New Marketing Automation Hits the Mark
CHANGING CHANNELS
While marketing automation is most prominent in the digital sphere, it is also becoming more commonplace in other channels. According to Rayport, brands spend the most in terms of dollars on broadcast and cable channels—but this could change in the next 12 to 24 months, with digital (Web and mobile) investments surpassing broadcast and cable. Regardless, with those two channels still accounting for the majority of marketing dollars spent, businesses are developing ways to apply marketing automation techniques from the digital realm to broadcast and cable.
According to Rayport, there are two major patterns that make automated advertising in broadcast and cable media possible. First, an increasing number of households are "cord-cutters"—that is, they simply purchase bandwidth from cable and telecom operators and then consume video content from streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. Because these customers are consuming televised and video content on entirely digital platforms delivered through digital channels, automated video advertising is especially lucrative. Second, an increasing number of households that elect to purchase traditional channel bundles from big cable operators have a fiber-to-the-home configuration connected to a digital converter box—a fully digital system that delivers video streams, and thus can enable automated advertising.
Some businesses are also looking to bring digital intelligence into the offline world—a move exemplified by Amazon’s announcement that it will expand into retail bookstores. "You can pretty much guarantee that those Amazon stores are going to have a huge amount of digital marketing intelligence built in," Rayport says. "There's no reason why Amazon would bother to build bookstores without putting a bunch of its ultra-low-cost displays all over those stores."
Smith agrees: "I'm pretty sure that they will have a data-led and technology-led approach to those physical stores," he says. "The same way that when you go to their online store, you get those recommendations, you can imagine their brick-and-mortar stores will have a similar capability, where you get recommendations all around the store, to guide you to things you might be interested in." According to Rayport, the use of mobile devices to personalize and manage customers’ in-store experience is where retail is headed.
MAKING A CONNECTION
With customer data being essential to any marketing campaign in the digital age, and mobile devices holding a wealth of information about customers, harnessing the data in CRM systems can prove lucrative for businesses. "As marketing and CRM come together, we are seeing a pretty strong trend in being much more data-driven and personalized in engagement with prospects," says Peter Chase, founder and executive vice president at Scribe Software. Chase believes that companies with successful marketing automation strategies have found ways to "bring all the right and relevant information together into their core marketing automation systems," while simultaneously creating a connection to their CRM systems.
Rayport agrees. "The next big thing to happen is linking all of the rich data and insights that are resident in CRM systems, which are filled with first-party data—the most valuable and indicative consumer data that's out there—to the analytics that are part of the targeting and the message customization that's going on through programmatic channels," he says. "The companies that do that sooner rather than later are the ones that are going to have a real advantage in the efficacy of how they spend marketing dollars."
Establishing a link between marketing automation and CRM systems can be difficult, however. Chase notes that many companies may utilize multiple marketing automation tools, and bringing them together "with one version of the truth" can be challenging. Furthermore, technological expertise is called for to connect marketing automation and CRM systems as they are typically siloed channels. According to Chase, many companies have not yet "matured to that level" of integration.
Nevertheless, many big-name vendors in the CRM market have taken steps to improve the connection. "CRM and marketing automation are really starting to blend together and become one and the same," says Daniel Lynton, founder and CEO of LyntonWeb. "You really see the major players having their own marketing automation product to try to bridge the gap between CRM and marketing automation." The effort is worth it, Chase says: "The best companies are looking at their systems and saying, first of all, I have all of this great information in my CRM system that I can use to be more personalized with my prospect, I can synchronize some of that out to my marketing automation system so that I can use it to both segment and personalize communication."