Benefits of Marketing Automation

All sizes and industries are starting to adopt marketing automation, but why?

On average 51% of companies are currently using marketing automation. With more than half of B2B companies (58%) plan to adopt the technology according to Ultimate Marketing Automation stats.

Benefits of Marketing Automation

1. Automates the Buying Process
2. Segments and Profiles Your Buyers
3. Integrates with Sales and Marketing
4. Improves Relationships with Buyers
5. Gives Marketing a 360 View of their Buyers
6. Generates More Sales-Ready Leads
7. Increases Sales Productivity
8. Makes Marketing More Strategic

Read below for more information on the benefits of marketing automation.

 

Reason #1:  Automates the Buying Process

One of the benefits of marketing automation is it provides Marketing and Sales with a new set of tools to accelerate past the lack of face-to-face connections in cyberspace. Today’s methods guide prospects through the buying process by delivering timely, engaging content while gathering key buying indicators.

Reason #2:  Segments and Profiles Your Buyers

Contacts can be easily segmented based on their buying cycle, needs, geographies or any meaningful way you need to segment your buyers.  Furthermore, segmentation is not limited to demographics or firmographics but can append information to a buyer’s profile – implicit and explicit, across channels including social media, email and web pages.  As a result of the platform gathering attributes and profile data across channels – marketers can easily segment lists and follow through the next best action.

Reason #3:  Integrates Sales with Marketing

Automated marketing uses the information gathered from digital body language to gauge interest and intent when it comes to your brand. It’s the modern and efficient way to target your efforts so they work best. Information gathered, either through forms, online activity or social media, data can be pushed through a sales force automation (SFA) system or a CRM system for sales follow-up and conversion tracking.

Reason #4: Improves Relationships with Buyers

Personalized content is key, buyers want unique, targeted content at each stage of their research. Marketing automation simplifies the process of getting the right content to the right buyer at the right time. Because it enables real-time personalization and customization of content across channels, you are able to easily deepen relationships. Because you have the ability to optimize a content strategy through a/b testing, engagement can continue to be improved.  All this translates to having more interested and informed buyers, about your brand, services and products. As a result, each engagement gives Marketing the opportunity to deliver more sales-ready leads.

Reason #5: Gives Marketing a 360 View of Their Buyers

Because the marketing automation tool is able to track engagement across channels and link it back to the customer profile, it provides the Marketing and Sales team a 360 view of their customer.  Metrics can include but not limited to website visits, email return visitors across product pages, shares on social media, video views, email opens, click-through rates and form submissions. This wealth of data enables you to have a 360 view of your buyer.  With this business intelligence, you can measure the quality of the lead, track the impact of each touchpoint, generate an attribution model and measure ROI.  

Reason #6:  Generates More Sales-Ready leads

As every touchpoint can be tracked, including website visits, downloads and social media activity, it enables the platform to perform automatic scoring to qualify, and prioritize the leads for either sales follow-up or to generate another marketing follow to warm the lead.  Some marketing automated campaigns can include the following:

• Trigger-based marketing messages
• Infrequent “drip-feed” emails to maintain interest
• Personalized emails
• Lead nurturing campaigns

Reason #7: Increases Sales Productivity

Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity according to Nucleus Research.  Sales receiving more sales-ready leads reduces their sales cycle time and cold-calling efforts.  It also, streamlines tasks for entering contacts into a marketing program, accessing marketing tools and using email templates. Furthermore, having insight into their buyers’ interests, including the frequency and recency of the content they view can steer the salesperson into having the right conversations with their buyers.

Reason #8: Makes Marketing More Strategic

Marketing automation reduces 12.2% in marketing overhead overall, according to Nucleus Research.  Many steps are now streamlined, automated and measured. And, when you eliminate many manual tasks, it allows your marketing team to focus on being more strategic. With the incredible wealth of business intelligence captured through marketing automation with the integration of CRM, Marketing becomes a more strategic partner in improving business performance.

There are 215+ marketing automation solutions currently on the market. -Capterra.

According to Mobilemonkey, a Toronto multi-channel chatbox service, these 8 marketing automation tool categories stand out from the rest of the pack:

1. Automated Live Chat Software with Bots
2. Social Media Automation and Monitoring
3. Customer Journey Automation Software
4. Marketing Attribution and Analytics Software
5. Increase Your Email Open Rates using AI
6. Open Source Marketing Automation Software
7. Pricing Automation Software for E-commerce
8. Send Automated Messages Across Multiple Marketing Channels

To learn what is the best marketing automation solution for your business, contact us.