A lot of different companies and writers focus on the area of Marketing Automation. But, there are quite a few subsets of Marketing Automation and it's important to understand the differences of those subsets to be able to choose which ones are right for your company, your customer base and your operations.
Marketing Automation for print production and large scale marketing customizations are what is often done at Brainloaf. In a typical franchise model, the franchisor (the parent company that created the franchise) has responsibility to franchisees to create a brand, a customer demand, a customer awareness of the brand and create franchises so that customers will know to look for those franchises and come in. The responsibility of the franchisee is to, clearly, run their franchise, get as many customers into their franchise, have a successful franchise business, and leverage the national or regional campaigns. General brand advertising, that is not targeted or specific to an individual location (like McDonald's advertising), will drive awareness to get people in store.
A Marketing Automation system developed on the web saves the franchise money by re-purposing existing collateral by giving the franchisee the flexibility to turn it into a direct marketing tool to drive people into their own store. By re-purposing all of the creative design that has already been done, it really becomes a powerful, lower-cost, local marketing tool. Assets can be re-used by simply taking national point of sale ads that are already created, putting them into a system on the web and allowing the franchisee to customize them with their local address, offers for their particular store, and allowing the franchisees to choose which products to feature that week.
Brands love it because they get to control the branding and they can make sure that everything is looking professional as their franchisees are putting these ads out into the market place. Franchisees love it because they get a self-service portal that lets them create whatever they particularly like and can control their messaging at their level. It’s the best of both worlds.
The automation of print production is important because large agencies could be developing any number of things for their parent clients. What Marketing Automation does is optimize the work flow and the production process, allow people to keep tabs on costs, turn around time and improve the communication within the teams to streamline the review process. Clients can go online to look at, approve and comment on collateral without things having to be printed. Marketing Automation, in the print production sense, replaces the paper-based system of routing, trafficking, approvals, collection of feedback, and the final distribution of printed material. So, you can use Marketing Automation in an internal sense to optimize your business process automation.
A place where those types of systems are important is at large print houses that handle thousands of print jobs for many different clients. We have technology to manage the routing of those jobs, the testing of those jobs, and the insertion of those jobs. You could really have a major problem if you have a print mistake where you've wasted press time, paper, ink. Those are hard costs that you'll never re-coop if you make a printing mistake. Marketing Automation systems from a production standpoint helps you put the checks, balances and approvals in place to avoid costly print mistakes that otherwise may go uncaught.
Another sub-area of Marketing Automation is the application of Marketing Automation technology to digital communications between a marketing staff and the customers, directly. There are a numbers of possible ways to automate, say, e-mail campaigns. Not just from the creation and sending of an e-mail campaign but, the scheduling and automated follow-up of messaging to clients. For example, a marketing team who has a landing page on a website may put together a series of follow up e-mails with relevant information as to what the client was looking for. Don't just take their name at the landing page, rather develop a series of on-going communications that then get sent to the customers who sign up for that landing page.
Marketing Automation allows you to schedule a set of content to be put into an e-mail campaign, sometimes called the "Drip Campaign." After consumers sign up, they may be given a series of messages week after week leading them off through your sales education funnel; taking them step by step through the data that supports your product, encouraging sales, educating the consumer overtime in a non-evasive way. After you finish that education, you can ask them to take action by purchasing.