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What do you think the future holds for marketing automation?
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5 Answers
Lindsey:
The future is bright for marketing automation in the coming year. Marketers are beginning to understand that automation is a powerful solution is combined with the right people, process and content . The ability to engage the buyer in a 1-1 dialogue via personalized dynamic content is giving marketers an advantage in demand generation and lead management.
In addition to enabling better buyer engagement, marketing automation is enabling marketing to deliver higher quality leads to sales. By first collaborating with sales to develop the lead qualification process then enabling the process via automation, alignment is occurring and their is an impact on bottom line revenue.
I beliebe 2011 will be a great year for automation and if used correctly and paired with proper process, organizations will see a great return on their automation investment.
As a side note, this will be one of the topics at Wednesday's Focus Roundtable on Marketing Automation - http://www.focus.com/events/marketing/focus-marketing-automation-roundtable-l...
Carlos Hidalgo
CEO
The Annuitas Group
@cahidalgo
Great question! Marketing automation, like the Web itself, must become more social, more mobile and more collaborative in 2011 and beyond. Integration with and leverage of social networks, mobile access and multiple collaboration tools and processes will all help to deliver more accurate, timely and complete information to marketing decision makers. What they DO with that information remains to be seen, but marketing automation tools are already evolving to provide it. In addition, marketing automation tools will increasingly gain greater reporting and analytics features, to help those decision makers to decide if they're taking full advantage of all of that useful information!
The future holds MORE in 2011. Greater targeting and focus on customers while understanding their true value is how you use marketing to effectively drive leads and ultimately sales. Social media will flourish in 2011 and brands that can understand the value and the opportunities will be successful. However, the true opportunity is to use marketing automation tools to your advantage then close with a personal touch.
Mark Burgess
www.bluefocusmarketing.com
Twitter | @mnburgess
"Automation" will be in 2011 as the word "guru" was in 2010. Marketing or sales or communications cannot ever be effective when automated. Not in todays world.
People are looking for personal interactions, meaningful relationships with people and brands, you just can't automate that.
Remember that people trust their friends more than brands, a lot more so broadcasting is out and personal recommendations are in. "Engage or die" as Brian Solis says. Engagement cannot be done through automated messages.
People hate Auto DM's spam accounts and people that just tweet quotes all day long, we hate spam SMS messages and emails.
At least with social media engaging with a large audience is finally scalable and efficient.
I hope there is no marketing automation. It shows a lack of focus and respect for the customer.
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