The number and variety of tools marketers have to reach potential prospects has grown exponentially, and many of them work exceedingly well. That’s the good news. But on the flip side…
- How do you use these tools so they augment each other?
- How do you find the time to manage multiple systems?
- How do you use them to know where a prospect is in the sales cycle, and effectively share that information with sales?
Oh, the opportunities!
Digital media has opened up a whole new world of ways to learn about your customers and interact with them. Email, web sites, social media (in all its many splendors), webinars, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) ads, website visitor tracking, and a host of other channels are all critical tactics in the marketer’s tool chest. They provide highly flexible and effective methods for finding and engaging prospects, extending your brand, and driving revenue. However, using multiple tools makes for a complicated technology environment… and where there’s complication, there’s cost.
Oh, the headaches: Managing multiple marketing tools
Time is a big headache. You can run out of bandwidth long before you run out of things that need to be done. You can spend more time managing your systems than managing your campaigns. (Ever had to wait for IT to do something for you?)
The other big headache is data. Analysis may be the foundation for marketing in our networked age, but when you’re depending on separate point tools that deliver discrete reports, data continuity turns into a manual process. (There’s that time thing again.) And it can be hard to see the big picture when the little ones don’t relate to each other.
An answer
Show of hands: How many of you are using spread sheets to move data around? How many of you are entering data by hand, into your CRM system or some other tool? How many of you are looking at your Google Analytics and wondering who those people are?
There is a better way. It’s called “integrated marketing”. Solutions exist that automate campaign functions, consolidate prospect behaviors into individual profiles, track social media behaviors, reveal real-time prospect behavior, and push qualified leads directly to the appropriate sales rep for follow-up. From trigger and transactional emails to on-going nurture programs, most automated marketing systems provide a centralized console for creating and managing elements associated with a campaign, including emails, landing pages, forms, social media, web events, and CRM communication, creating a seamless, visible, measurable workflow.
It’s a lot more information…and better results… for the same investment of time.