Cornerstones of Automated Marketing

Automated marketing rests on a few large areas that support the entire idea of automation, without which, the whole notion fails. Two of these are content and business rules.

There are others, but if you want to succeed you must embrace these two.

What is content? For some this is a nebulous word that means very little. For others, like publishers, it is the substance that makes their business work. I’d like to draw your mind around a wide definition of content, because with automated marketing, the broader your view, the more opportunity you will see.

The written word is one of the more obvious places to find content; streaming news, magazines, press releases and analyst reports. Words create a vast treasure of content. Add to these user created content in email, blogs or social networking posts and content is everywhere.

Data is another place to find rich content. It can be simple demographics like age, gender, household income, number of children, the type of car you drive, etc. For business it may be your industry or number of employees you employ.

Transactional data is much more interesting and like user created content it is a burgeoning source. You find it on web sites, in shopping carts and in your back office systems; interactions between systems that identify behaviors and triggered events. Consider the information that is created every time you swipe your credit card, debit card or send a text message. Even though the “content of the transaction” or the “content of the text message” remains private, you’re on the network and electronic exchanges of information happen that create patterns of your behavior.

Consider a young lady that I know. She is 18 and sends and receives over 600 text messages per day. Voice traffic from her phone, audible talk time, is less than 20 minutes a day. This is not unusual given the research reports I see on the mobile marketplace. As a result, marketers are struggling to keep up with massive cultural changes across the globe. Sending a text message instead of dialing a phone number is just one of them.

Lastly, consider that multiple software companies are investing heavily in research that will allow software to automatically generate a “social network” based on algorithms that examine who people interact with most often via email. This becomes a new data source built on the foundation of content. In the context of a large corporation, the ability to identify internal networks of people and understand how “influencers” effect buying decisions and corporate policy can be very valuable.

This is all interesting but not very useful unless you can organize it, structure it and act on it. This is where business rules come and why the combination of content and business rules is so powerful and critical to the success of automated marketing.

Creating messages is easy enough. Figuring out how to send them is also pretty straight forward – but matching messages to relevant events in the lives of customers is the home run. If your customers trust you enough to grant access into their daily interactions then they hand you a golden key that opens the door to automated marketing.

Marketing that is personalized, transactional, integrated and exceptionally relevant to the lives of your customers.

Email the writer: i.Gilyeat@alrroya.com