When it comes to digital marketing, your ability to make your campaigns more effective often relies on your data capabilities. Data-driven marketing can help you refine your messages, target the right people, and pivot in response to market conditions more quickly as you scale. However, keeping track of all the pieces that go into collecting, analyzing and acting on your data becomes an increasingly complex process.
That’s where business process management software (such as that from Aproove) can come in handy. It helps you bring together your workflows and bring your data to life in order for you to make smart, data-driven marketing decisions.
Data informs marketing strategists about consumer behavior. It helps marketers identify purchase trends. Data is the information that marketers use to personalize experiences for their customers, or that they employ to test campaigns and optimize for clearly defined processes to capture, filter and analyze data. By having un-streamlined processes for capturing it, marketing teams risk using incorrect or misinterpreted data.
The process-oriented nature of data-driven marketing keeps data flowing freely through an organization’s different marketing channels, so it can be collected, analyzed, and used to inform decisions in real-time. BPM tools help marketers keep that continuity going by creating standardized processes that collect and bring data in from a diverse array of different sources into a consistent, usable format.
A core principle of BPM design is that a workflow can be broken down into different steps, forming a process together. Business process management software enables a business to define, implement and automate a workflow for a given process. In a marketing context, the process may involve a set of steps executed within a marketing campaign. The continuing development of the best marketing automation software has finally made available marketing tools that allow for the adoption of a BPM approach and extend the reach of data-driven marketing throughout the company. There are various ways in which BPM automation tools facilitate data-driven marketing.
Let’s look at some of them.
Data collected from customer interaction; social media analytics; website metrics; and store, web or mobile app transactions all need to come together in one place before insight can be applied to future marketing decisions. Business process management software provides the architecture to aggregate that data in one place. Armed with a 360-degree view of customer and campaign data, marketers can track engagement trends, customer likes and dislikes, and the performance of campaigns on multiple platforms in real-time.
When you have data that comes from multiple sources, it is very easy for your campaign to go off course if you have inconsistencies and errors in the data you are using. BPM tools can help you with data validation and data cleansing to make sure the data is validated. This is very important because all the decisions made in a marketing campaign are based on the information that is being used. If there are bugs in the data it can have a major impact on the decisions that are being made. The best marketing automation tools make sure there is a high level of such automation, and the checks and balances in place will make sure there is minimal chance of something going wrong. There is much less human error involved. By making sure all the data input and validation processes are standardized, this will make the marketing team confident that they are using proper, valid data, and will help them avoid redundancies and inconsistencies in the data.
By automating data entry and analysis in real-time, business process management software provides marketers with reports that show the campaign’s performance, KPIs and what needs to be changed as soon as that data is available. The most significant advantage of data-driven marketing of its information; in fact, any delay in the insight can make the data obsolete as another marketing campaign will have already started by that time. Therefore, BPM tools provide marketing teams with timelier insights, helping them identify trends quickly and change the strategy if a campaign is underperforming.
Mapping the customer journey and optimizing it is a hallmark of good marketing, and this is where BPM tools can really shine. The customer journey usually has several stages – how you make contact and stay in touch before a sale, through to the sale, to after-sale contact that reinforces your brand and keeps customers coming back for more. By mapping each stage of the customer journey in BPM, marketers can begin to understand how customers behave in each stage, and improve aspects of the process. For example, friction points in the process – what causes dissatisfaction at particular stages – can be diagnosed and later corrected.
Data-driven marketing demands fluidity in the way campaigns are created, launched and tweaked. BPM software provides the infrastructure to automate and streamline marketing processes in order to help achieve this fluidity. BPM automation tools help at every stage of the campaign as follows:
BPM software can help marketers to define clear campaign planning processes, including setting targets, identifying target audiences, and defining the KPIs. With predefined workflows, BPM tools makes it clear to each team member what they are supposed to do, when and by whom, and which tasks they rely on from others. This makes a marketing team act like a coordinated team and respond much faster to changing market dynamics, ultimately reducing time-to-market of campaigns.
Content is at the center of many marketing campaigns, and the process of producing, reviewing and approving that content can be lengthy. Business process management software enables marketers to create workflows that automate each of these steps, ensuring that each piece of content goes through the appropriate review and approval steps. By automating and standardizing the process, BPM can speed up the content pipeline, allowing teams to create, review, and publish content more quickly, all while keeping up with the fast-paced realities of the highly competitive landscape they’re competing within.
Breaking up an audience into smaller groups is a core element of data-driven marketing because it helps to communicate more precisely with different segments of customers. Business process management software helps marketers create workflows that segment and aggregate audiences against different attributes, such as demographics, behavior, or interaction history, and automatically initiate or modify other workflows, gating on the actions taken by participants, to adjust campaigns to the insights they provide. Workflows to segment audiences automatically can help to speed up the segmentation process, and trigger the right combination of events.
With BPM automation tools, a marketer can automate the execution of campaign steps – such as time-based scheduling of emails, or publication of automated social media posts – saving time and helping to prevent errors that can occur in manual processes. For example, BPM software can automatically send out marketing emails just after a customer makes a purchase or visits a website, according to a set of rules. BPM user interface typically displays the steps and their progress If done right, it’s incredibly effective in carrying out targeted campaigns for nurturing leads and engaging existing customers to boost the ROI of a campaign.
Once the campaign has run its course, marketers then review the key performance metrics to evaluate whether all the effort was worth it and where they could improve next time. Business process management software can make this review easier by consolidating the data, automating the reporting, and creating a structure for future iterative improvement. By automating the process of eliciting feedback, surveying participants and gleaning insights from customer data, BPM tools help marketing teams iterate on their strategy and create ever-more effective future campaigns.
Data-driven marketing is best when a lot of different departments – sales, customer service, IT, etc. – are working together to agree on what to do next, based on what they each know. And that is the other reason for BPM. It gives people a common platform, where they can all see what stage of the process they’re at, what data they need, and what’s been updated, in near real-time. It helps to quieten the noise, and knocks down departmental silos. Now the marketing team’s decisions can be fully informed and consistent with overall business goals.
BPM software enables marketing to scale as businesses grow. If a company builds out its marketing strategy and infrastructure, BPM software can adapt its workflows and processes to the new needs of the business. More channels? Add them in. More data sources? Connect them. Larger campaigns? BPM tools can handle the increased complexity of data and workflows. Marketing teams maintain their agility and ability to respond to their business customers, knowing that their marketing and inbound capabilities can support almost any initiative.
While modern marketing campaigns are data-driven, at times it is difficult to perform and interpret the quantity of data needed for efficient marketing. Business process management software is used to structure and automate the acquisition of data, ensure its accuracy and do real-time adjustments, thus helping marketers develop very personalized, effective campaigns.
With the ability to centralize data, automate critical workflows and promote cross-functional collaboration, BPM automation tools can help marketing professionals leverage the power of the data-driven approach.
As businesses increasingly emphasize CX and the delivery of a positive ROI on marketing campaigns, BPM is a must-have for any organization looking to optimize its data-driven marketing campaigns.