Marketing is undergoing a fundamental shift. Emerging digital channels such as social media and mobile have created unique opportunities to reach a new generation of customers more quickly, efficiently, and directly. However, traditional channels such as direct mail and the telephone aren’t going away anytime soon.
This means marketers are faced with the challenge of presenting a consistent face to customers across both old and new channels, transcending technological and organizational barriers. It’s a tall order and, in 2013, marketers will be faced with more data than ever.
In this post, we’ll highlight some ways marketing automation software can help compile customer data to track trends, deliver targeted campaigns, and ultimately improve ROI in 2013.
Social Media ROI
In 2012, data showed 53% of tech marketers planned to increase social media investment in marketing operations throughout the year. With that expected trend to continue in 2013, more and more social data will be pouring in and marketing automation software could become a necessity to perform successfully. Specifically, social marketing automation, which allows marketers to manage mass, segmented, and personalized messaging across social networks, could help marketers deliver results.
Marketing automation software gives marketers the ability to measure the ROI of each action on social media in terms of audience, reactivity, lead conversion, and sales. This coming year, marketers will have the ability to monetize social efforts, a great challenge for most, while building brand awareness through social.
Lead Scoring
Another marketing discipline set to expand in 2013 is lead scoring, the process of identifying and tracking leads, and assigning a score to communicate with sales the maturity and readiness of a particular lead. Scoring models will evolve throughout 2013 and improve as users stray from behavior-based calculations to those based strictly on statistics.
This evolution will track customers who visit websites once before making a purchase. Traditional scoring methods cannot identify these interactions as meaningful leads for the sales funnel, and evolving lead scoring processes will result in qualified leads being passed over to sales to improve ROI.
Dynamic Websites
Dynamic websites will also play a large role in 2013. No single website can serve or anticipate the needs of all visitors within a single design. By offering content that is too broad or too specific, static sites often satisfy one customer while alienating many others. Adaptive content applied through behavioral targeting individualizes user experiences, allowing websites to effectively engage a variety of users. Marketing automation can provide the information to make behavioral targeting possible, but fresh content and consistent analysis is vital for success.
This coming year will offer marketing automation vendors a huge opportunity to capitalize on massive amounts of data that are becoming available as the digital world evolves. Social and mobile, as well as traditional communication and marketing channels need to be brought together for marketers to achieve maximum ROI and deliver results.
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