Many companies know the term “marketing automation”. But what, exactly, is it? 

In short, marketing automation is this: the digital tools that make marketing simpler and more effective. 

At a broader level, marketing automation refers to the software that makes every part of a marketing campaign – such as emails, social media, blog posts, web pages and more –easier, more effective and less time-consuming to produce. In other words, marketing automation software lets companies easily create strategic, creative campaigns that get real results. 

The role of customer centricity 

In business today, customer expectations are higher than ever. Buyers expect consistent, one-on-one cross-channel journeys and a connected, cohesive customer experience. One of the main purposes of marketing automation is to help companies get this right with every customer, every time. In other words, by delivering the right content, at the right time, to the right people. 

Does your company need marketing automation? 

Industry leaders in nearly every vertical use marketing automation to help drive their businesses forward, connect with their customers, and boost brand loyalty. But does every business need it? Here are some of the benefits:  

• Improved productivity. Marketing automation means your marketing team no longer needs to perform repetitive, mundane tasks. Instead, they can spend more of their time coming up with strategies to move your business forward creatively. 
• Personalisation. At the click of a button, you can create a tailored and unique experience for every customer, whether you speak to hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of people. With automatic data ingestion from every area of your business, you can enable comprehensive insights into each customer automatically, and speak clearly to their specific wants and needs. 
• Simplified multi-channel management. Marketing automation helps you keep track of every campaign and every marketing channel from one single hub. 
• A consistent experience. Marketing automation helps unify all your marketing campaigns, so you can ensure that every customer receives a consistent, on-brand experience.  
• Better ROI. By targeting customers more effectively, your marketing spend has the potential to yield greater results for every rand spent. 

Should you give marketing automation a try? 

Here’s a quick set of questions to answer about your business.  

• Can you take a list of customers and easily assess their fit and likelihood to buy? 
• Can you identify, track and engage individual buyers online? 
• Are you able to comb through sales leads based on interest and engagement? 
• Can you measure the specific revenue contribution of every marketing campaign you run?

If the answer to any of these questions is no – or you find your marketing teams spending excess time getting the answers to these questions – marketing automation could be the answer you’re looking for. 

Want to find out more? Chat to us about Dynamics 365 Marketing. Packed with tons of new features and capabilities, it’s the leading tool for driving effective, streamlined marketing campaigns in any industry. 

8 key benefits of marketing automation 

In a nutshell, marketing automation refers to all the digital tools that help marketers reach customers more efficiently, effectively and scalably. But what are the real differences between business that use marketing automation and those that don’t? We broke it down.

1. Lower staff costs

Marketing automation means fewer people can effectively do the work of more. How? By helping marketers to be more efficient. The reason: with marketing automation software, almost no time is spent on repetitive “busy work” such as manually creating emails or responding to certain triggers. Imagine a world in which one employee has the same output and effectiveness as a team of 25.

2. Faster, more effective targeting across multiple channels

One of the most powerful benefits that marketing automation offers marketers is the ability to reach customers in a personalised way – both online and offline – at scale.

Whether via phone, text, push notification, email and more, marketing automation makes it easy to deliver targeted messages to your customers at the right time, with zero hassle.

Without marketing automation, running targeted, multi-channel campaigns at scale is almost impossible.

3. Continual A/B campaign testing

There’s only so much time in a day. That’s why, traditionally, marketers test assets such as emails and landing pages only a handful of times before deploying them – and then leave it at that.

Marketing automation tools change everything. Suddenly, you can easily run ongoing A/B tests. That means constant feedback on performance and the ability to constantly iterate, change, and tweak, for optimal performance.

4. Accurate reporting end to end

When using fragmented tools and platforms, reporting on marketing campaigns’ effectiveness can be time consuming and error-prone.

With marketing automation software, everything is simplified – summarised in a single place, no matter the channel. Suddenly, insights are available at a snap of the fingers.

Better yet, marketing automation platforms provide a bird’s-eye view of the entire marketing process.  That helps reveal areas of drop off and complication easily, so you can fix problem spots quickly.

5. Intelligent segmentation and a 360-degree view

Do you know who your customers are? Do you fully understand their wants, needs and desires?

The best marketing automation tools use clever analytics and AI to break down your customers more granularly than would ever be possible otherwise. No matter how many customers you have, you can understand each of them individually, to provide them with the most effective, tailored messaging possible.

6. Better data management

When your business has thousands or tens of thousands of leads, keeping track of engagements can be a daunting task. Marketing automation simplifies and streamlines the process, so that no interaction data is ever wasted, lost, or unaccounted for.

7. Scalable processes and a platform for growth

As your company expands, your marketing activities need to keep pace. Manual processes are difficult to scale. But automated processes scale instantly to fit as many customers and leads as they need to.

