Marketing automation is fast becoming the next big thing in the industry. Any marketing agency that wants to keep up with the times knows all about it and is using it in their strategies. Marketing automation is software that allows you to streamline, automate and measure marketing tasks and workflows. It is one of the most effective ways to nurture prospects for the long term and create a personalised customer experience.
Marketing automation has been embraced by a myriad of companies and is on the way to producing the next “unicorn”. In “tech talk”, a unicorn is a privately held startup company valued at over $1 billion. And with the way that marketing automation is going, it is set to produce the next one in no time.
Classic marketing automation already boasts billion dollar companies
Initially, companies didn’t know that they needed marketing automation. They knew that they needed web analytics, but automation was a new and interesting concept. At first, it was about convincing your web visitors to convert by using the analytics data you were already collecting.
This continued to evolve, helping companies to do more with existing customers and users. The first marketing automation software to breakout was Eloqua, which banded together with Salesforce very early on. Soon after, hundreds of other like Eloqua began to flood the market and marketing automation became somewhat par-for-the-course, expensive enterprise software that the big budget “Hollywood style” marketing agencies enjoyed. Each new entry came onto the scene with a new hook and soon enough a few billion dollar marketing automation agencies came into existence.
It’s cross vertical, cross industry and cross platform
Marketing automation, especially mobile marketing automation, is effective and could create a billion dollar company because it is cross vertical, cross industry and cross platform. This makes it a huge opportunity for anyone who is looking to invest in technology.
No matter what kind of app you have or what industry you are in, marketing automation can work to help you reach your goals. And this means that it can be used to produce a unicorn in any number of industries. All business owners have a goal that they want to reach, whether it be getting users to consume more ads so you make more money or converting online shoppers to online buyers. Marketing automation can be used effectively to make your business smarter, more effective and richer.
It’s not about getting more consumers, but getting them to do what you want them to do
Previously, the focus would be on getting people to land on a site and, using sheer brute force and the increase in website visitors, you would end up with enough customers to make a profit. But, thanks to marketing automation, we’ve learned that it was about getting more from what you already had.
A unicorn will know to use marketing automation to focus more of their attention on the 40 percent of consumers who already use their brand, rather than trying to convince the 60 percent who do not. These are the users you can actually encourage to perform desired actions, actions which will net you a nice profit. You should not disregard the rest of the consumers, but instead of trying to reach out to consumers who are not interested, use the ones you have to drive actions that will benefit your business.
Analytics are awesome… but you have to actually use them
Most businesses are aware of what analytics are, having heard the term from many marketing agencies. And this is where a normal company and a unicorn differ, because unicorns actually use their analytics data.
Marketing automation offers highly insightful analytics which you can use see exactly how your campaigns are performing and how close you are to reaching your goals. The secret is to actually pay attention to this data. Let’s say that you have an email campaign that people sign up to and receive a downloadable white paper. Your results might show that after downloading the white paper, many consumers unsubscribe from your emails. This shows that the white paper might not have been what they wanted. You could change things up and offer them an informative article and measure the results of this campaign to see which performed better.
AI is progressing rapidly
The domain of artificial intelligence is progressing rapidly, which means that it is set to disrupt many industries from law and medicine to marketing. It is introducing automation at a scale that is thus far unknown.
A computer might have more memory and capacity than a human mind, but it is the unicorns of the business world who know how to harness this power and use it to their advantage. Rogerwilco is one such unique and exciting marketing agency that is making use of automation in the form of Acoustic Campaign (formerly IBM Watson Campaign Automation), a question-answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language. As many unicorns, we look to marketing automation to help build our business reach success.
Need Assistance with Digital Strategy?
Rogerwilco’s team of strategists, business analysts and data scientists is here to help.
