Putting Marketing Automation to Work
Marketing automation is not about automating your marketing efforts. That sounds like a funny and perhaps incorrect thing to say, but it’s the truth. Small businesses don’t get involved with marketing automation simply to automate the process, they do it to deepen their understanding of current processes and make better decisions about business. Despite this, many small businesses view marketing automation as the be-all, end-all to understanding deeper data. Small companies often institute expensive marketing automation platforms only to find they never actively work with interpreting the data they receive – everything’s just on autopilot. While setting your marketing campaigns up and letting them fly with marketing automation can save time, businesses that do so are missing the point – the core value is in the information.
Marketing Automation – Who’s Watching the Data?
Rather than taking a set-it-and-forget-it attitude toward automated marketing campaigns, it’s important to have someone in your company interpreting the data you see in your dashboard. It’s great to have a product like the Lead Liaison Streamer on your desktop so you can see real-time data about visitors. However, Streamer is far less effective if you set it up on your desktop only to run around to meetings throughout the day. Making automation work can bring results into your company you never thought possible, but it’s important to have someone on your staff looking at the data as it comes in if it’s a habit you won’t keep. As the primary decision maker in your business, you already know data is power – now it’s time to have someone on your staff presenting the data to you so you can decide together how to move forward on your marketing campaigns.
Putting Marketing Automation to Work
The first step to making marketing automation work for your business is getting a dashboard set up that’s easy to read and functional across your business. The left hand should always know what the right is doing – visitor data should be ported across every area of your campaigns when you plan for the future. To accomplish this, you’ll need to work with a seasoned team who can install the dashboard for you and teach you how to use it. The training shouldn’t be too difficult, but does require a solid relationship with your marketing automation company. For this reason, it’s important to work with someone who will be happy to troubleshoot, stick around and give you the information to make you and your marketing people excel with your new dashboard. We’d love to help make marketing automation work for you! Talk to Lead Liaison today about putting marketing automation into practice.
