Marketing automation refers to the software platforms and technologies that are designed specifically for marketing departments and organizations to market more effectively on multiple online channels like social media, email, websites, etc. Marketing automation helps the marketers in generating, nurturing and scoring leads, segmentation, cross-sell and up-sell, customer retention, customer lifecycle marketing, and ROI measurement.

 

You can use the marketing automation process to interact with your website visitors, increase your leads and customers. It also explains how marketing automation and content personalization together allows you to automate a great user experience and make it personal to each of your website visitors. Here is an infographic that explains the top marketing automation trends.

Who can Benefit from Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is not only used by just big companies. Small and growing companies are making up a big space right now for using marketing automation. Primarily B2B ‘business-to-business’ industries were using it like high tech software, manufacturing, and business services.

Now it’s increasingly being used by B2C (business-to-consumer) industries like financial services, healthcare services, retail, media, and entertainment including the software for its real-time engagement-oriented approach and extending customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle. Marketing automation is highly adopted among B2B marketers. According to research by Regalix, about 79% of B2B marketers worldwide are using marketing automation.

Benefits of Marketing Automation for B2B Companies

 

Helps in Improving Lead Nurturing, Lead Quality, and Increasing Lead Generation
B2Bs are all about leads now when it comes to marketing automation. Leads are the top issue that B2B marketers are facing. Lead quality is something that every marketer should pay attention to. It should always be quality over quantity. If Quality is good then no doubt the number will increase automatically. Marketing automation has its critical role in the lead process. 80% of the marketing automation users increased their leads and 77% of them increased their conversions.

 

According to a study by Regalix conducted in March 2005, when B2B marketers were asked about the changes in contemporary lead conversion techniques, 59% of the B2B marketers showed their strong dependence on marketing automation tools. Further in April 2005, marketing automation objectives were met. B2B marketers ranked the benefit of marketing automation four out of five related to leads. Marketing automation is one the best answers to the puzzle that questions many marketers about their ROI and lead generation process.

 

Helps in Understanding ROI
Measuring the result of the marketing efforts is the biggest challenge that marketers are facing today. With marketing automation technologies, B2B marketers got closed-loop reporting that enables them to measure the effectiveness of their marketing. What should be a better way to measure the effectiveness of any marketing campaign? One can measure it based on measuring the number of sales that result from the campaign. Measuring these metrics instead of less important ones sounds good. Now it’s the end of the marketer’s efforts as marketing automation tools have advanced now and are able to accurately attribute sales and new opportunities to specific marketing initiatives.

 

Each marketing automation platform provides different types of reports but the major ones are Marketo, Act-On, Pardot, Eloqua, etc. that provide some level of Return on Investment (ROI) reporting. Brands can typically see a 20-50% increase in revenue after marketing automation adoption because it’s error free. It doesn’t make mistakes when dealing with data whether it’s about 20 campaigns or 2 campaigns. Marketers can make a data-driven approach every time with marketing automation and will be able to invest in future campaigns whether be its SEO, paid media, link building or social media etc.

 

Budget Constraints and More Time for Other Works
B2B marketers identify the budget constraints as their number one challenge when it’s the question about their marketing strategy. But marketing automation does more for the marketers. A marketing team can run all the elements of a marketing campaign with the help of a marketing automation system. The number of people is not needed. One person can track, keep, and target the marketing campaigns in an organized manner and review the tracking data and thus can determine the ROI of each aspect of the marketing strategy. “74% of the marketers say that marketing automation is their biggest advantage in saving time. So they can focus on their other task thus increasing efficiency. ”

 

Improves Customer Relationships
Now technology has changed a lot in terms of customer interaction with the business and most of the marketers find it a concerning part of their business. But marketing automation can help you with this and get over with this concern. Marketers can add prospects to a list with lead nurturing to automatically receive information on specific offers and products.

 

Marketing automation ensures your marketing business stays top of the mind. Personalization of business interactions with the prospects is possible now by separating them into lists based on their interests. The word ‘automation’ itself is explaining the meaning of it. The communication with the customer is automated and marketers can simply walk away. Previously marketing jobs were thought to be finished when they had a lead over to the sales team but now the concept has totally changed.

 

Marketing now needs to provide sales with the ongoing personalized content for customers to nurture long-term advocacy. Sales team then need to provide customers feedback to the marketing efforts for helping content and influence strategy. “Its predicted that by the year 2025, 85% of customer relationships will be managed by marketing automation without human interaction.” Agencies will use marketing automation to improve communication with customers by automating personalization and communications.

 

Customer Acquisition
Increasing the number of audience and subscribers is not an easy task but marketing automation has changed the concept. It has tools that can help you meet your business goals. There is no better way than marketing automation to nurture existing leads as it saves time, integrates well, and moves existing leads and prospects seamlessly through the sales funnel. According to the below chart, among the top performers today, 69% use marketing automation for customer acquisition and retention.

 

Marketing automation has proved to be the most beneficial aspect of the marketing team. It can make the B2B marketing and sales team the most productive and happy team. 74% of the B2B marketer’s reports that dynamic content helps their company create a path to lead a more audient list through the sales-cycle.

 

Boost in Sales
Marketing automation benefits in increasing your sales by providing more quality and quantitative leads. B2B marketers who adopted marketing automation reported an average of 20% increase in their sales program from nurtured leads. Marketing automation also improves lead nurturing and increases the lifetime value of a customer. Lead scoring of marketing automation is an automatic strategy that either adds or subtracts points from each lead based on the actions taken that are taken or not taken. It tracks demographic data to provide a high score lead that fits your ideal buyer persona. Then that high score lead reaches the threshold that you set and will be “sales ready” and is passed onto the sales team.

 

Segmentation and Personalization
Market segmentation is a vital idea if you want to increase B2B sales through personalized marketing. You can identify segments and opportunities with the data provided by a marketing automation process. Personalized emails improved click-through-rate by 14% and conversion rate by 10%. Segmenting audiences allows marketers to personalize content for each group’s needs which increases open rates and CTR.

 

Reduce Human Errors in Marketing Campaigns
The biggest benefit that B2B marketers can get from marketing automation is less error. Marketing departments, consultants, and employees benefit from marketing automation in specifying criteria and outcomes for tasks and processes, which increases efficiency and reduces human error. 8% of the B2B marketers say that the biggest benefit that they got from marketing automation is less error. Mistakes are by default reduced when emails, social media posts, and other items are pre-scheduled and crafted in advance.

 

Faster Lead Conversion Time
Sales conversion time dropped by 72% with marketing automation according to a report by Thomson Reuters. This contributed to a 175% overall increase in revenue. Many companies and B2B marketers reported high revenue with decreased lead conversion time after adopting marketing automation in their day to day business strategies.

 

Reduce Staff Expenses
One person instead of several can handle all marketing efforts and aspects and can efficiently automate and trigger marketing campaigns across multiple channels. The above video by Vbout explains 10 major benefits of marketing automation.

Conclusion
Marketing automation is a platform that is used by the marketers to plan, coordinate, manage, and measure all marketing efforts and campaigns, both online and offline. According to Jon Miller “Marketing automation is the technology that propels your business into a new era of relationship-based marketing with quantitative results. Your company will soon find itself on a journey that leads to new heights of business success, when powerful technology meets effective implementation and internal process management .”

All marketers should be aware of the benefits that marketing automation provides so that they can reap the advantages and include them in meeting their business goals. The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.