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Qrimart.com

http://www.qrimart.com/

Introduction Whether you call your customers leads, clients, travelers, students, or investors, if most of your audience doesn’t purchase your product on a whim, you’re probably dealing with a longer than average buying cycle, that’s bad news and good news. The bad news:

70% of those opportunities will happen before they ever talk to your sales person, walk into a dealership, or ask for a financial consultation. The good news:

A longer buying cycle means you have more opportunities to convince your consumer to buy your product.

©2015 Quorium Solutions. Trademarks belong to their respective owners. All rights reserved.

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marketing. With the right software and systems, it’s now more possible than ever to eliminate a range of guess‐work and manual processes once required for truly integrated marketing programs. That means your website, content, landing pages, social media contests, blog posts, email marketing, direct mail, and events can all be managed and tracked under one platform that directly integrates with the systems your sales and customer services team use.


What then is Marketing Automation?

Let’s take a moment to define what marketing automation actually is. Today, marketers are responsible for a larger piece of the buying process than ever – from attracting initial buyer attention to locking in customer loyalty and advocacy. A marketing automation platform streamlines, automates, and measures

these processes, so that your company can scale while still maintaining meaningful relationships. Automation should deliver on the following six functions:

1. Comprehend Track contact information, demographic data and behavioral data across every digital interaction in a single view for each customer. Organize this information into one data repository.

2. Organize Design and coordinate engaging customer experiences and continuous conversations that take each customer on a journey‐in an organized, automated way.

3. Personalize Deliver relevant, personalized content and messages across channels and devices at the right time to drive a desired behavior.

4. Control Support your department’s operational functions – plan your marketing calendar, coordinate your content, track your


investments, and manage your marketing budgets.

5. Optimize Measure and maximize marketing ROI across channels, and accurately attribute outcomes to marketing efforts, supporting data‐driven decision‐making.

6. Study Keep pace with marketing’s evolution, helping marketers stay competitive with current guidance, best practices, and knowledge.

In summary, marketing automation combines email, landing pages and forms, campaign management, relationship marketing, prediction and scoring, lead management, CRM integration, social marketing, and analytics – all with the sole purpose of empowering marketers to drive more revenue.


It’s About the Content

Once you understand how marketing automation works, one thing becomes clear: your content is the fuel behind all of your marketing efforts. In a nutshell, content marketing refers to the collective effort of regularly creating and distributing information (frequently educational and entertaining, rather than promotional) as a means of attracting and keeping customers. You can use content to establish your brand as fun, useful, informative, or tied to a specific cause. Most importantly, you can use content to engage with the audiences you want to attract. You can also offer content in exchange for contact information, and send content in email campaigns to develop and nurture relationships.


Why is Content Marketing so popular?

Because a range of studies from organizations like the Content Marketing Institute consistently demonstrate that consumers are more likely to buy from, and feel better about companies that are producing valuable (not just promotional) content that educates buyers throughout their buying journeys.

For e ple, financial services panies may provide content that any investor would want, such as analyst reports. Automotive companies might write on topics such as, “The 5 things new families shoul consider when buying a car

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f course, you’ll need content to fuel this Ofire. But creating content is simple. Start with a couple of pieces that you think will have a big impact, and pay attention to what works – and what doesn’t. Today, there are also many quality content companies that can help you create massive amounts of content, without blowing your budget. But just having content isn’t enough. Marketers still need to deliver the right content to the right person at the right time. And that’s where our next marketing automation advantages come into play: scoring, dynamic content delivery, and nurturing. 1. Scoring

The path to purchase can be long and often non‐linear. But knowing how to identify prospective and current customers, and move them through the buying journey, is what scoring is all about. Scoring is the process of assigning a potential buyer a score based on their demographic data and/or behaviors. In the world of marketing


automation, you might encounter the term “lead”, which can be defined as an identified, potential buyer who is engaged or likely to engage with your brand (or product/service offering). As a rule of thumb, even your current customers should be considered leads – after all, they definitely have potential to buy again! To better understand how scoring works, it’s helpful to first be familiar with what’s called the buying cycle, or customer lifecycle. This can be thought of as the collection of actions (or stages) that result in a buyer making a purchase. While the modeling, terminology and practices involved in scoring can be very intricate, the concept of scoring is actually simple. By using demographic and behavioral data, you can gauge your customers’ interest in you as well as your interest in them. From there, you can strategically plan which buyer segments (stages, personas, etc.) to focus on. Automated scoring can help you:

• Improve and prioritize content that helps advance a consumer from one buying stage to another.

• Get greater insight on content that’s working (or failing) across multiple channels, such as your website, advertising, social channels, email, and events.

• Prioritize your prospective customers and know when someone from your sales team should reach out.

2. Dynamic Content Delivery

With marketing automation, marketers can automatically deliver custom content (whether it’s text, images, or video) based on the behaviors and demographics of their target consumers. Through a technology called real‐time personalization, they can also display custom website content based on the same variables (consumer data and behavior).


