If You Understand the Buzzword, You can understand the User

Connecting the dots

Tricky but increasingly far from impossible. In fact, this type of thing is starting to help marketers all over the world expand their efforts in a scalable, programmatic way and reach the 90%-plus of visitors to their sites who never make it past the ‘just visiting’ part. I’m here to tell you it’s just about connecting the dots. The problem is too many marketers can’t take that step due to dealing with marketing channels mired in silos and not having centralized data.

I have made many calls to integrate marketing and unify data, and here are some compelling scenarios clamouring for it to happen:

•You already know where a user has come from.

•You know what media that user has been exposed to (Have they searched for your product? Have they clicked on an ad? Have they seen a banner, liked a post, mentioned you to their friends?)

•You know when they visit your site, how often they visit and how long between visits.

•You know what pages they look at, what their behaviour is like when they are there, if they act like a converter.

If you can put these things together in one place and understand the user, you have more than enough to communicate the right message to the right user at the right time – automatically. You just wouldn’t be doing it over email or traditional marketing automation channels. You’d be delivering the right message to the right user at the right time in a cohesive, nuanced multi-channel media plan with an emphasis on site conversion.

Why not take that intelligence and use it to deliver these messages when the user is visiting your site? Deliver promotions or chat or offer forms to push them to the next level. Not in an annoying one-size-fits-all way where everyone gets served the same message, but in an automated, personally tailored way.

Take those tactics and deliver those messages when they leave your site too – through partner sites or through media. Why not call this marketing automation?

Yes, in other words, marketing automation is marketing! You may now be saying that I am just adding more fuzziness to an already fuzzy term. That is not my intention.

I want to remove the fuzziness and both expand and hone the term so that it is more inclusive with more clarity and will inspire marketers to actualize the term by delivering automated personally tailored messages to both their potential customers and current customers.

By doing this we not only usher in a new definition for a “buzzword” but welcome a new era for digital marketing

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