3 Things the Pandemic Taught Us About Marketing Automation

Throughout COVID, and especially last year, our society has realized how important time is and how to spend it well. Material things have taken a back seat for many people facing serious health issues. This is still especially true today.

The time we have with families and friends is now more sacred than ever. Communities are coming together as floods, fires and hurricanes ravage our earth. People are starving in some parts, homeless in others and fighting for their lives in some countries. Large numbers of social unrest, racism and inequality is happening in all corners of the globe.

3 Lessons Learned Post-Pandemic About Marketing Automation

Amidst all of this, marketers have had to learn to navigate this tumultuous territory with grace and tact. So, how do we break through the noise when people are bombarded with messages, spam, emails, texts daily? How do we truly make a difference for both our customers and our brands? And, how do we ensure right timing?

1. Time is Precious

Those questions and more are answered when we provide true value to our customers. Rather than barraging our customers with the same daily offer, consider their choices, their preferences and the timing of such messages.

For e-commerce companies, this may mean instead of just sending offers, there are meaningful messages too sprinkled into a multi-channel campaign that taps into the heart of the consumer.

For businesses, it may be focusing on real world problems and taking a stand as many corporations have done over the past couple years. Whatever your strategy, take the time to map out the customer lifecycle of your customer and ensure the right message is delivered at the right time and in the right medium.

2. Listen to Feedback

Not only is it important to deliver meaningful messages at the right time and on the right medium, listening to feedback and taking action is equally important. Ensure your systems are set up to handle social feedback as well as customer support. If you are active on social media channels, ensure you can listen and engage with conversations with your clients. This will go a long way toward avoiding larger issues.

There are some great platforms out there where you can listen to social media conversations like Sprout Social and Hootsuite to name a few. Also, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a decent social studio embedded in their platform.

3. Create Advocacy

The best way to drive your brand value these days is to create advocates who will tout your brand for you. In the consumer world this is often done by Influencers via social media. In the B2B world, this can be done through client testimonials, case studies and even creating such “raving fans” that people must talk about you in a positive light.

The book Raving Fans was written ages ago, however it is more relevant today than ever. The ability to create raving fans is not easy with all the competing ads vying for time. However, when you can break through and reach your customers in such a way that it moves them to take action, then you have tapped into a very special medium for getting the word out and converting even more customers. If you haven’t read the book, I recommend you pick it up and think about how you could create raving fans in your organization and your customer base. Sometimes, it is the worst situations in customer service that are handled with such grace and excellence that those people become the biggest advocates. How can you transform situations and products within your organization to generate raving fans?

Most importantly, take the time to really think about your customer and learn their needs and desires. Map out a customer lifecycle model and then fill in the gaps with meaningful content through a content matrix. Only then, will you have the ingredients to plug into your marketing automation system and create conversions.

The Bottom Line On Marketing Automation

The marketing automation landscape this year was heavily influenced by the pandemic, but it looks like three clear lessons have followed us into 2023. Take the lessons we shared above and infuse them into your own company, you won’t be sorry that you did.