Good question!

 

I first heard the term years ago at a marketing exhibition in London, it was being banded around all over the place, every second exhibition stand claimed they could help me with it. But none of the stands explained what it actually was and I really didn’t want to get into a HUGE conversation with someone on a stand for hours on end, sign up to something that I STILL wasn’t sure about and then get back to my lovely northern team and try and explain what I had spent a chunk of our marketing budget on!! So I got on the train and left the term behind.

 

A few weeks later I was sat with my marketing team and we were chatting about the week ahead, one of them said….

 

“I’ve got a meeting with a guy this week, he’s coming into talk to me about MARKETING AUTOMATION!!!!!!”

 

I am a relatively simple minded marketer, I try not to make simple things confusing, but what I am (and have always been) is very efficient, at last I had found a platform that could help me streamline our marketing efforts all from the same place! I remember saying to the guy sat opposite me “but does it really work, are others using this software of the future?” and after a very quick but effective demo, I was sold! That meeting was over ten years ago and I have never looked back, every marketing job I have had or client I have worked with, I have insisted this should be the way forward. 

So what is Marketing Automation and will it help you grow your business? Well basically it is having all of your outbound marketing options in one place, you can easily build personalised email campaigns, paid search, social media, website tracking, triggered email, host pages and actually much more. We very quickly got ahead of the game, for years we had been chasing our tails and getting tasks done just in time, now we could schedule everything in advance and not just that, we had triggered emails in place for visitors on our website and for our outbound email marketing campaigns. Our communication had become consistent and for the most part automated, it felt good and very organised! 

 

We had always managed to get leads in, but the quality of the leads changed, from here we could spend time nurturing the leads that we thought had potential and work on them until they decided to work with us! 

 

At IOL we truly believe in the power of automation we specialise in all aspects of it, we use powerful AI tools and a wealth of marketing experience to help businesses of all sizes build, improve, automate and manage their email marketing & communication strategies, after 10 years of using it and believing in it, we are very good at it!!

 

 

Kim Crowther

Client Services Director