Be a Better Marketer with Marketing Automation

Marketing in the digital age is no easy task—and it’s only getting harder. Your customers are researching and self-educating online long before they want to hear from your sales team. And even people who are visiting your site stay largely anonymous. That leaves you without enough information about the personality and needs of your potential customers.

The heart of effective marketing is relationship building. But if you don’t know who your potential customers are, how can you initiate a conversation and make sure your products come out ahead in their mind? Many of today’s marketers find themselves cut out of the buyer’s journey altogether. And current global health conditions have only made it harder to make personal connections with potential sales leads.

The pressure to deliver results is high. But instead of addressing these roadblocks to positive customer experiences, most marketers find themselves bogged down in repetitive, manual marketing tasks like reporting and data entry. And when your marketing efforts do deliver positive results, chances are you don’t get the credit you deserve.  

Sound grim? Luckily, this scenario is not your only option. You can build a marketing strategy that not only gets you the results you want, but helps you prove the value of those results.

Getting there probably isn’t as complicated as you think. Below we’ll talk about four main marketing challenges, and why automating tasks is the best way to solve them.

Do These Marketing Challenges Sound Familiar?

Regardless of the types of customers you support or the industry you work in, most marketers are facing these four main challenges.

1. Building trust. Most customers want to be experts before they make a purchase, whether they are buying a phone or a new car. Many of them turn to social media, online reviews, and advice or recommendations from friends to help them make purchasing decisions.
   
   They’ll probably even spend quite a bit of time visiting your website. But many online buyers are already distrustful of marketing information. Marketers can further erode trust with mistakes such as inconsistent messaging, response times, and branding.
   
   For example, a bad database could mean that instead of getting professional, personalized emails, your contacts are getting sales emails with the wrong name or no name at all. And the more manual processes you have, the more likely you are to make mistakes, like sending the wrong information to the wrong person, or making the same phone call twice.
   
   If you can’t get a customer’s name or phone number right, chances are they won’t trust you to get anything else right and their business will quickly go elsewhere.
   
   
2. Anonymous visitors. Most customers bounce around to multiple sources looking for information without leaving many details behind. That can make it difficult for marketers to get a handle on who their potential customers are, let alone what those customers are looking for. 
   
   With the right software, however, marketers can identify the IP addresses where their page views are coming from. Anonymous visitor tracking is the first step in figuring out who your potential customers are. It can help you identify the company domain of you visitor. That information is key for lead management, building customer relationships and helping marketers become part of the buyer’s journey.
   
   
3. Manual effort. The time marketers should be spending on tasks that drive results is often taken up by repetitive marketing tasks, like reporting and manually entering and recording information.
   
   Not only do those tasks take away from the personalized relationship building that good marketing requires, manual work leads to more mistakes. And more mistakes take you right back to eroding the customer trust you are working so hard to build.
   
   
4. Value attribution. When a marketing campaign goes well, do you feel like you get the credit you deserve? Chances are the answer is no. As a marketer, it’s part of your job description to show the return on investment of the work you are doing, but you need to right tools to do that.
   
   Limited customer data, incomplete outcome measurements, and imperfect manual tracking of campaigns and outcomes can make it difficult to show the value of your work. It also makes it hard to identify what specific content marketing efforts created the most value. 

The Right Marketing Automation Platform Can Reduce Errors and Improve Results

It might seem overwhelming to tackle all these marketing challenges at once. Luckily, they all have the same solution: marketing automation tools. Marketing automation reduces variance and increases reliability, by improving the quality, accuracy, and precision of your work.

The right marketing automation software can save you money, too. And without the pressure of manual tracking and other repetitive, difficult tasks, marketers can get back to delivering results.

The key to successful marketing automation is to find one integrated platform that can do everything you need. If you are juggling multiple tools, you’re just creating a different version of the problem you are trying to solve.

With an integrated platform, you can do everything you need in one place. That includes creating email workflows, identifying anonymous visitors, publishing social media, and driving customers to a specific landing page or website. The right marketing automation platform can also easily track the results of your efforts.

Let's Talk Marketing Technology

Ready to learn more about marketing automation and anonymous visitor tracking software? Contact Pivot today. 

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