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Marketing Automation – Why, When, and How

As 2015  begins companies are working hard to begin implementing their marketing strategy. It’s the time to analyze 2014 marketing efforts and introduce new ones, all to make sure the sales pipeline gets a boost in the coming year.

With new marketing platforms and tools emerging every day, marketers have more possibilities than ever before when it comes to creating, launching, and measuring campaigns. For marketers, their environment is fresh and exciting, but with all this opportunity comes the added stress of higher expectations from management. Choosing tools, and researching effective measurements and data analysis can be the most important decision a marketer makes, and it all happens before a campaign is event drafted.

For instance, when choosing a marketing management tool for multi-platform use, you must consider you needs:

  • A website for more engagement and personalization?
  • CRM for customer experience?
  • Social media for deeper engagement and finding new audiences?
  • Web Analytics for tracking and understanding user behavior?
  • Or Marketing Automation…?

For most, Marketing Automation (MA) stands out against the rest.

With the growing popularity and success of content marketing, personalization, targeting, segmentation, and mobile focus, marketers are putting a lot of emphasis on Marketing Automation. MA has provided a fresh perspective on marketing tactics, accelerating campaigns with a data-driven approach. Plus, it has become a great alternative to reduce manual and repetitive tasks in the office.

“B2B marketers who implement Marketing Automation increase their sales-pipeline contribution by 10%.”- Forrester
“78% of successful marketers cite Marketing Automation as most responsible for improving revenue contribution.”- Lenskold Group/Pedowitz Group

A carefully fitted MA tool helps produce an excellent customer experience, targeted awareness, more leads, and higher revenue.

Why Adopt?

Once upon a time, it took two generations to establish a major brand; now it takes just a few years (when done right). Don’t believe it? Think about Google, or Facebook, and then think again.

Today, early adoption directly affects success. To succeed in today’s competitive market, you should have a clear understanding of customers’ requirements and expectations. To obtain this, marketers need better tools to manage complex, multi-touch customer ecosystems. Companies that use Marketing Automation tools have access to new data sources, superior analytics, and better integrations that allow them to generate high-value pipelines.

So how can this new data and information affect ROI? Simple. With an integrated MA and CRM system, marketing and sales departments can better collaborate and coexist to create greater value for the company and customers.

What does it do…specifically?

To many, Marketing Automation is considered as an email campaign management platform. But, it’s much, much more than that. Using an MA tool, you can present personalized content to your particular customers with lead nurturing campaigns, but you can also see visible results in audience reaction to marketing efforts, including:

  • Maximized visitors’ experience and customer satisfaction
  • Boosted speed, accuracy, and execution of marketing campaigns.
  • Higher quality,  deeper insights about customers
  • Improved productivity, and enablement of better alignment between sales and marketing departments.

Perhaps most importantly, marketers can better analyze their strategy and ensure that their approach is steady and relevant from top-to-bottom for creating long-term competitive advantage.

When Should I Implement?

There are telltale signs that your current strategy needs a boost. Here are some things that give a clear picture of the need to automate your processes:

  • Campaign execution and management process is complicated by multiple touches from Marketing and/or Sales.
  • Need better insights about customers’ wants and needs.
  • Customer base is expanding, it is becoming hard to foster personal relationships.
  • New leads require nurturing.
  • Data plays a major role in decisions that your marketing team makes.
  • Personalized content for prospects exists in large quantities.
  • Marketing campaigns need to be more agile.
  • Campaigns must be scalable to meet growing demands.
  • Difficulty storing customer contacts and information.
  • Need to target sophisticated buyers

Any of these business hurdles can help establish a baseline for MA implementation, but you must be prepared. You should first determine your strategy and business objectives then use those ideas to help choose the platform that best suits your needs.
Once you’ve established all of this, you’re ready to make your case, good luck! And let us know how it goes.

Marketing Automation platform provider and OSSCube partner, Act-On, has made MA pricing and implementation simple and flexible. It’s up to you how much leverage you can get because opportunities here are huge

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