Marketing Automation is the next phase of internet marketing

Tuesday in class we talked about maketing automation. We looked at an example from Allstate where they are using marketing technology to improve their lead capture and demand generation process.

I said that I had watched internet marketing evolve from static banner ads, to email marketing, to search engine marketing, to interactive and well-placed contextual advertising, to social media marketing and now to the point where marketers want to track and measure the results of all their efforts on an integrated media 'dashboard.' We will have Acton software demonstrate their solution and have also looked at some material from Marketo. We analyzed Exact Target's stated positioning statement from their web site and see that that company also wants to be an integrated marketing solution.

I then asked a discussion question for next Thursday: What would a dashboard for your Restaurant.com project look like? Do you agree that marketing automation is the next phase in the evolution of the internet marketing?