Where Marketing Automation Meets Inbound Marketing
Where Marketing Automation Meets Inbound Marketing: You-centric vs. User-centric
If inbound marketing is about offering value that is attractive to your audience, will employing automated communication defeat your efforts? The answer can have a big impact on the potential digital marketing offers for your product or service.
Marketing generally refers to promoting, but before the 1920s it meant shopping or going to market, oriented on the buyer and not the seller (1). Inbound marketing is a concept the Internet fostered where your audience can find you rather than be interrupted in their activities by annoying traditional marketing methods. Marketing automation is used to send messages, mainly via email, triggered by a marketing campaign or by activity on a behavior-tracking website.
“The name given to software platforms designed for marketing departments and organizations to automate repetitive tasks is Marketing Automation.(2) "
SRI’s Centibots, a team of 100 coordinated, mobile robots
Marketing automation arose to save the time of the marketing and sales team members. When inbound marketing meets marketing automation, the purpose of automation needs to shift to user-centric. Consideration is the cornerstone for building successful inbound marketing automation.
Our agency has recently embraced inbound marketing because it reflects our own process of doing deep research and understanding our clients first, so that we can help them achieve their goals. All clients need online marketing, but each one has a unique profile. We have to understand what differentiates each customer. Inbound marketing is about a relationship rather than a transaction.
How might user-centric automated marketing look?
Grouping users is more you-centric. Recognizing their needs as individuals is user-centric. Individuals all have less time and more input today. User-centric automated marketing lets users choose the channel they prefer for receiving messages and lets them choose the format they find most digestable. Do they have the option to receive updates via email, rss, text message? Can they choose daily or weekly digests? Those are automations that are considerate of the user's time.
Generic emails talking about your suite of services and products in a series of automated messages triggered by anyone completing a form on your site is more you-centric. An automated alert triggered by a price drop on a specific product a visitor has put in their basket or visited the page of is more user-oriented.
Say you sell kayaks. A series of messages that only develop the argument for purchasing your kayaks is more you-centric and transaction-oriented. Relating to this individual would be recognizing the desires behind buying a kayak. They are for sport, relaxation, they go on bodies of water, there are dangers and adventures associated with kayaking. Sending a series of messages incorporating the activity as a whole: kayaking spots in their area, safety tips, tips for taking cameras on the water, stories of customers using your kayaks in intriguing ways included with product information would be user-centric.
Marketing Automation has seen huge growth in use, but not necessarily in results. For more information about employing best practices and avoiding pitfalls, check out the information on the subject at inbound marketing software specialists, HubSpot : http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-automation-information/
Summary
- Inbound marketing is about a relationship rather than a transaction.
- When inbound marketing meets marketing automation, the purpose of automation needs to shift from you-centric to user-centric.
- When automating, ask: How does this serve your client?
Citations
1. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/marketing
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_automation