You've heard it before. On average, consumers are exposed to 3,000 to 5,000 marketing ads every day, whether these are online ads, marketing emails, TV commercials, and so on. Of these ads, chances are that most of them lack personalization and just add to the marketing and advertising noise experienced by most people.
Setting yourself apart from this noise is a crucial part of a successful marketing strategy and can be accomplished through personalization.
Now, stop and think of your current marketing strategy, specifically your digital marketing strategy. It's likely that this portion of your marketing strategy is reliant on email marketing, social media posting, and landing pages that aim to convert leads into clients. Can you now imagine the amount of work that would be involved in personalizing your entire marketing strategy while scaling it larger to touch more leads and potential clients?
Your best tool for both separating yourself from the mass amount of advertising and adding personal touches to your marketing is a marketing automation platform.
There is a misconception that automation is impersonal. However, that is simply not the case. Properly utilizing a powerful automation platform actually allows you to add a personal touch to all aspects of your marketing while reducing your daily workload and allowing for personalized messages to be automated.
To know exactly how a marketing automation platform can benefit your marketing strategy, you must first know what tools are available in the platform. If you choose an all-in-one platform, you have access to the tools needed to learn more about your leads and clients through web tracking, campaign reports, and personalized CRM profiles. By using a solution like SimplyCast, you have all your channels in one place, which allows the channels to work together and share information each channel learns based on how the client interacts with the messages.
Learn more about your audience
The first step in personalization is knowing how to personalize your messages, which means knowing your audience. Before making that first call to a lead, wouldn't it be helpful to know what pages they've viewed on your website, what their main interest is in your offering, or how many emails they signed up for and received? Knowing this information gives you a place to start the conversation without needing to ask these questions. In this way, automation prepares you to offer personalized information right away.
Identify high potential prospects
If you have a list of 1,000 potential prospects and you want to identify and reach out to the ones with the highest potential, how would you approach that? Calling each individual would be incredibly time-consuming and would result in a lot of wasted time on clients that aren't ready to buy.
In order to allocate one-on-one resources to high potential prospects, you need to know how engaged they are with you before picking up the phone. A marketing automation platform automatically tracks how engaged all clients are through a tagging and scoring system as well as tracking how many email opens, link clicks, and message interactions each contact has had with your campaigns. This allows you to identify high potential prospects at a glance and know exactly what they're interested in before you connect one-on-one.
Nurture prospects
For the prospects that haven't yet been qualified as "high potential," nurture them automatically with personalized information relevant to their interests. Having a personalized nurturing campaign shows prospects that you value their needs and interests and automating the process through a marketing automation platform saves you time and resources. Being able to nurture prospects in this way allows you to grow interested prospects into high potential ones thus increasing yields and conversions of personal touch strategies while optimizing resources.
Automatically qualify prospects
You can even automate the prospect qualification process with the right marketing automation platform. Through the tagging and scoring process, staff can be alerted when a specific client has reached a specific engagement threshold and is ready to be contacted one-on-one.
This same strategy can also be used earlier on in the sales cycle by moving prospects up in the level of communication. For example, you may want to provide all prospects with the same introductory information. After a prospect has interacted with this information and shown engagement, they can automatically be moved on to more personalized information specific to their needs. Once they engage with and show interest in this information, then they are automatically qualified and can be interacted with directly.
Automation and personalization are not mutually-exclusive. In fact, automation is a very valuable tool that can help you optimize your personalization and personal touches with prospects and clients at all stages of the sales cycle.
If you'd like to see how marketing automation can help you add a personal touch to your digital marketing, sign up for a 14-day free trial of SimplyCast's marketing automation platform, SimplyCast 360.