8. Better lead nurturing

Sales take time and leads need nurturing. With marketing automation software, you can track campaigns’ effectiveness and respond to your prospective customers’ needs effectively at every stage of the buying journey.

In short, marketing automation makes marketing more effective, more reactive, more proactive, more scalable and more personalised. It frees up marketers’ time, so they can focus more on creative, ambitious ways of moving business forward. Finally, it primes companies for growth, as scaling is instant and automatic. No lags and no delays.

All this and more is possible with Dynamics 365 Marketing. Want to learn more?
Chat to us today to learn how to put these new features to work in your business. 

The CRM Team and Simple join forces!

Empowering marketing, to deliver a brilliant customer experience

London and South Africa, March 04, 2021: The CRM Team, expert implementers of world-leading customer engagement technology, and Simple MRM Ltd, enablers of result-driven marketing and customer experience, announce a favourable partnership.

The alliance is a natural fit between two Microsoft partners focused on transforming the customer experience through technology. Properly coordinated sales and marketing improves engagement and advocacy with a brand, ultimately increasing the lifetime value of the customer.

The CRM Team brings together tons of customer data with AI in Microsoft Dynamics 365, to create a single customer record, providing sales, marketing and service teams with unique insights to take action, automate repetitive processes and engage customers like never before. As experts in project and change management, the team deliver fastest time to value for customers investing in Microsoft technologies.

Simple empowers teams further as the command centre for managing marketing resources, delegating jobs at pace to build campaigns that wow customers, with content that’s brand compliant, consistent and approved by business leaders. This governed material is readily available to the wider team to strengthen all customer engagements, increase productivity and unleash more effective marketing.  

“Our partnership with Simple is designed with our customers’ marketing teams in mind. We consistently heard of specific challenges that marketing teams face, and these were only made worse during the pandemic. The solution from Simple helps us address these challenges. And the insight, expertise and engagement model provided by Nick and his team will ensure that we can instantly transform how marketing teams collaborate, innovate and adapt.”

Paul Slade, CEO- The CRM Team

Simple is your command centre for managing marketing resources, budgets, assets, campaigns and customer experiences. As a single central tool for directing marketing operations, Simple lets you focus on creating brilliant marketing and customer experiences.

“Simple is built on Microsoft to empower all things marketing, but the enterprise solution has wide-reaching benefits across all departments, giving stakeholder visibility and enabling marketing, sales and service teams alike. The CRM Team are the perfect partner to support customers in delivering their targeted business outcomes through leveraging technology, to jointly transform business operations.” 

Aden Forrest, CEO – Simple MRM Ltd

Digital Transformation – Everything’s Changing

When people get more freaked out about being separated from their phone than their cash you know a paradigm shift has occurred.

Here’s the rub: like Yellow Cabs, your company may be late in embracing digital transformation – but your customer’s aren’t. They’ve already digital and they’re looking for businesses who understand how they operate and who talk their language.

Here’s another example: My business partner recently took his wife away for a long weekend. He went all out. Do you know where he stayed? In an AirBnB. He booked his beautiful, luxurious getaway through an app on his phone. The Marriott or Hilton didn’t get a look in.

Microsoft’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, who’s carried out his own digital transformation, says this:

Engaging your customers… empowering your employees… optimizing your operations… reinventing your business models – this is nothing new. Every great business leader in history has been on top of these. The difference nowadays is that the pace of technological advance is so great that if you don’t keep up you can quickly become a dinosaur – and you won’t even know it until it’s too late. Save & Exit

“Organizations must embrace a digital culture now or be embarrassed by it later.”

How is your industry doing in the realm of digital transformation? Could your industry be the next one to be disrupted by a tech-savvy start-up?

Last year, Accenture Interactive commissioned a Forrester survey of 396 organisations (minimum 1000 employees or more). They found:

• Only 5% of organisations feel they have mastered digital to the point of differentiation from their competitors.
• 58% now look to digital to help them sell profitability.
• 63% of them plan to improve their online customer experience’ this year.
• 88% of them use third-party providers for at least one component of their digital transformation.

Taken from ‘Digital Transformation in the Age of the Customer’

So. You’re aware of the threat/opportunity. What should you do?

The first thing you need to do is take Braden Kelly’s advice:

“You must look at your business and your industry in the same way that a digital native startup will if they seek to attack you and steal your market.”

Put yourself in the shoes of your customer. What aspect of their interaction with you feels old fashioned or clumsy? What are better ways of doing this? If you were a start-up and looking at things from a fresh perspective, what would you do to disrupt the industry?

For the Huffington Post, an online newspaper founded in 2005, that meant using the web, rather than print, to take on the big newspapers of the day. It sounds straight-forward, but HuffPost has also embraced marketing automation technology and has a highly-developed social media strategy.

