Do you want to equip yourself with a marketing activation or azerbaijan whatsapp number data 5 million marketing automation platform ?
Are you looking to find your way in this teeming ecosystem and identify the partner best suited to your needs?
This article is for you.
Here are 5 tips for choosing the right marketing activation solution.
Article_5conseils_Activation-Marketing
Summary
1. Define your needs and objectives precisely
2. Choose an agile and scalable solution
3. Evaluate the quality and availability of customer support
4. Favor a data-centric approach
5. Choose a trusted, expert partner who listens to you
1. Define your needs and objectives precisely
It is essential to start with a clear vision of your expectations before embarking on the selection of a tool. For this reason, the first step is to identify your priority use cases .
In short, what are the objectives of your marketing activation / marketing automation project? What do you want to do:
Automate your email campaigns?
Personalize your customer journeys ?
Analyze your audiences’ behavior in detail?
Easily evolve your marketing scenarios and use cases over time?
Unify your customer data in a 360° view to better segment your audiences?
Benefit from advanced and customizable reporting to manage your activity?
Deliver engaging and personalized customer experiences across all your touchpoints?
You must precisely list your business and functional needs, this will help you target the most suitable martech solutions.
It is also important to assess your level of maturity in marketing automation . Are you in the start-up phase, with still manual processes? Unless you already have a technology stack that you want to optimize? Your choice of solution will have to be consistent with your current maturity and your development ambitions.
Finally, take care to involve the various stakeholders concerned by the project upstream . Beyond the marketing team, think about integrating your sales teams, your customer service, your IT department and, ideally, management.
Each will provide additional insight into the challenges of the project and will allow you to refine the framing of your needs. This 360° vision will be invaluable when writing the specifications for your marketing activation solution .
2. Choose an agile and scalable solution
Your marketing activation solution must be flexible and modular enough to support the growth of your business and the evolution of your use cases.
Therefore, favor solutions that offer open architecture and “plug and play” functionalities so that you can easily:
Add new data sources.
Integrate new marketing channels .
Develop your customer journeys and marketing automation scenarios.
Deploy advanced marketing use cases (marketing pressure management, dynamic segmentation , etc.).
Increase the volume of data, contacts, emails sent…
A piece of advice in consulting: Don't hesitate to challenge publishers on their product roadmap and their ability to support your growth.
Finally, make sure the solution integrates with your existing ecosystem. Your marketing automation platform must integrate seamlessly with your other applications (CRM, analytics tools, data management solutions, etc.).
So take the time to evaluate the integration capabilities of the solutions you are benchmarking: connector library, APIs, webhooks, etc.
3. Evaluate the quality and availability of customer support
Choosing a marketing activation solution is not just about choosing software, it is also about choosing a support team - a team that must be able to assist you in installing, discovering and using the tool.
We recommend that you find out about the quality of the support offered by the publisher.
The success of your marketing activation project certainly depends on the suitability of the tool to your needs, but also on your ability to quickly get to grips with the platform and benefit from responsive support if necessary .
Check the level of support offered by the pre-selected publishers. For each publisher, you must find the answers to the following questions (do not hesitate to use these questions to build your analysis grid):
Does the publisher offer assistance with getting started, with dedicated training sessions led by business experts?
Does it provide you with experienced advisors to help you configure your platform and optimize your campaigns?
Do you have access to an Account Success Manager (ASM), who will be your preferred contact to advise and guide you as you use the platform?
What are the support access methods (telephone, email, online chat)?
Is support available in your language and during your working hours?
What are the publisher's commitments in terms of response times and handling of your requests?
Do you have the option to upgrade to a premium level of support with enhanced commitments, such as through a customized Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
Does the publisher provide you with a complete and up-to-date knowledge base, with user guides, video tutorials, practical cases, to enable you to improve your skills independently?
Do they regularly host webinars or training sessions to keep you informed about new features and help you get the most out of the platform?
To go further, download our free ebook on the key steps to get started with Customer Activation .
4. Favor a data-centric approach
Data is the fuel of your marketing activation or marketing automation strategy . To deliver personalized and engaging experiences with your customers, you must be able to collect, centralize and exploit your data effectively. Your choice of platform must therefore be part of a resolutely data-centric approach.
First, make sure that the solution is able to centralize your customer data . Your platform must be able to collect and communicate data from your different points of contact: website, mobile application, social networks, physical points of sale, etc.
Unifying your data in your marketing automation solution will allow you to have a 360° view of your customers and their interactions with your brand.
Also check the possibilities offered by the tool in terms of segmentation . To what extent do the solutions you have pre-selected offer the possibility of creating relevant audience segments, by crossing different criteria: demographic, behavioral, transactional, attitudinal data, etc.?
Segmentation enables targeting and personalization of campaigns and messages. It is one of the core features of marketing activation solutions.
A marketing activation platform is used to activate data - a truism - but also to analyze it. So, also pay attention to the analysis and reporting features offered by the platform.
A marketing activation solution must be able to provide you with dashboards to manage your marketing activity, your marketing automation scenarios, your campaigns.
There are three questions to ask about this:
Are the native reports offered in the platform customizable? If so, to what level and with what level of depth?
Is it possible to create 100% customized reports, using a drag & drop editor?
Does the marketing automation solution offer connectors with business intelligence tools?
Another point of vigilance: do not forget to audit the compliance of the solution with the regulations in force on the protection of personal data (GDPR, in particular). Your platform must integrate features for managing consents, securing data and respecting the rights of individuals.
5. Choose a trusted, expert partner who listens to you
Beyond the platform's features, choosing your marketing activation solution is also choosing a partner who will support you over the long term. The relationship you establish with the publisher will be crucial to the success of your project and the achievement of your objectives.
So choose a trusted player, an expert in their field and someone who really listens to you .
What does this mean in concrete terms?
First of all, go for a recognized and experienced player . Find out about the publisher's history and references:
How long has it been on the market?
Who are its customers, particularly in your sector of activity?
What are the achievements and success stories highlighted?
Quite logically, an established publisher, with solid experience in your industry, will be better able to understand your challenges and offer you a suitable solution.
Also check the financial strength and sustainability of the publisher . In such a changing market, it is important to choose a partner who is able to maintain and evolve its solution over time. Do some research up front to analyze the company's financial results, its growth trajectory, and its capacity to invest in R&D.
Finally, and this is probably the most important, make sure of the proximity and quality of the relationship that you can establish with the publisher . Once again, beyond the technical solution, it is a real partnership that you are setting up.
To avoid casting errors, take the time to meet the teams, assess their understanding of your business issues, their level of listening, the responsiveness of the exchanges, challenge your contacts on their ability to offer you concrete and innovative solutions.
What you need to remember
Choosing a marketing activation solution is a structuring decision for your business.
The 5 tips we've reviewed should help you sort through the many options on the market and identify the platform that best suits your challenges and goals.
Don't hesitate to take the time to think , to thoroughly audit the different solutions and to meet their teams. Don't rush. Your marketing activation project is a strategic investment that must be part of a long-term vision of your customer relationship and the growth of your business.
At Actito, we are committed to being this trusted, expert partner who listens to you . Our marketing activation platform has been designed to combine power, flexibility and ease of use, in order to meet the personalization and engagement challenges of ambitious companies.
Do not hesitate to contact us to discuss your project and find out how we can help you realize your marketing activation strategy!
