Customers.com Technologies

Want Marketing Success? Examine Your Internal Processes Before You Invest in Technology!

By Patricia Seybold

Today’s marketers need to use social media, email, mobile, and web technologies to effectively target and personalize their messages. Ideally, all of these targeted and personalized “campaigns” are managed by an integrated suite of marketing automation tools.

Marketing automation is one of the fastest growing niches in the technology landscape for good reason: it enables marketers to personalize their nurturing of leads and get higher conversion rates. Personalized marketing results in higher conversion rates for self-service sales, better quality leads to sales people for assisted sales, and, of course, higher revenues. It also helps marketers reduce creative production costs, cut short poorly performing campaigns, and improve predictability of revenue.

However, too many marketers view the technology as the panacea, so they often select and start to implement technologies, such as marketing automation systems, before addressing their own organizational issues and business process requirements.

How to Keep Customers and Prospects Engaged?

By Patricia Seybold

Provide Fresh Insights and Timely, Compelling Content

We’re all trying to grab the scarce attention of our target audiences—prospects and customers. One way we do this is by providing authoritative content in and around our expertise and our brands. We all disseminate our ideas, how to’s, and insights in a variety of ways. We use social media outreach, targeted opt-in emails, online discussions, informative e-newsletters, ever-changing content on our Web sites, and we link to videos, images, and audio that people will find appealing and seductive.

Coming up with new fresh content to showcase every day or every week can be a daunting task. But the metabolism of the Web and the rhythm of social media is greedy. It’s hard to keep up—both as a consumer of information and as a disseminator of information. As a brand owner, you want to be top of mind and easy to find when the customer’s need or mood strikes. That means that you need to be on their radar.

That’s the rub. It’s virtually impossible for any organization—even a professional publishing organization, much less a normal organization that isn’t in the publishing business—to continuously create and disseminate insightful, useful and captivating content on the topics of interest to our audiences.