Benefits Of Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is more than merely automating your workflows, even though this clearly is the point, as the name suggests. However, if you do what you are doing now but with the help of a fancy tool, the results will not be that different. Nor does marketing automation mean mass marketing, i. e., providing the same content to all the leads you have got, regardless of their engagement history, progression in the sales process, or preferences, and hoping some will bite.

Instead, if you decide to use a marketing automation tool, you must also choose to do marketing in a new way.

The secret of marketing automation is that it enables you to track contacts' engagement with your content (newsletter opens, link clicks, landing page visits, etc.) and use that data to create personalized customer journeys. A marketing automation tool gives you complete insights into how effective your content and journey are, and you can then leverage this data to improve your activities continually.

What marketing automation is

What marketing automation is not

Marketing Automation ≠ CRM

Implementing a marketing automation tool especially makes sense if you already have a CRM system in place.

This is a good time to get our terms straight:?CRM stands for customer relationship management.?A CRM system provides an overview of leads, opportunities, and customers and is mostly used by sales departments to automate tasks and synchronize data. However, it also allows different departments, such as service, marketing, controlling, or management, to access aggregated data and use it operatively. A CRM system can, and often does, include some marketing functionality.

"Customer relationship management is not the same as marketing automation, however."

Marketing automation?is focused on automating marketing tasks to generate and nurture leads. A marketing automation tool runs campaigns, creates assets, and manages leads.

However, there is some overlap between marketing automation and CRM, and the tools complement each other, which is why many businesses use them in tandem. This allows users to get a 360° view of potential customers, from the contact stage to the purchase decision (and beyond).

When combined with a CRM system, a marketing automation tool will help to improve collaboration between marketing and sales, generate more leads, and close deals faster.

How marketing automation can improve collaboration between marketing and sales

Aligning marketing and sales is essential, and it can lead to 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales win rates. The first step in bringing sales and marketing activities closer is simplifying?cooperation.?After all, digital transformation does not mean providing each department with digital tools but digitally aligning processes across one's organization.

How to find the right marketing automation tool

A marketing automation tool may be a standalone solution or a module to be integrated with a CRM system. When evaluating your options, you should?prioritize integration into your CRM?over the tool's features. Then consider how easy to use the tool, its features, and which integrations are necessary. Finding the right solution depends on the type of your company (B2B or B2C) and the software you already have in place.

What a marketing automation tool does

Marketing automation solutions usually include data integration, customer segmentation, campaign management, and lead management (lead generation, scoring, nurturing, and routing) functionality.

These components enable marketers to

• send mailings
• generate and segment leads
• publish and disseminate content
• publish social media posts
• score leads
• increase customer loyalty

Benefits of marketing automation

Marketing automation frees up time and resources and provides data that helps businesses better understand their customers and helps them realize more effective marketing campaigns.

With marketing automation, you can?align your processes to your marketing strategy.?You have more time to conceive your campaigns, i.e. being creative and coming up with a good strategy, because you can set them up much more quickly.

When lead prioritization is automated, your sales teams can dedicate more time to nurturing promising leads.

You get a clearer view of prospects by tracking their engagement with your content, messages, ads, and e-mails. It lets you personalize follow-ups and prioritize leads according to objective KPIs rather than intuition.

All of which means your marketing ROI will improve.

Why marketing automation is so essential for B2B companies

During the non-working hours of their days, B2B buyers are also B2C buyers and are used to?sophisticated consumer interactions. They should not be experiencing anything different in a professional capacity. In other words, what they are used to as private consumers, they expect as professional buyers.

What if business-to-business marketers treated their potential buyers like their B2C peers do theirs?

Nurturing leads with personalized, relevant content along a customer journey until they are ready to purchase.

While B2C marketers seem to have such an easy time selling soft drinks, consumer electronics, or sneakers, in B2B industries, purchase decisions are often a long time in the making. Corporate structure, product complexity, and the significant investment required all factors into the purchase decision and customer experience—every touchpoint matters.

An exceptional, personalized customer journey is vital.

And while B2B companies may think of themselves as customer-centric, they are often actually account-focused. What should be a customer journey is still frequently treated merely as customer relationship management. Therefore, B2B buyers receive largely impersonal content and experience inconsistent and conflicting interactions that do not meet them where they are in the sales process.

Marketing automation can have enormous benefits for B2B companies, mainly because their sales cycles are long and complex decision-making. Converting leads into customers requires a lot of interactions and more lead nurturing than B2C marketing. Providing relevant content at strategic decision points during the research and consideration phase and analyzing the prospect's engagement allows marketing to generate data that can be analyzed and used for strategic action.

Mistakes to Avoid

To ensure that your marketing automation will be successful, you need to find the right tool for your business and make sure it is set up for success. Don't do the following:

1- Don't personalize your content

Workflows will help you communicate more personalized with workflows. However, a good chunk of the work is left up to you. You will have to have the right strategy and build the best customer journey. Leads must not suspect that communication is automated.

2- Treat every user like a lead

Your goal must not be to generate as many leads as possible but to generate those that are relevant to your business. Marketing automation helps you differentiate between qualified and unqualified leads. This way, you avoid wasting resources on leads that will never become customers.

3- Focus on e-mails only

You have more than one channel available to you.

4- Don't measure your results

Marketing automation is not just about automation. This will only save you time, but it does not mean that you will be more successful. You need a strategy, and you need to make adjustments. Therefore, make use of the insights your marketing automation tool provides. Take the time to determine KPIs beforehand, analyze them regularly, and react accordingly to avoid wasting potential.

5- Over-automate

Your marketing automation tool is a shiny new toy you want to play with. However, if you overdo it with too many mailings or incessant tweeting, your contacts will run away scared. Which is to say they may react negatively, i.e., unsubscribe from your newsletter unfollow you. That does not mean that you may still win them as customers. However, you will have less control over influencing their decision-making.

6- Do too much at once

You will probably be tempted to use all the fantastic features, and possibilities your tool allows has to offer. However, if you get bogged down trying to master too many things at once, few if any will work out in the end. Therefore, focus on what most made you acquire the tool in the first point. Start by improving your most significant pain point, achieve that goal, then consider what will be the next logical step.

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