Smart marketing, CRM and marketing automation to grow your business

The development of technology enables us to constantly listen to customers and thus determine their behavior, interests and purchases. We can use this listening to analyze the customer’s voice in detail and, with all this, give the appropriate response. This is what is known as smart marketing, derived from the label smart we give to all connected devices.

The ideal tool – or tool kit – to carry out this complete analysis is the Marketing Cloud environment, which offers all kinds of specific solutions to find the customer and generate leads.

We would like to take a look at the role of smart marketing and its resources: What are its uses? What about its tools?

What is “smart marketing”?

Since the advent of digital channels, efforts have been made to leverage these technologies to target customers. As these means became established and developed, it has become easier and easier to assimilate the steps taken in the customer journey.

We live in the age of data and have hundreds of tools to capture data on virtually everything. In this particular case, marketing departments can fine-tune the attention given to the customer: for example, in what has been called “social listening” (through networks); or “active listening”, with the aim of responding to conversations taking place at the digital level.

Obviously, all of this would be a component of smart marketing, which some experts define as formulas for applying innovation. To this end, we will not only create a different proposition, but we will also provide value, especially for a target saturated with advertising and information.

In short, it is all about collecting data about the customer, his or her customer journey, and using it to understand the behavior and tastes of our target in order to generate leads.

Smart marketing resources

First of all, we have the usual digital strategies and tools, but we can offer a positive twist by applying this insight based on data. These are divided into the paid media (SEM, Social Media and marketing automation) and unpaid media (SEO and content marketing):

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM): based on creating campaigns from the data we have collected from the segments of interest, while optimizing the reach to the utmost. In addition, through remarketing you can automatically target customers based on their interests.
• Social media: community management can be taken a step further if the right tools are used to quantify interaction, assess the behavior habits of followers in particular, and audiences in general. New predictive models for understanding and interacting with online communities are a trend.
• Marketing automation: efficiency above all else, due to the cost and time reduction that this technology allows. Basically, marketing actions are carried out automatically, such as the appearance of a chatbot to assist the customer or a retargeting email to a customer who has viewed our products on the website. Without data collection it would not be possible.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): long-term work to position our online content at the top of search results. With the software we can sharpen our aim and have guidelines to help us in the whole process to achieve the best SEO.
• Content marketing: developing content with which to populate our channels is an almost indispensable strategy. However, these contents have to respond to prospects’ searches, trends, etc., which need to have been monitored beforehand.

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A CRM for listening and interacting with customers

Salesforce is the number one CRM in the world, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud is its cloud dedicated to marketing professionals. It is a platform that is constantly growing, which adds that extra element of permanent transformation in line with new strategies and cutting-edge tools.

But the most important thing about the topic we are discussing today is that Marketing Cloud is a 360° platform that also has specific tools for the entire process. From capture to customer service. From SEM to automation.

The consultancy firm Gartner named Salesforce as one of the leaders in its 2019 Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. One of its great virtues is the ability to control all content from a single platform. In this way, the connection and conversation with the customer can be established quickly and flexibly. Here we would highlight the following:

• The ability to transform data into charts and visual content. Such data can come from related content, objects and even data from external sources. From here, all these insights can be used to optimize all types of content (blogs, news, social media posts, etc.) from the same platform.
• The ability to create dynamic content for any experience. Responsive content that adapts, without the need to create new content for each point of contact.

We now understand how smart marketing and marketing automation relate to each other. Discover the end of the journey: how