Technology is listed as one of the 5 core competencies required of the successful modern marketer in an early-2013 study entitled Defining the Modern Marketer. And if we consider the accelerated pace at which we do … well … everything these days, it’s not surprising that we turn to technology to help us automate and manage our marketing programmes effectively.
So how are these successful modern marketers managing marketing technology? Let’s take a look, shall we?
Content management systems have been around for some time but presented limited functionality for the marketer. For the most part you still required some intervention from our propeller-head friends in the IT department to get things right and that generally meant lodging requests, waiting for your allotted time and lengthy explanations as to why you absolutely needed to change that button from blue to red, but only for certain website visitors … oh and then yes please, could you provide me with a report on which version was clicked on more often. How did that whole process work out for you? In my experience, more often than not, my requests got shoveled down the queue until the point where I became sufficiently demotivated to simply let sleeping dogs lie. (Note: I am not referring to my current position!)
The evolution of marketing software means that we have access to fully integrated systems that allow us, as marketers, to take responsibility for website and blog maintenance in an un-intimidating, non-technical way. This means that we are able to create new offers, landing pages, CTAs, blog posts and site pages on our own clock. And yes, if we feel like testing out that blue verses red button theory ourselves we can totally do that too as well as checking out the results in real-time.
Marketing software and technology also enables us to scale our social media participation and monitoring while at the same time reducing the amount of time required to execute this in disparate systems.
Most of us are aware that anywhere between 50 and 75% of our leads are nowhere near making a buying decision at the point of first conversion and thus need to be carefully nurtured to the point where they reach out to the sales team. Marketing software tools, such as HubSpot, allows you to determine the sales-readiness of leads based on lead scoring and intelligence and enroll them in certain workflows (series of emails and offers) in line with their previous behaviour, points of interest and stage in the buying cycle in order to move them closer to a point where they qualify as a sales-ready lead and the handover to sales can happen with confidence in lead quality.
Marketing technology that connects your CRM with your marketing analytics allows you to effectively quantify the results of your marketing efforts with data from marketing and sales flowing freely. This type of reporting allows marketers to plan more strategically for the future by focusing their efforts on sources that generate the best lead to customer conversion rate. The knock on effect of this is that you are able to set realistic goals and expectations based on historical performance of each of your channels, shorten the sales cycle by handing off highly qualified, sales-ready leads to the sales team as well as keeping costs per leads and customers down.
At the end of the day, marketing technology enables us to become smarter, data-driven marketers who are in control of our assets as well as having access to other systems that we may not necessarily ‘own’ but help us to do our jobs better which results in more effective marketing programmes and more money in the bank! #winning