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Prodware Blog: Microsoft Dynamics Marketing – how marketing automation can help unite multiple channels

19 January 2015

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that marketing in the modern business comprises dozens, if not hundreds of different strands. Marketers know that navigating through this multifaceted and complex world can be extremely demanding. This is where marketing automation and, in particular, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing come into play.

Why marketing automation is important

Whether they’re managed in-house, via external agencies or through a mixture of the two, a savvy business needs to incorporate the right level of customer identification and segmentation, lead generation and nurturing, advertising and design, PR and media relations, social media, digital, search, events, sponsorship and much, much more into its marketing strategy.

And of course, all of this needs to feed directly into board-level analysis and decision making. It’s no coincidence that we’re seeing increasing analysis of why Marketing Directors should aspire to become CEOs.

So how can Marketing Directors manage the ever-expanding juggling act of looking after this huge range of channels and ensure external messaging is coherent and consistent? Needless to say, technology has a fundamental role to play.

Crucially, it’s a role that, for maximum effectiveness, should be centred on unifying and consolidating all these disparate marketing strands. Today’s marketing technology platforms and applications must enable the smoothest possible collaboration between marketing teams, as well as every stage of the lead-to-customer journey – and ‘collaboration’ here means a lot more than just sharing ideas.

The benefits of marketing automation software: Microsoft Dynamics Marketing at a glance

Comprehensive platforms like Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics CRM can add fantastic value to businesses. Here are some of the many benefits marketing automation brings:

  • Lead generation – achieve full, segmented visibility of the complete lead journey, conversion rates for different campaigns and activities and their effectiveness.
  • Creative and advertising – span the gap between traditional and digital creative output, enable cross-channel creative campaigns and tracking.
  • Social, web and digital – access an approved library of web-ready content and get in-depth insight into sales and marketing performance across multiple online channels.
  • Management and board-level marketing – gain unparalleled insight into performance and ROI across every area of marketing.

This improved form of collaboration means enabling all stakeholders to access the same information and tools at the same time, for the performance of one area to feed into the actions of another, and for senior management to have a truly all-encompassing view of multiple marketing channels. It is, in every way, a dynamic form of collaboration.

Speak to Prodware, a Microsoft Gold Partner about how Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics CRM can improve your marketing and sales performance.