Marketing Automation has been, of late, one of the most popular subjects in the world of marketing. The market of systems of this class grows at a significant rate. Only by 2015 Marketing Automation market will be worth about $ 3. 2 billion.
With the emergence of a growing number of companies offering Marketing Automation class systems, and dealing with marketing and sales automation there have been also attempts to define Marketing Automation. Constructing a definition, it is worth answering a few questions.
What is Marketing Automation?
It is a segment of information systems dedicated to management of marketing and sales.
How it works?
Makes more efficient, automates, and measures all marketing and sales activities, at the same time, combining them with an individual customer, and their effect.
What is the point?
The main objective of marketing and sales automation is to increase a volume of sales through perfect match of sending messages to the needs, interests, and capabilities of potential customers.
Marketing Automation technology
allows to:
- Lead Nurturing
customer retention
- measuring ROI
- behavioral and transactional segmentation of contacts
- contact scoring
- personalization of communication
- combining marketing and sales activities
- determination of optimal conversion paths
- integration of many diffrent data sources and Big Data support
“Marketing Automation solution delivers essentially all the benefits of an e-mail Marketing Solution along with integrated capabilities they would otherwise need to be cobbled using various standalone technologies”. Gleanster Research
Big Data Marketing
Let us try for the beginning to define what really is Big Data. The simplest (although mistaken) definition says that Big Data is everything we count in petabyte. McKinsey defines „Big Data” as a datasets which size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze data.
Robert Klopp from EMC talks about unstructured data stored in different databases. IBM definition adds one more condition related to data diversityand speed of their capturing and processing. They must origin from different sources and be generated in real time or nearly real time. According to Forrester Research company „Big Data” is a concept considering data problems in four dimension, called 4V:
volume – data size
- variety – data diversity
- velocity – fast emerging of new datatheir analysis in a real time
value – how much data are worth(some sources say instead variance – data variance)
This concept seems to reflect a sense of what we call „Big Data”. Forresterconsiders (rightly), that the name Big Data is confusing because suggest only size omitting remaining three aspects. (Often, in parallel, is used a less popular term High Performance Analytics). It is no less important variety resulting from a nature of collecting data in a contemporary organization. Big Data combines data from different channels (behavioral data, statistical, geographical, transactional) and data formats (website traffic, social media, video, music, documents, forum activity, forms, survey, telephone talks, offline data), what departs from known so far combining of relational data coming from the same sources.
In standard tools for data processing there is also a possibility to handle different data, however it requires one essential factor – an appropriate amount of time. Unfortunately, we do not have abundance of it – by definition Big Data are data that appear in a large volume, and what is more important, often requiring analysis and reaction in nearly real time.
Selecting Marketing Automation System
The market of Marketing Automation systems offers a wide range of products. The first 15 years result in developing mature tools existing virtually form the very beginning, and also those which present a quite fresh approach to the subject. Regardless of the company size there is something for everyone.
International corporations which employ highly skilled employees, with large databases and very complex marketing processes can choose among platforms intended for them with a lot of modules which allow for a precise adjustment of functionalities to the needs. On the other hand, the sector of small and middle enterprises, may also select from platforms focused on an end user, which thanks a friendly interface and a simple implementation can be implemented in the company in just a few days. However, regardless a company size can count on the following advantages.
