While it was never a fair or respectful label, it’s fair to say that these days it further from the truth than ever. Marketing has become dominated by data and technology. In fact some marketing teams now have pure mathematicians on board to help crunch all the data involved with modern marketing.
The whole ethos of in-bound marketing is to enable the prospect to consume your information when they want it, not when you want to communicate it. That means having content available for long periods of time to ensure that it can be consumed when the potential buyer is ready. In turn, that means mapping out the customer journey and playing out a personalised communication plan for every new individual on that journey when the time is right for them. Marketing automation software helps to reduce the burden of the workload involved in execution of these plans and helps to make something which could be very complex into something much simpler.
Further to the CRM and marketing automation technology we’ve known for a while, the range of tools to help marketers do their job is ever increasing, sprawling to encompass social media hubs, keyword generators, web site analytics, content creation and more. Marketo‘s LaunchPoint Technology Partner programme has over 400 application and service members. Each tool contributes to increased brand awareness and/or engagement, but in the process generates its own data, offering more statistics than anyone could ever care to interpret. But, to do marketing at all these days, these tools are critical.
To do marketing well, the best tools integrate with others to make life simpler. It’s not enough for the product to work well in itself. It needs to work well alongside the other tools that marketers are using to help simplify complex processes, consolidate reporting and attain that holy grail of a single customer view.
