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Marketing automation is emerging as a hot topic in 2015 for marketers and business owners. If it's done well, marketing automation promises more and better leads, improved conversion rates and greater productivity. All words that you would love to hear when it comes to generating new business.
So what is it, and does it mean you lose the relationship with your client base?
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If the heart of marketing is understanding the customer needs, marketing automation is using the knowledge and insights gleaned from data to personalise and improve marketing efforts. It uses technology to track and analyse consumer behaviour at every stage in the customer journey and then automate marketing tasks – like email marketing and online marketing campaigns – in response.
It can be used for everything from telling you when the best moment to contact your client is to what message will resonate with them the most. Marketing automation will also provide you with data you may not have had access to previously such as what your clients like to read and the search terms customers used in Google. This can then be used to trigger follow-up communication, send targeted reminders with deals with lenders and allocate tasks to a business manager. The list and potential is nearly endless.
But the word 'automation' implies the technology takes over the relationship with a prospective client, something you might not be comfortable with when service is a key differentiator in broker marketing.
It's interesting to see that some broker groups are adopting the use of marketing automation already (for example Connective's use of Hubspot) and there is a range of different software providers including Pardot, Marketo and Oracle Eloqua to name a few. If your aggregator is using this and you wish to understand the technology better, there are a range of live demos that cover integration with CRM, technology support, training and, importantly, data security. Also, with identity theft and fraud on the rise, data security is a huge issue so these issues also need to be considered.
It sounds like the holy grail but, like most good things, it requires a careful tactical planning and the capture of data. This involves assessing your current marketing efforts, understanding what your automation goals are, and how the technology will be implemented. By being clear about your requirements and your budget, this will help guide your vendor selection when it comes to choosing the technology.
Rather than dehumanising the relationship between broker and client, marketing automation has the potential to help you move from 'leads' and transactional marketing to enable brokers to engage with people in a meaningful way at each stage of their journey. In an era when data is becoming more available and consumers are expecting more, being able to stand out from the crowd by providing content that speaks directly to an individual will assist cutting through to prospective clients.