For example, a financial services company could display different investment products based on a visitor’s web behaviors, such as a visitor who indicates he or she is risk‐adverse versus one who’s more aggressive. A company may also leverage demographic‐based content – sending or displaying different content based on attributes like job title, marital status, or city of residence. Whether content is presented based on behavior or demographics, you’ll benefit from the ability to learn about and improve your content’s impact on engagement and progress toward a purchase. If you’re marketing to existing and prospective buyers, they may have vastly different interests with respect to your products or services. That’s where dynamic content generation comes in. For example, consider a prospective college student who’s identified a keen interest in engineering, but is looking at a school with a broad range of degree programs. In this example, the school might want to specifically highlight its engineering program for that particular student. As you efficiently track your customers’ readiness to buy, you can also craft detailed and specific marketing content to keep your consumers moving toward a purchase from the moment you capture their information. That’s how you’ll know that your marketing content is effectively driving consumers and customers in the right direction. 3. Nurturing

As a modern marketer, you are also by default a publisher of content. Your nurturing strategy (how you are creating relationships with potential customers regardless of their timing to buy) will determine the type and frequency of content you’ll deliver. Once you’ve established a framework for your customer buying cycle and scoring, an ongoing nurturing practice will become the lifeblood of your marketing automation. Imagine that Qrimart.com noticed you’re a visitor spending most of her website visits on pages related to the Range Rover Sport‐series. As a result, she is placed into a “nurture track” designed to deliver content related to the Range Rover Sport ‐series. The nurture track starts by sending you email about the top five features of cars in this class. Your marketing automation platform sends a follow‐up email a week later, which includes a link to an independent study on luxury Range Rovers.



Finally, a few days after you open that last email, it sends a request asking you to schedule a Range Rover‐series test drive at a local dealer. At the heart of successful nurturing is the ability to match relevant content to buyers’ interests, which may naturally change and shift as they move closer to making a purchase. There might be a number of nurture tracks for any given buying stage—some may schedule communications over several days, and others over several months. Measuring (and adjusting for) results along the way is what turns good marketing into great marketing.


The Analytics to Know What’s Working (and What Isn’t) Effective analytics and data are absolutely essential to unlocking the full potential of your marketing initiatives. Good data paired with trained analysis will help you determine:

• The right way to segment your customers, and any patterns in your customers’ behavior and demographic data

• How to build programs that are more efficient and effective • How to prioritize your marketing funds (for example: should you spend

more on generating new contacts, or on building a nurture program for existing subscribers/customers?)

When it comes to analytics (and associated dashboards in general) too much data is a common problem. Decision makers are frequently overwhelmed with heavy, text‐based, pie chart‐filled reports related to a range of performance metrics, leading them to ask questions like these:

• Given all the data we have visibility into, where should we focus our attention?

• How can we get a better picture of what the data is telling us? • What’s the story behind the numbers?

Marketing automation can help address these questions with “analyzer” dashboards. These visually display insights into program performance, comparative effectiveness, and overall impact to revenue as a direct result of marketing. In the next section, we’ll summarize and discuss the details of these dashboards. Analyze Marketing Programs and Channels

With marketing automation, you can monitor the effectiveness of all of your marketing programs and identify which channels are yielding the highest return.


You can also easily compare different channels – including email, online, events, and social – to optimize your marketing mix. Consumer marketers can analyze the factors that drive return on investment, including offer time and channel, which helps you determine which programs and channels are working. Marketers can understand which programs are attracting more people, and which programs are influencing people during their buying journey.

Analyze the Buyer’s Journey If your goal is to shatter the perception that marketing is a cost center, it’s important to show marketing’s aggregate impact on revenue. With marketing automation, you can measure key performance metrics for each stage of the revenue cycle, including the number of buyers at each stage, the number of buyers who enter or leave the stage, the percentage of buyers who convert from one stage to the next, and the time it takes a buyer to transition from one stage to the next (the “velocity”). You can view how these metrics trend over time and compare performance across multiple time periods. You can also identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement.


Conclusion Using marketing automation, any marketer can access the demographic and behavioral data of every one of your email subscribers, known website visitors, event attendees, and social media followers. Although marketing automation has become a competitive necessity for companies that sell to other businesses, Qrimart’s own sales data demonstrates a significant surge in consumer‐facing companies seeking to realize the same advantages. These advantages empower marketers to:

• Generate more awareness • Build relationships with consumers before they’re ready to buy • Drive action by delivering the right message at the right time • Know when you should have a sales person reach out to the consumer • Measure the results of your efforts – and constantly improve them

All of this is achieved through effective content marketing that leverages scoring, dynamic content delivery, and nurturing. Integration with CRM systems for sales, and the use of smart analytics dashboards provides an additional value, positioning a company to surpass its competitors on multiple levels. The new wave of marketing automation for consumer‐based companies has arrived. B2B industries took the early risks, recognizing that marketing as a function of business (like accounting, HR, customer service, etc.) had finally found a true platform… and it worked. Now you’ve found the platform. Where will you take it?



About Qrimart.com

Qrimart provides leading marketing software for companies of all sizes to build and sustain engaging customer relationships. Spanning today’s digital, social, mobile and offline channels, Qrimart’s customer engagement platform powers a set of breakthrough applications to help marketers tackle all aspects of digital marketing from the planning and orchestration of marketing activities to the delivery of personalized interactions that can be optimized in real‐time. Qrimart’s applications are known for their ease‐of‐use, and are complemented by the users and third‐party solutions users who share and learn from each other to grow their collective marketing expertise. The result for modern marketers is unprecedented agility and superior results. Headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria, Qrimart serves as a strategic marketing partner to large enterprises and fast‐growing small companies across a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit www.Qrimart.com. The materials on this website are provided for general informational and educational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. They are not offered as and do not constitute legal advice or legal opinions. You should not act or rely on any information contained in this website without first seeking the advice of an attorney
