Hey peeps,
Hope you enjoyed these twelve days and had time to recharge your batteries.
Now it’s time to commute back to the office in brisk mornings, avoiding icy roads and trying to not be buried under 10 feet of snow.
Last Wednesday we were discussing the marketing cloud in particular, and the future of marketing in general.
Recap
It is predicted that by 2018 (next year that is) spending on marketing cloud services would exceed $30 B, which is a remarkable number.
The disruption by some is as large as the dotcom boom, meaning that the impact would be colossal.
But again, what is marketing automation and Marketing as a Service (MaaS)?
How does one benefit from using it?
Marketing automation and MaaS
Marketing automation, particularly marketing automation tools, allow the user to focus on the macro scale of marketing instead of the microscale.
Marketing automation ranges from customer care such as automatic answering bots on the website to reduce the use of customer representatives and to redirect users into a sort of self serve service, up to email marketing triggers that send emails based on user behavior such as opened the email and didn’t proceed to cart, proceeded to cart but never finished the checkout, etc.
Contrary to common belief, marketing automation doesn’t necessarily advocate less work as we do need to hire professionals or pay for resources that need to be completely integrated with the services we have to make sure the user experience is smooth and there is no need to really pick up the phone and call in the call center that we do possess.
One way for automating customer care is by using all kinds of CRM services such as Zendesk, Zoho, etc.
Facebook understood that perfectly and now advocates for more and more automation using the messenger bot.
Email Service Providers (ESPs) such as Sendgrid, Silverpop and the likes offer all kinds of triggers for automation, that send 3-5 emails in general to people who have registered to the service without the need of a real human to click “send” each and every time.
How does it correspond to SEO though?
SEO Automation
When we describe SEO, we always think about the technical difficulties of optimizing results on search engines; optimization in general isn’t only computer generated, it is a skill based work that needs to be done by a professional.
That doesn’t mean we can’t optimize the service by offering a platform that aggregates data from more than source, gives us a dropdown of analytics, metrics and more.
It could still be self service, but why work with more than one system at the same time?
By harnessing the power of automation, we ZEFO were able to produce beautiful results such as automatic daily ranking, which gives us daily metrics with which we could optimize and see how well we perform.
Geographic flexibility in the form of scanning SERPs across the globe with a click of a button and more.
One of the most beneficial features is automatic tracking of competitors, knowing what they do better and how you can combat these results.
With automation we don’t stop working, we just stop working hard and start working smart!