Today, there are a lot of tools a marketer can use to execute online marketing campaigns. Tools for advertising management, tools for emails campaigns and other lead creation methods abound. But oddly enough, as a marketplace, we’ve ignored a very important part of the equation: what happens when we get a prospect’s attention? We bring them to our website most often, or a landing page. And that site is typically managed in a totally different way, with different processes, and is almost always unconnected to the lead generation tools that brought the lead to it in the first place. And there is the problem. There are significant payoffs developing a single continuous process: from creating awareness, to building interest and converting a suspect into a prospect. Yet in today’s marketing world, that’s 5 different systems, with their own processes, content repositories, analytics and users.
Today’s marketers have the opportunity to bring these together in a single platform that can allow them to manage their lead generation campaigns, and at the same time, manage and orchestrate the customer experience when those campaigns bear fruit and drive prospects to their site. The modern marketer also needs the ability to see everything about a campaign, including the behavior of visitors that arrived via various campaigns, as well as lead scoring data to allow marketing to transition leads to its sales team when they are qualified and ready.
The web remains an untapped reservoir of customer intelligence for marketing and sales. Marketing and sales teams alike can benefit from deep user profiling to understand how best to engage prospects: from offering the right call to action based on browsing behavior to providing a detailed dossier to sales based on a prospect’s composite interaction history. It’s imperative that marketers bring these types of systems together in an orchestrated fashion, where their website seamlessly continues the customer engagement process with the prospect, and tracks those interactions from end to end for marketing and sales.
An integrated approach to Web content management and marketing automation offers the 5 following benefits:
- An integrated understanding of who your site visitors are and what they want to accomplish.
- Real-time personalization which gives you the ability to offer up content that will help achieve higher conversions.
- Immediate insight into the website goals and conversions accomplished by each campaign, down to the individual session level. Ability to focus on the high impact campaigns and weed out underperformers.
- Instant intelligence on prospects and deal influencers of site visitors with GeoIP tracking for stronger more qualified leads for the sales team.
- A way to do more with your website and lead generation campaigns with fewer tools and less complexity.
The marketplace is certainly evolving, and it’s becoming more common to see web content management technology now offering marketing automation and web analytics capabilities. At the same time, marketing automation and web analytics vendors have started to offer more web management features as well. This convergence will only continue over the next several years as marketers demand more integrated solutions that allow them to streamline their operations and improve their lead quality and volume. Creating a single, continuous customer engagement process will increase marketing’s demand generation capabilities, while giving sales the tools to engage and convert more prospects to customers.
Darren is broad technologist with a deep understanding of the Web CMS marketplace. At Sitecore, Darren’s responsibilities include Product Planning and Management, technical briefings with Analysts, Press, and major Clients, and Business Development and Alliances.
