Today, most of the businesses engage with the prospects via the web and social media. With the great reach of the Internet and social media, it's now a lot easier to get the message to a large audience very quickly and more frequently. Also, with the prospect data and interactions going into the thousands and even millions, marketers can be overwhelmed and confused by the size and complexity of the data they receive. Even the best of marketers might find it almost impossible to run their campaigns without the right automation tools for the planning, execution, and measurement of their marketing strategy. Some of the challenges in the world of modern day marketing are shown in following figure:
The commonly-faced marketing challenges
The Internet has made communication a lot easier, but it has also made marketers more prone to errors and renders their marketing efforts ineffective and irrelevant. Many a times, marketing campaigns actually confuse and annoy the prospects with irrelevant and conflicting messages that eventually end up as noise to the overexposed customer.
Marketing involves lead acquisition, lead nurturing, lead scoring, customer segmentation, lead transfer, customer data integration, and closed loop marketing analysis, which are tasks involving a high volume of data that are time-intensive to process. Moreover, at any point of time, most companies are concurrently running various types of campaigns. This can make marketers inefficient and prone to error, turning the marketing campaign to an ineffective exercise.
The golden list of the prospects doesn't work; it's difficult to sell to the prospects just with their name and contact details. To get the most out of a marketing campaign, you need to consider all the information you have about the customer. This is so complex that most companies skip this. Consequently, they are deprived of essential information about the people on the marketing list, which makes their marketing ineffective and gives little returns for their campaign expenditure.
The best planned campaign will suffer if the execution is haphazard and not methodical. Campaigns generally involve a target list upon which the marketing team performs various predefined actions in a systematic manner, such as sending e-mails, making follow-up calls, and tracking the status of each list member. Complexity reaches its peak when the responses are to be tracked and reported, which involves tracking individual responses from various marketing channels. Manual execution of campaigns has a high probability of errors with too much reliance on the skills and efficiency of the marketing team. This increases the risk by making marketing affairs more people-centric and less process-centric.
The CEOs want the worth of every marketing dollar with proof of results for the marketing investments, and the CMOs need to make effective marketing decisions as every marketing effort needs to be accountable and all the costs and Return on Investment (ROI) measured. Let's consider an example where the company decides to advertise its product on social sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The cost involved in advertising is different for each of the platforms. When calculating the ROI for each of the platforms, it might be difficult to manually determine the advertising effectiveness on a social site without a proper automation or analytic tool. In scenarios where multiple concurrent campaigns running, it becomes extremely difficult to measure the effectiveness of the individual campaigns. At times, marketers even fail to identify what went wrong and what went right, and they fail to optimize or fine tune their future campaigns.
Marketing and sales are two functions that need to work extremely closely with each other to generate revenue in a company. Most of the time, marketing teams generate and nurture leads by the method of scoring until a lead reaches a probability. Once they have reached the threshold, they are simply passed on to the sales team. In this model, the sales team misses most of the key information about the customer and the previous interactions with the marketing team, and thus the sales team fails to get a complete customer perspective before they start to sell.
Incorrect data in your marketing database can do anything from wasting money to annoying the customers and can possibly lead to losing the customers. In fact, the more highly targeted and selective your marketing campaign becomes, the more important it is to use clean data. Marketers might fail to clean and remove any redundant or incorrect entries, which can result in an increase in the overall marketing costs and provide incorrect marketing performance results.
In the previous sections, we have seen various marketing challenges faced by today's marketers. We will now see how CRM's marketing automation feature can help us overcome these challenges and significantly improve the efficiency of our marketing programs.