Get to Know Your Customer through Marketing Automation

Overview

Marketing historically has been an imperfect science. Trying to figure out whether a promotion or ad placement produced the desired results wasn’t easy. But thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics, that is changing. Businesses now can learn lots of information about customers, their preferences and habits, and leverage that knowledge to refine and customize their marketing efforts.

Greg Plum, senior vice president of strategic alliances at Markee and chair of the CompTIA Emerging Technology Community, discusses the application and outcome of AI-driven marketing automation with Jason Juliano, director of digital transformation at EisnerAmper Digital and a member of CompTIA’s Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council, in this episode of CompTIA’s From Promise to Profit series.

Challenge

When looking for a service provider such as an MSP, a customer is often are spoiled for choice. Capturing that customer is a challenge. An MSP needs meaningful, actionable insights into the customer’s needs, preferences and priorities in order to engage them for the long term. It requires sifting through first-party, third-party and zero-party data (through interactions such as online surveys), said Juliano.

“There's a lot of information out there in terms of information overflow,” Juliano said. “So you want to make sure that you're providing them the information they're looking for as part of their pipeline.” MSPs have “limited resources, so they want to make sure they can automate their marketing programs to make sure that they're getting more qualified leads and book more qualified appointments.”

Solution

To automate marketing programs, EisnerAmper leverages multiple AI tools and capabilities such as natural language processing in IBM Watson to gather data from online chatbots and phone systems. That information is used to build buyer personas, determine client types, personalize customer engagement and build leads. Use of a digital assistant, Juliano said, makes it possible to get insights from various sources, including interactions by phone, Slack, Facebook and text.

Gamification plays a role. For instance, when users take an online survey, they can win badges for completing different stages of that survey, Juliano said. As another example, when interacting with a digital chatbot, users have “the option to change a digital assistant into a female or male, depending on their preference.”

Outcome

EisnerAmper uses AI and data analytics to enable companies to curate information from various tools, such as Salesforce Customer 360, which connects customer data with relevant departments within an organization. The data is then turned into specific recommendations for lead generation, taking into account the specific channels that collect the data and customer preferences, Juliano said.  

“Also, you can use AI tools to help your business create a SEO optimized headline, if you will,” he said. Then, based on specific buyer personas, “you could tie them into service and product recommendations,” and use them for search targeting by creating AI-enabled predictive algorithms based on Google Analytics.

Summary

By leveraging AI and data analytics, businesses can gain a much clearer understanding of their current customer journey and how to improve it. Businesses can curate, sort and understand the data to refine customer engagement efforts. For MSPs, this creates an opportunity to boost their net promoter scores (NPS) through service enhancements and better customer relationships.

AI tools enable MSPs to trace and document all interaction with customers, be it through drip campaigns, online interaction or face-to-face meetings, so they can evaluate and refine the customer experience. They can also review customer feedback received through various channels to shape and position their services to boost their chances of success.

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