Technology makes measuring, delivering, and following up with customers possible in a way that wasn’t so in the past. Leveraging the right strategy, content, and tools will make your business more efficient and effective at communicating with your current and prospective customers.

The marketing automation world has evolved significantly and there's now an accessibility of tools to help facilitate more targeted — and dynamic — communications. GRAYBOX takes a strategic approach to defining your audiences, mapping out how those audiences should be receiving communication, and the kinds of tools to deliver those messages. The last thing you want to do is start with a shiny new tool and realize that you either overbought on the tool or don't have a plan to leverage the tool you have to help accomplish your goals.

Once we have a solid understanding of where your business is going, GRAYBOX leads a collaborative process to identify who your customers are and/or should be. Sometimes it's crystal-clear; often it's not and we facilitate a culling through a diversity of customer types or groups that may be similar, to try and get 3-5 total personas that are clearly defined. Next, we poke at them to see how they hold up to the scrutiny of a series of questions that get at what makes them tick. We want to know their underlying motivations so we can see how well-defined they are and ensure that they serve up actionable insights to drive decisions about targeted marketing and how to interact with them through your website.

After identifying the customer groups, it's important to map out what kinds of communications they should be receiving, and then, in your engagement or buying funnel. We can leverage marketing automation to set up automated follow-ups after someone downloads a whitepaper. Maybe it's what the communication stream should look like after a new member joins the fold. Whatever the scenario, identifying what those individual touchpoints are and how they could potentially be communicated with is key in mapping everything out. This is the time to go all-out on a workflow diagram that provides a visual mechanism for understanding what happens, and when, along the funnel. GRAYBOX creates a clear decision tree that shows what happens at each stage and what happens when users take an action, which is ultimately what you want them to do.

Toolset shouldn't be overlooked, but shouldn't be where you start. GRAYBOX has experience with a wide variety of tools, from Hubspot to Mailchimp, and each can be a great fit for your business depending on a variety of factors. We can recommend tools that fit your budget, set them up. and figure out the communications and associated triggers to make sure that the right groups get the right communications at the right time.