My Personal Learning from Marketing Automation
I believe strongly that marketing automation and personalization have had positive impact to the whole operative marketing work at Ruukki. Marketing has become more customer oriented, systematic and analytic and sales demand increasingly marketing campaigns that were earlier considered as questionable.
Ruukki started marketing automation one year ago and was competing to win the international Eloqua Markie Award 2013. The top three candidates were PayPal, Ruukki and Philips Eletronics. Unfortunately, Philips won this prize, but it showcases well the good start of the marketing automation at Ruukki.
I prefer combining these two topics, personalization and marketing automation as these tactics strengthen each others when used together.
Marketing challenges
The challenge of Ruukki’s marketing has long been that sales is organized through products and the whole company operations are pretty much product focused. This is probably good from the operations perspective, but it builds challenges for the marketing how to target the right audiences with the right media mix.
I addition there has always been a lot of discussion with sales, if certain marketing tactic is actually bringing the right leads and any sales. Nobody has had the exact answer based on the facts one year ago.
7 top learning from marketing automation and personalization
- Marketing is forced to change thinking from products to customers.
- Customer understanding needs to go into deeper level than without marketing automation. For example, you need to know customer click through paths at www pages.
- You cannot automate, without the right content and good content plans.
- You need to be systematic in order to be able to automate. This means systematic way of working: lead qualifications, customer nurturing processes, content creation.
- If you really want to get results, you need to raise marketing analytics and CRM competences. For example, the role of CRM data base will become inevitably more important
- You need to integrated all other systems related to automation such as CRM and customer project management tools.
- Marketing mix will get better optimized after each execution as you start to understand the effectiveness of your marketing actions.
Marketing automation and personalization together will trigger a positive chain reaction in the marketing operations. You need to constantly think about what kind of content customers need in each phase of the purchasing in what format.
You get increasingly engaged with the customers and challenge your own doings in a daily basis.
Here are few slides from my presentation at “Digi & Mobile Summit 2014” Helsinki. Summary slides in English and full presentation in Finnish.
See Slideshare: