Jeff Bullas 15 REASONS YOU SHOULD BE USING DIGITAL MARKETING AUTOMATION Learn how to use technology to scale and measure your tactics and campaigns, to beat your competitors, understand your customers and increase sales. INTRODUCTION In the almost forgotten era of the 1950’s “Mad Men” of Madison Avenue, the art of marketing was enhanced and augmented by the inspiration of a few cocktails and long lunches. It was all about the dark art of advertising, and the focus was intuition- fuelled creativity. Marketing and advertising data analysis was a fluffy science. Impressions, newspaper distribution and television viewer counts were the main metrics. Data scientists were yet to be seen. Computers and the Internet were still the realm of science fiction. The only visible technology available to the advertising gurus was the radio, and the television was only just emerging. In the digital and social web we now inhabit, the creative ideas masters are now being augmented by technology. It’s a new world that is both exciting and daunting. Marketing is now an “Art and a Science.” But mastering the science of marketing is becoming a necessity for the modern marketer, and businesses want to disrupt rather than get disrupted. It is innovate or die. 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation But digital marketing is both a curse and a blessing. It’s complex, diverse, and new. But it can provide scale and measurement for the marketer that can reveal a return on investment that in the past was almost impossible to gauge. So, there are many challenges in mastering it and using technology that promises a competitive edge and global reach in a 24/7 world. It is the rise of the robots that remove the mundane and provide insights on competitors and customers. It can show what works and what doesn’t in real time. WHAT IS DIGITAL MARKETING AUTOMATION? As technology emerged with the rise of the mainframe and then the personal computer, the software and applications were the domain of the accountant and business systems. Payroll, HR and even the warehouse got software for managing the money and the factory. But technology for the marketing department in the past was non- existent. The sales teams sometimes had “Customer Relationship Management” systems (CRM) but marketing had no voice at the technology table. 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation But that is changing. The splintered media world we now inhabit requires technology to scale and to measure. Internal teams are now doing social media and content marketing and the digital advertising. In the past, the advertising was often a function performed by the advertising agency. The tech and the tools are becoming mandatory for the modern organization and digital-savvy entrepreneur. Digital marketing automation can take many forms. Email, social media and paid digital advertising are just a few of the sub-species. The range of technologies and features are large and often confusing. So, what are the main reasons for implementing, using and optimizing a digital marketing automation system for your business? 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Market ing Automation 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation THE TOP REASONS YOU SHOULD IMPLEMENT DIGITAL MARKETING AUTOMATION IN YOUR BUSINESS The marketer of the past was more of a Salvador Dali than an Einstein. It was the domain of the artist. That has changed. Decisions that were made intuitively are now being made in the cold light of the real facts. This is the data. The new breed of publishers is not guessing about what to do next with their marketing and content distribution but making decisions revealed by software and big data. 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation 1 SCALE YOUR MARKETING 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation Sit back and think about how many marketing channels, advertising channels and social media networks the online world demands us to play on. The digital world screams at us. ▶ Social media marketing ▶ Email marketing ▶ Content marketing ▶ Affiliate marketing ▶ Search engine marketing ▶ Google AdWords ▶ Facebook paid advertising Then you have hundreds of social media networks to consider and thousands of tools and apps! Then you are told that you should also be considering live streaming (Blab, Meerkat and Periscope are the new kids on the block). Then there are webinars both live and replays. Oh...I forgot to mention Snapchat as another possible marketing media. Now that is just the earned and owned media. You then need to understand the complexities of the pay to play options of Facebook, Twitter, AdWords and re-targeting. The past paradigm of the analogue media world by comparison seemed plain simple. 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation So...the complexity and splintering of the new media demands some new thinking and some new technology. Before you just hired more hands to help... Now you also buy more technology... Simple automation. I leapt onto Twitter in 2008. It was fun, short and I could watch the world wake up on the other side of the planet as my day was finishing. Tweeting was manual. You had to be there to push the buttons. As I scaled the blog, it became apparent that some simple automation was needed. The first tools were raw and not sophisticated. The social media purists started to scream at me from a tweetable distance. Their rants went a bit like this: My self-esteem was tested. But just one tool that saved me 100+ hours a month is not to be sneezed at. I pressed on as stones continued to be “You are evil and a bot..” “Automation is a moral travesty on the social web...” “Facebook and Twitter are for humans...” “How dare you get a machine to tweet.....” 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation thrown from the side-lines. Social media management tools such as Tweetdeck provided simple automation across multiple social networks as they emerged and the tools grew up with the rest of us. It started to get more complex. But if you want to get serious then there are more complex digital marketing automation tools that allow you to scale your efforts without losing control. They can... ▶ Segment your leads ▶ Accept online payments ▶ Run automated email sequences months into the future ▶ Measure results ▶ Perform optimizing measurements that allow A/B split testing ▶ Manage affiliate campaigns ▶ Allow teams to collaborate The list goes on. These tools can start from as little as $200 per month or even less. The access to the technology is not just for the big end of town, but small to medium organisations can now afford and use these technologies. The challenge for many is that the old habits die hard. But remember... robots can run 24/7, never get tired and don’t complain. And.... they don’t make as many mistakes. 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation 2 IMPROVE YOUR CUSTOMER TARGETING 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation Most businesses have multiple products that appeal to different markets. Segmenting was often the role of the salesperson. Identify the market. Pick up the phone book and start calling. Segmentation in a digital world can be done using Facebook ads that deliver the targeted banner or video ad to the demographic that is granular and measurable. Once those leads are captured, they can be put into the marketing automation database for nurturing with the right type of content marketing and then that phone call can happen. 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation 3 MEASURE YOUR RESULTS 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation Mass marketing in the past was and still is a lot of spray and hope. The clever creative team at the ad agency put together a cool looking concept. The collateral was shot, printed and recorded. Then the print, television and radio campaign began. After the campaign had been run, the blunt metrics of views and impressions were trotted out — it didn’t seem to be working. The pricey process then started all over again. It could take weeks and months to pivot. But it’s getting harder for the advertising agency to hide. Digital campaigns can be measured in real time. Email conversions can be monitored as they happen. YouTube views are there for all to see. Now it’s target and measure, rinse and repeat. It is often done in minutes or hours. 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation 4 OPTIMIZE YOUR TACTICS & CAMPAIGNS 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation Launching your campaign is one thing, but results are another. The new digital marketing platforms and technologies allow you to see what works in real time. Tools like SumoMe also provide this capability Here is an example of 2 different e-book landing pages that I use to build my email list. 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation This is the other one below. Which do you think converts better? The answer is the simple landing page below. But it’s marginal at just over 5% improvement over the better-looking design. Don’t be tempted to let your web designers tell you what will work best. 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation Steve Jobs was famous for many quotes but this one resonates on this topic. “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works” Real- time data can tell what works. So no longer is it waiting weeks to measure what works and what doesn’t. It’s A/B split testing in real time! 15 Reasons You Should Be Using Digital Marketing Automation 5 UNDERSTAND YOUR PROSPECTS & CUSTOMERS BETTER