But in doing so, it’s been successful. In 2011 it was acquired by AOL for $315m. In March 2016, the British national newspaper The Independent followed it’s lead and also became an online-only newspaper – halting its print run, that at its peak, had a daily production of 97,000 newspapers. The newspaper industry is in a fast-paced digital transformation.

A look at what’s possible

You might be saying ‘this is great, but I don’t actually know what is possible in my industry?’ This is understandable, but in the digital age, it’s become the job of every business leader to be familiar with the latest technology trends. It might give you just the advantage you need over your competitors.

Have a look at what is trending currently:

• Machine Learning – Get supercomputers to work for you. Imagine taking the data you’re collecting, analysing it and automatically adjusting your business processes in response to the results. The more data the system is fed, the better its predictions become. For example, in the insurance industry machine learning is helping companies better predict which offers certain customers will respond to. As the customer data is fed into the call centre program the salesperson will be prompted with certain deals. If the deal is taken, the system learns that deal is a good fit for that customer. If not, it adjusts it algorithm and tries a different deal next time, evolving with every iteration.

• The Internet of Things (IoT) – Imagine the benefit you’d obtain by connecting the assets you own to the cloud. Each vehicle or piece of machinery you own can have its own IP address. You can monitor and make interventions in real time, from anywhere in the world. For example, machines can generate their own service tickets so that repairs happens before things go wrong. Weather data can be combined with automated irrigation machinery so that only the crops that need watering actually receive it. The options are endless.

• Bots – You may already have interacted with these without realizing it. These are pieces of software designed to run automated tasks (scripts) for you over the internet. Typically, they are designed to be as conversational as possible. For instance, there is a medical bot that you can type in your symptoms and it will suggest relevant medical websites to go to. Facebook already has 11,000 bots ready to launch with its Messenger service. Siri, Cortana and Google Now are very advanced bots hosted on your cell phone, tablet or computer. The popular company communication app, Slack, has been using bots for a while. And Microsoft is preparing to launch bots in conjunction with Skype, and Office 365

• Integrated Business Applications – Most companies already use Microsoft Office 365 to optimize employee productivity, but Microsoft’s announcement of Dynamics 365, means that businesses will be able to give their employees continual access to the software they need, wherever they are, from any device. Cloud applications have done away with the need to dial into company servers, and with Dynamics 365 built on the same data model as Office 365, multiple sets of customer data will be a thing of the past.

Beginning the Digital Transformation Journey

Of course, you don’t even need to use these technologies for your company to begin the journey of digital transformation. You need to see a new way of operating and adopt the technology that helps you do that. Technology is simply the tool that you use.

Let’s talk

Whatever your industry, here at The CRM Team we are helping many companies take their first step (or next step) along the digital transformation journey. Whether it’s as simple taking your sales team off Excel, or more complex projects, such bringing consistency with the way you engage with your customer over the four customer touch points, we can help. And of course, we’re also geared up to help you use some of the trending tech such as IoT, Machine Learning, Integrated business apps, bots etc.

What opportunity will digital transformation create for your business?

What risks does it pose?

We’d love to assist you to take your next step. And in a digital world, it doesn’t matter where you are based. Why not arrange a conversation about it today?

Microsoft | LinkedIn – Sleepless nights have arrived for Microsoft’s competitors!

Now those sleepless nights have arrived!

On Monday, Microsoft and LinkedIn threw out their first challenge to Salesforce.com. In an article released by Reuters, Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella shared the companies plan to integrate LinkedIn data with their Dynamics 365 offering.

According to Microsoft, the upgrade will help salespeople become more efficient. With new insights from LinkedIn’s 500 million professionals, this solution will help salespeople improve their pipeline by,

• Recommending ways to save an at-risk deal.

• Displaying LinkedIn personal and company information on every lead, contact, account, and opportunity page in Dynamics 365.

• Daily updates between systems, which automatically save accounts and contacts in Dynamics 365 to Sales Navigator.

The new solution will comb through a salesperson’s emails, CRM, and LinkedIn to gain insight into their relationship with a potential customer. And ultimately give recommendations on the next best action to take.

“We’re introducing a single offer that brings together LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365 for Sales… at about half the cost of competitive solutions.” Said Microsoft on Monday.

“I want to be able to democratise A.I. so that any customer using these products is able to take their own data and load it into A.I.”

“This is really all about expanding the opportunity we have, going beyond productivity and collaboration tools, to having a professional network.”

We all know LinkedIn is the business social hub and is a fantastic source of data for salespeople. So, we’re excited to see the first updates to Dynamics 365 that will include LinkedIn.

Read the full article here: Microsoft’s Nadella banks on LinkedIn data to challenge Salesforce