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As with all things strategic, in digital marketing it's not just 'what' your strategy can achieve, but also 'how' you can execute that strategy. The most detailed, brilliantly designed strategy is all for naught if it becomes so complex it can no longer be effectively implemented. While avoiding this pitfall seems obvious at first it can be more difficult in practice. How then do we then keep our strategy simple while simultaneously not limiting its ability to achieve our desired goals?
This is where marketing automation tools become profoundly/particularly/quite important. Let's look at an example.
It's the beginning of the month and the team is meeting with a big client. Because there's always some emergency somewhere, the client explains that a new, vitally important campaign needs to be launched by the end of the month. The team starts brainstorming and a plan starts to form. The client is not only excited, but adamant that this is the plan they want to see in action.
Over the coming hours and days while toiling away you discover this plan requires far more manual work than you had first .png?width=300&name=Inline%20Blog%20Images%20(23).png)
assumed. Worse still, the interplay between all these manual steps is quite complicated. The further you plan you realize even worse still, this problem becomes multiplied as all these complicated interlocking manual processes are divided among 5 team members who have to perform these steps on a detailed timeline. Determined not to fail you finish your grand strategic plan and prepare to present it to the team.
After your presentation, when your white board looks like a mapping of the human genome and the boss is groaning as she's rubbing her temples, it's clear that the plan is just too complicated and won't work.
Although presented in a tongue in cheek manner this can lead to quite serious problems. Explanations have to be given at meetings how "complications arose". Promises to clients have to be walked back. Team members have to scramble to recover. Everyone's bottom line takes a hit.
Automated marketing tools really can be a silver bullet. The team member who used to manually chat with visitors to a website can now instead oversee the multiple conversations visitors are having with chatbots. This is not only far more scalable, it can help team morale as the team member can focus on larger issues while the software handles the tedious repetitive work. The rate of contacts coming into your CRM increases. The chatbot automatically provides the correct form the contact may need to fill out. The software segments the contacts into the appropriate automated email campaigns. The emails in those campaigns have automated intelligent content that varies depending on the contact, increasing your conversion rates.
The complicated unwieldy strategic plan can be replaced by a more simple plan that is also more powerful due to automation. What once took a great many labor hours is now completed in seconds. Questions at team meetings that once took detailed and often confusing processes to address are now addressed with standard automated processes instead. The time consuming and often confusing interplay between manually navigating numerous software platforms disappears as integration spreads your automated strategy across those platforms.
Advances in software over the last several years have made automated tools both more powerful and easier to use. Using these tools, and using them well, is key to simplifying your strategic planning and also executing that plan successfully.
