Single customer view creating double vision for CMO’s

Marketing automation can help you get a deeper understanding of your customers, so you can communicate with them more effectively.

Automation presents a dilemma for many marketing leaders. The software promises exciting capabilities that can help make marketing not only more targeted and sophisticated, but simpler, too. All too often, though, this doesn’t seem to materialise. Instead of making things easier, marketing automation actually seems to create more work – yet the complex systems all this effort is going into yield only modest improvements.

So it’s not surprising that last year, a report from B2Bmarketing.net found that 61% of marketers agreed that implementing automation was “very difficult” or “difficult”.

However, with an awareness of how to get the best out the software, marketing automation can deliver real returns, by enabling you to work in a more streamlined, efficient way.

Reaching the single customer view – without getting double vision

Customers have a single view of your company, whether they’re interacting with you on social media, buying something, or receiving your emails. It doesn’t matter to them that they may be dealing with different parts of your organisation – they’re all part of how they perceive your company, and what happens during one interaction will affect what they do at other times.

The ideal position for a business to be in is to know about the whole variety of all a customers’ interactions with you. This can get tricky very quickly: for CMOs, striving to reach a single customer view can all too often result in double vision.

But marketing automation can help you make this goal a reality, by integrating different parts of the buying cycle into a whole. So the data you have in your CRM can be linked with information on how leads have responded to your emails, and which content they have downloaded from the site.

This means that instead of having fragmented data on leads and customers in different parts of your business, you can harness the power of big data to get a holistic single view. What’s more, automation helps you track how people interact with you, so your profile of a customer can be constantly updated, as you learn more about them.

The richer data that automation enables helps with a whole range of areas. It makes it easier to segment your leads into different types, and plan workflows through the buying cycle for different personas – determining how you will interact with people, depending on the results of their previous interactions.

Automation can also help with aligning your sales and marketing efforts, because it makes it easier to define leads at different stages of the cycle, and to determine and measure how people fit into this scheme. In turn, this helps to measure what is working and what isn’t, and to make adjustments to what you are doing in the light of what you find. And the more you know about how people travel through the buying cycle, the better you will be able to refine your buyer personas and to create the content that will generate high quality leads.

Joining up the dots

Delivering effective marketing can be daunting when you’re interacting with leads and customers in so many different ways. Marketing automation can help you join up the dots of what your organisation is doing, making it easier to bring together data from different places to get to know your customers better.

With a deeper understanding of what’s going on, you can tailor the way you communicate with customers more effectively, delivering a personalised experience that will get you ahead of the game.

Takeaways:

• Many marketers struggle to get the best out of automation software.
• Customers have a single view of your company, whether they’re interacting with you on social media, buying something, or receiving your emails.
• The ideal position for a business is to be in a similar position with your customers, with knowledge about all their interactions with you.
• Marketing automation can help you make this goal a reality, by integrating different parts of the buying cycle.
• With a deeper understanding of how people interact with you, you can communicate with them more effectively.

Find out how automation can help you develop that elusive single customer view. Download: The Automated CMO’s Guide to Marketing Automation