Sprinklers and watering cans

Sprinklers and watering cans

14 June 2018

CRM
Big Data
Intelligent Marketing Automation

Traditional marketing's primary intent was to increase awareness. Think of it as a lawn sprinkler: you distributed your message as widely as possible, and hoped that something came up. You didn't mind if part of your message landed on your deck instead of your lawn, as long as the grass grew. And you were OK with the fact that you were wasting resources on moss and weeds, or even your neighbor's hedge, because your lawn was green enough.

Times have changed. Marketing still serves to raise awareness, but also increasingly focuses on segmentation and nurturing. Think of the watering can you use for indoor plants: you choose which plants you'd like to grow, and carefully concentrate your resources on those goals. You provide exactly what they need, when they need it. You monitor their growth and don't give them too much or too little. 

Nowadays, with the right strategy, the right tools and the right drive, we can utilize the resources invested in marketing much more efficiently. We can better monitor our leads' growth process and easily adapt our tactics if needed.

Taking the lead

That's the theory. But how do we reach those leads in practice? What do we need for that? How do we recognize the most interesting leads? How do we keep track of which leads require what and when, and how do we streamline our entire process to optimize the return on our resources? 

These aren't questions you can answer just like that. Generally, purchasing a single license and then just muddling along isn't enough. A modern marketing environment centers on data. And in order to capture that data, process it, store, consult, use and enrich it, an integrated approach is needed. That means creating an ecosystem to facilitate the use of CRM system data in your marketing tooling, and automatically enriching that data with the knowledge resulting from your campaigns. Then, the next step is to add intelligence and analyze your results in clear reports, using those insights to adjust current campaigns and make subsequent ones more efficient.

The forest and the trees

Sounds complicated, but it needn't be. Most enterprises aren't starting from scratch. A few additions and better integration of your current systems will get you far. Plus the right support and training. After all, to really shift your marketing into a higher gear, your marketing team must be familiar with the subtleties and possibilities of their environment.

How intelligent is your marketing?

Realdolmen helps enterprises achieve perfectly integrated marketing environments for improved insight, higher ROI and greater impact. 

Learn more about Intelligent Marketing Automation here or contact our specialists, free of obligation:

More blog posts in this series

This blog post is part of a series about Data Driven Marketing Automation. Read the other posts here: