Assessing Marketing Automation

Looking to build ongoing relationships through conversations with your site visitors? Marketing automation is an amazingly cost-effective tool to extend your website to build ongoing relationships and profits.

There are a number of awesome marketing automation tools on the market. I've just completed an evaluation of several of them and developed a business case that summarizes the development costs of an new highly optimized inbound website with integrated marketing automation.

There are several great evaluation tools out there to help with the assessment of marketing automation. The ones I have found the most effective are:

1. Gleanster
2. Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management with Marketing Automation solutions with annual revenues >$20K (April 2013)
3. FindtheBest.com Marketing Automation
4. G2Crowd Marketing Automation
5. GetApp Marketing automation software
6. Marketing Automation Software Guide
7. Wikipedia: Comparison of Marketing Automation Workflow software

Online Consultation

Online consultations or e-consultations are an effective and cost-effect way to collect feedback from potential clients and stakeholders.

I recently set up an online consultation for the National Farmed Animal Care Council using Survey Monkey. The two business requirements for assessing and selecting a consultation tool were simple: (1) the tool had to be intuitive and easy to use for stakeholders to comment on each of the new draft policies and (2) the tool had to be intuitive and easy to use for administrative staff to access feedback on each policy and create the e-consultation feedback reports.

I researched a number of existing e-consultation tools then selected SurveyMonkey, an online survey tool I had setup and used for previous clients to gather marketing research information from clients and board members. For both e-surveys and online consultations Survey Monkey is very easy to set up. My client and I worked together to input the consultation questions using a variety of open-ended response types for each section of the policy to guide and gather feedback.

For users it was dead simple to use. Users could download the entire draft policy or read each sub-section of the policy and then answered feedback questions. For administrators it was  easy to generate consultation reports based on policy subsections as well as the whole draft.

The online consultation was a big success all around and is currently being used for to collect public, government and industry stakeholder feedback on 17 policy and code of practice documents.

Using search engine marketing results to optimize sites and content for search engines

To optimize content and sites for search engines, take top keywords and top key word phrases from your search engine marketing campaign results and add them to your website content.

Top phrases and keywords recorded as higher click-throughs from your Google Adword campaigns can be used as webpage titles, as navigation labels and included in your website content. When users are searching for products, services, and information, your site or webpage rises to the top because it has been optimized and keywords and phrases pre-tested in your search engine marketing campaigns.