In an age where digital data is not only valuable but ubiquitous, organization and automation becomes a marketing agency’s pillars of time management and financial advantage.
More needs to be done to understand the motivations of a consumer. Content creation and targeting are only the tip of this iceberg and the start of a deep dive to converting a customer into a lead or sale. It’s data that educates a marketer on what makes an individual tick. Through data, they’ll be able to establish what exactly triggers them and the most efficient way to do so.
To do so, you need to build a customer profile:
“Through marketing automation systems, we should be able to build better-rounded customer profiles through variable data field capture during different communication touch points.”
Using big data can gain a marketing agency advantages when it comes to developing relevant content and messages, collecting and analyzing data on how customers interact, and delivering a more consistent, positive customer experience across devices.
Digital advertising isn’t just posting an ad online and hoping for the best. Leveraging automation enables agencies to determine what type of content is best at attracting leads, how they find you, and why they chose to connect with you. It can help figure out how, when and where customers tend to interact with you, as well as what platforms and devices they’re reaching you on.
Even though we’re online, you still have to imagine a face and personality behind that screen.
Online marketing may have muddied the border between buyer and seller, but it hasn’t completely eroded it. The intimacy of conversation may get down to bare bones quicker, but getting to know one another, in order to build up a level of trust from the seller’s side and understanding from the buyer’s side, has not been completely lost.
Now instead of asking questions, you’re simply provided with profiles through those variable data fields we just mentioned. You get to know their behaviors, tendencies, and interests, while marketing automation and big data work “together to create an effective way to collect, sort and gain insight from thousands of data points about customers, campaigns and products or services.”
This can partly be done by the miracle of predictive analytics, which can predict the future by mining the past. Consider Amazon; they gather past purchase data, wish lists, similar purchases and customer ratings to predict future shopping patterns. They simply acquire all the data they need to build up an accurate enough profile that will efficiently usher you from point A to point B:
“With the increased accuracy of self-learning algorithms, marketers will be able to better deconstruct big data to create incredibly targeted and optimally timed user experiences.”
Getting a customer from each of those points requires a meld of data and automation; the data working as the blueprint, and automation working as the tools, delivering quickness, accuracy, and an improved user experience, one that puts the user in the driver’s seat:
“They can access the exact information they want, how and when they want it. But every potential customer isn’t necessarily going to want exactly the same information. With automation, you can also create multiple paths, so each person can have a different experience, based on their own needs and interests.”
When “80% of your sales come from only 20% of your customers”, automation is a necessity to pinpoint just what type of customers will react and how. For example, say you’re running an email marketing campaign and you’re trying to deliver the best possible user experience, you might monitor:
- When your customer open emails
- When they engage with content
- What content they engage with
- The frequency with which they choose to engage
- Conversions that take place
Platforms like AutoPilot can deliver a tailored experience that accommodates each and every one of your leads as a unique individual, rather than just another part of the catch-all. Sure they might share similarities by way of being interested in what you’re selling, but they all have different triggers and ways of going about things.
On the other end, the Zapier platform can help gather that data and turn it into data you can use to create a more efficient workflow and finish routine tasks quicker.
These platforms and tools will not only help you get better organized, but they’ll help you draw in more leads. You can’t treat your audience as a monolith. They might all like your product or service, but they all arrived there differently, are using different devices, react to different content, and come from different areas where the product or service might serve a different purpose.
You may not see them, and that disconnect and widening gulf isn’t helping, but there’s still a person behind the screen and the only way to turn them into a sale or lead is treating them like one.
