The trends in technology for SME marketing are not that difficult to spot as they invariably come from the investment and innovation of larger organisations.
Think of it as ‘what Formula 1 invents today, comes as standard on the family hatchback five years later’.
For the past few years the big businesses have been developing marketing automation and recently I laid eyes on a SME friendly version.
Describing what ‘marketing automation’ is can be a tricky. Think of it as a friendly programme that sends out the emails and text messages that you know you should send to potential customers but often fail to. You can build intuition in to these system and integrate with other business software, for example it could trigger a call notice in your sales team CRM based on a client’s behaviour, maybe after they opened an offer email and/or visited the website.
The system features for marketing automation continue, as you can link analytics to your campaigns, call centres and PPC activity (both Adwords and your landing pages).
The service is ideal for those already using MailChimp (or similar) but that want to take the next evolutionary step up to something that have more functionality…, more clever stuff. MailChimp have already taken a small step in the Automation direction but they remain an email platform first and foremost.
If you are interested in learning more about what marketing automation can do for your business then please give Crush Design a call and ask for Jonathan.
Otherwise, start research the services yourself, and here are some of the marketing automation service out there that we have looked at:
- Force 24 – these are the guys that recently gave me a demonstration. They are UK based, have a support team available to do site visits and had an excellent piece of software.
- HubSpot – gave me an online demonstration but felt it was too complex / grand a platform for Crush and / or our clients.
- Marketo
- SharpSpring