip fed email campaigns. So this is the process of sending a different email at various intervals and the next email the user receives can vary based on what we know about that user’s interaction with the website or previous emails.
- Lead scoring – Certainly a feature that is more focused on B2B activity, but can be useful for B2C businesses too. Lead scoring allows you to prioritise your sales pipeline and reach out to the leads that are close to converting. Attribute scores for different actions or behaviours that we are able to track.
- Behaviour tracking – Know what web pages and other marketing touch points a user has interacted with and personalise your communications accordingly. We will be keeping track of all users who visit certain key pages. We will also be able to keep a note of who has attended various seminars that we’ve spoken at based on who downloads scripts/slides. Having this level of data will make our future communications much more informed. We’re also currently using the system to keep a track of who owns a priceless Attacat mug!
- CRM integration – Fully integratable with all well known CRM systems and even comes with its own built in CRM system. We have tried out various CRM systems in the past. The big players such as Salesforce as ridiculously expensive and so not justifiable (we’re a small agency!), and most of the small players were quite frankly crap. This system’s CRM is exactly what we need. Its simple, robust and best of all customisable.
- Sales analytics and optimisation – In order to understand what marketing efforts are working well and which not so well, you need to be able to attribute your sales back to the original touch point. Doing so will help you to understand the true ROI of different marketing techniques and strategies allowing you to optimise accordingly moving forward. Do more of what works well and less of what doesn’t. Simple stuff really, but you need the data to back up such decisions, and this software suite can help you gain that visibility. We are tracking our sales pipeline very carefully and can see very at a nice granular level where each new client has actually come from. We rank #1 for Edinburgh SEO and we’re on page one for SEO, so we tend to get a lot of leads through our prominent search rankings, but we also get a lot of people getting in touch who have heard good things said about us or they’ve seen us talking at a conference. Understanding each of these different routes to sale helps us understand what works well for Attacat. We can then tweaks our efforts moving forward.
- Anonymous visitor identification – A nice bonus feature that will be more tailored towards B2B users. Through reverse IP lookup, the suite can help you to identify which companies have visited your site, even if they’ve neglected to get in touch or identify themselves in any way. Creepy huh?
Marketing Automation helps you to really target all levels on the marketing funnel…
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The biggest hurdle to getting started with Marketing Automation is generally the cost. The well known providers of such software are charging a really beefy monthly fee. Hubspot, arguable the market leader for automation, charge $800 per month for up to 1000 contacts. If your site receives even just a few hundred visitors a day, then this 1000 contact limit will be used up in a few days and you’ll find the software cant meet your needs effectively (without having to go up to the next price bracket). This poses a notable barrier to entry for a small to medium size business.
We’re currently in the process of finalising our automation offering and full details will of course be distributed shortly, but what we can promise, is that it will be affordable. Affordable for small business, but still with the robust and vast feature range that big business would like to utilise.
We just wanted to get you all excited about all the cool wonderful things we can do for you.
What ways would you like to automation your marketing processes? Leave us a comment to let us know 🙂 If you are interested in hearing more about our Marketing Automation service, please fill out the form below and I’ll be in touch extremely shortly! 🙂
