As the old proverb goes, it’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.
Yet as a new year starts, making predictions is part of our jobs. Priorities have to be set, budgets allocated, and resources diverted according to how things have changed over the past 12 months.
Marketing automation has come a long way.
Considered an emerging technology as recently as a few years ago, estimates are that more than half (59%) of Fortune 500 companies now use marketing automation along with nearly all (95%) of SAAS-based companies.
The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is upon us. In the past few years, vast improvements have been made in how well computers can recognise objects in images and understand human voices.
Progress in these areas has been made due to increased computing power and the availability of large stores of data, which, when combined, have made AI systems dramatically more effective.
Marketers face the challenge of a constantly changing media landscape.
According to a recent study by McKinsey & Company the number of digital touchpoints is increasing by 20% annually and consumer activity is shifting rapidly to these new digital channels.
“Bots are the new apps” according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a keynote given at a Microsoft developer conference in March 2016.
On the basis of the amount of start-ups working on bot related activities at Web Summit 2016, it would seem as if bots may be about to become mainstream after all.
Digital marketing has undergone somewhat of a transformation over the last decade, bringing email marketing into its centre.
This is evident in a number of ways, not least when looking at email’s ROI rising from 66% in 2008 to 73% today; it has shown a spectacular growth compared to other channels in the marketing mix.
Using customer segmentation and attributed reporting together allows you to gain greater insight into what drives your customers to purchase.
This is crucial information in a world where paths to conversion are so complex.
The robots are coming for jobs, and many who believe that they’re exempt from the much ballyhooed robot job apocalypse might have reason to be far more worried.
That includes marketers.
Proof of ROI is the one factor guaranteed to get board-level buy-in for increasing marketing budgets.
But is the fixation with ROI getting in the way of innovation?
The effort needed to create marketing automation rules are causing B2B organisations to lose time, money and new business.
It’s time to use predictive machine learning instead.
CRMs are meant to be much more than a glorified contact management system, and if used correctly, can greatly increase business productivity and effectiveness.
CRM software often have a multitude of features, many of which are rarely used by sales teams.
Here, we’ll take a look at three ways you can start getting the most out of your CRM, from automating actions to utilizing sales pipeline functionality for managing customer support.
A repeatable and effective sales process is key to scalable business growth, and it’s a much more straightforward endeavour than you might imagine.
Growing a business is hard, but fortunately, designing a uniform sales process doesn’t have to be.