Marketing automation will elevate your business

Picture this: You’re a marketer working for a software enterprise. You and your team manage your organization’s social media accounts, lead generation, email marketing, paid search campaigns, content marketing efforts, and more, on a daily basis. As your marketing team expands, the manual tools you have at your disposal are no longer helping you manage one-to-one connections with customers.

If this sounds familiar perhaps it’s time to contemplate a solution that will help you create and handle customer interactions with more speed and customisation, increase your marketing productivity, generate a larger number of high-quality leads and enhance your return on investment. That’s right — I’m talking about Marketing Automation.

Why an increasing number of  Enterprises are adding Marketing Automation to their arsenal

A fundamental internet-age shift in power has thoroughly transformed B2B buying behaviour. Thanks to technology and steadfast access to new information, savvy B2B prospects have taken their educational odyssey of business products and solutions into their own hands. Prospects now have the tools they need to make informed business decisions, subscribing to content that’s relevant to them and engaging with brands who provide customised content catered to their needs.

It really boils down to this: prospects are now more empowered.

The Result?

Sales teams have had to leave behind their archaic practices of nurturing prospects through ineffective sales prospecting techniques. They instead depend enormously on the prospect discovering their product’s information organically. A growing number of businesses have also changed the way they generate revenue, placing the responsibility for the top half of the sales funnel to marketing.

Marketing Automation has, therefore, become a strategic imperative for many enterprises to stay competitive or lose their edge. It’s an interesting action-reaction scenario. Marketing’s increasing reliance on technology is due to the prospect’s independence thanks to technology.

Still unconvinced? Here are 5 Indisputable Benefits of Marketing Automation that might help you decide:

1. INCREASED MARKETING PRODUCTIVITY

Marketing automation allows you to pre-schedule specific tasks, decreasing the time and resources required to plan, execute and keep track of your marketing activities. This frees up your time to address more strategic or urgent objectives and boosts your overall productivity.

2. GREATER NUMBER OF HIGH-QUALITY LEADS

Leveraging on the lead intelligence, scoring and nurturing components of Marketing Automation enables you to provide the sales team with not just more leads, but higher quality leads in terms of sales-readiness. The lead intelligence element is of distinct significance as the sales team is outfitted with a deeper understanding of each lead before the first contact. This means they can tailor their opening call to the lead’s particular realm of interest allowing for a much ‘warmer’ reception than a conventional cold-call.

3. TIGHTER MARKETING AND SALES ALIGNMENT

Overall business success is dependant upon there being a strong relationship between sales and marketing teams. The application of the Marketing Automation technology can encourage this consolidation as it generates a closed-loop system, meshing marketing elements with the CRM system and forging a stronger partnership and transparency between these two departments.

4.  EXTENSIVE VIEWS OF CONTACTS

Marketing Automation seamlessly bridges your marketing touch-points like CRM integration, lead intelligence and scoring, landing pages, email marketing, social media marketing as well as marketing analytics and campaigns. This integration allows for intricate, comprehensive profiles of your contacts, which can enable you to productively segment and target specific contacts based on interaction preferences and behaviour.

5. ENHANCED ROI

Undeniably one of the most compelling driving factors for Marketing Automation implementation is the ability to not just bring about an improved ROI, but also to be able to adequately track and report on prized performance metrics. The inherent analytics of Marketing Automation technology enables a closed-loop view of marketing through to sales processes which means you can meticulously and productively report on your contribution to the overall organizational results. Marketing automation delivers value and ROI to your diverse marketing efforts. The right Marketing Automation platform, mingled with smart organizational and process alignment, enables you to connect the dots between that promotional newsletter you sent last month, that webinar you hosted last year, and the revenue your Director sees this week or can expect to view next quarter.

IF YOU’RE GOING TO USE IT, USE IT RIGHT

Many companies do not take full advantage of the Marketing Automation platform, merely utilizing its email-blast capabilities. If you are one of them, you could just as well save time, effort and money by turning to an email service provider. But you’d be giving up a great deal.

For example, with Marketing automation, you can exploit trigger events to bring follow-up content depending on what content the prospect or customer just engaged with. Or hone your lead scoring processes based on determining patterns of engagement and intent. Or employ progressive profiling to ask incremental questions to help confirm what you trust to be true about a target segment and to better adjust content to needs and demands.

Marketing Automation gives marketers a helicopter view across the entire buying process. This is something that has not been readily available in the past. The platform enables you to innovate the ways in which you go to market and the amount of time it takes to help your buyers make the choice to embrace change. This is a huge deal for marketers who are prepared to put in the effort and do the hard work to innovate beyond what they have always done.

Marketing automation isn’t just a buzzword or a trend –  it’s a vital part of a business’s strategic objectives for companies that use it right.

Read more about  Marketing Automation

Thanks for the Photo Omar Prestwich on Unsplash