The 5 Principles of Marketing Automation

1. Targeting

The first step in building any sustainable structure is to ensure a proper foundation. Think of your database as this foundation. Without the proper data management and hygiene in place, your marketing operations will suffer because it’s nearly impossible to meaningfully segment and refine your prospects.

2. Engagement

Meaningful marketing is centered on the customer. No longer can marketers or sales reps relegate communications to company centric conversations. To engage with prospects and customers in a meaningful way, you must develop tactics to address and align messaging across all digital channels. To do this effectively, you must have a content marketing strategy in place to provide educational engagements.

3. Conversion

Marketers are using technology that responds to the buyer’s actions in real time and delivers profile information that reflects their timeline and research journey. Automated campaigns have higher conversation rates and are much more resilient for maintenance. By automating your campaigns, you can improve the buyer’s experience, develop loyal relationships, and track conversion data more effectively. If you understand the nature of conversions, you can leverage that data to refine business initiatives across your organizational structure.

4. Analytics

As accountability for marketing investments increases, data analytics provide a helpful tracking resource to define and measure. By implementing systems for reporting and intelligence, organizations can better understand the impact that sales, marketing, and other efforts are having on overall business performance. This insight helps you refine strategies and develop repeatable processes for success.

5. Marketing Technology

Organizations across all sizes and industries are leveraging tools to simplify business processes. Successful marketers understand the importance of aligning marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms in the cloud. They can then extend capabilities with cloud applications by integrating other key technologies to connect the dots of internal efficiency and maximize prospect and customer interactions.