Today’s release of Hubspot 3 marketing automation software at the Inbound Conference marks the rise of dynamic content, a method of customizing the way individuals view content, images or actions. Now small and medium enterprise marketers can easily deploy dynamic content segmented by niches.
Dynamic content harnesses database marketing to serve unique content to people based on a wide variety of factors, including their sales history, social media preferences, historical content preferences, and prior interactions with the company.
Delivery mechanisms for dynamic content include both online web pages and forms, and emails. Of course, if you engage in direct mail, you can deliver print pieces based on segmentation and individual preferences (depending on your vendor).
According to Hubspot, dynamic content can evolve over time or based on what information a company has stored about the individual viewers’ preferences and interests.
Modern integrated marketing far surpasses the 90s equivalent of simply getting everyone to apply the same message across diverse tools. While certainly a method of strengthening overall communications, historically, integration lacked the personalization and intelligence that strong database marketing can bring to the table.
At a minimum database driven marketing automation can empower you to segment your stakeholders to serve them customized content. But now with the rise of Big Data and strong CRM solutions, we’re starting to see customization on an individual basis.
Some statistics supporting dynamic content via marketing automation:
- 53% of retailers plan to focus on web personalization engines in 2012 (National Retail Federation)
- In a study of 650 multi-channel marketing campaigns, personalized campaigns consistently and overwhelmingly beat out static campaigns in generating a high response rate from recipients. (MindFire). See a breakdown by industry.
- 37% of brands would like to use social media engagement to create customer-tailored marketing campaigns (Forrester).
Marketing Automation Challenges
A carpenter can buy the best hammer in the world, but if she/he swings it blindly it won’t work.
Marketing automation presents its own challenges for professionals. Success depends on the competency of the marketing department.
What dynamic content via marketing automation really offers us is the marketing equivalent of power tools.
These tools are awesome, if used intelligently and strategically. Conversely, if they aren’t deployed with purpose and analysis, then one may not be pleased with the results.
For example, 25 percent of marketing automation adopters have not integrated with CRM, and more than 50 percent have not added in lead scoring or nurturing (source: Pedowitz Group).
Joby Blume’s prior company relied on marketing automation to drive their new business, but went belly up. She detailed several challenges they faced including lack of strategy, process, a lack of leads, and poor content choices.
Hubspot 3 Approaches to Challenges
Full disclosure: I accepted compensation to speak at the event, and attended a private dinner hosted by Hubspot.
One of the mechanisms for addressing process challenges in HubSpot 3 is workflow, which creates a series of rules set by the marketer to create dynamically evolving segments and automate marketing actions.
Hubspot says that workflow enables marketers to trigger campaigns, change contact profile properties, score leads, send notifications, and sync to a CRM system based on when a lead has met a set of conditions.
I did get a sneak preview of the Hubspot 3 system at Inbound2012. It’s pretty sweet, tying together many disparate pieces to provide a robust integrated package for online marketing.
Generally, the UI is very clean and easy to use, much more so than other comparable dashboards that I have seen. The embeddable forms are simple to generate, as are the unique landing pages, emails, and the ability to serve targeted pictures to segmented lists.
I still think someone like me can benefit from training and tutorials, but Hubspot3 does offer these best practice eBooks and tips systems inside the system.
Besides Hubspot 3, other marketing automation vendors include Eloqua, Marketo, and Vocus’s Marketing Suite.
What do you think of dynamic content and marketing automation?