Marketing Automation Explained
Marketing Automation Explained
Improved marketing with technology
With the constant bombardment of advertisements from all angles, making a marketing strategy stand out is more challenging than ever.
Marketing departments are under more significant pressure to develop creative ideas that are larger and more superior to anything that their competition is doing. However, doing this in addition to day-to-day marketing tasks isn't always easy.
Marketing teams require more time to concentrate on the big picture, and that's one of the main problems facing many companies across the globe. However, technology in the form of software for marketing automation could provide the solution.
Marketing automation explained
Marketing automation allows you to identify potential customers and automate your processes for nurturing leads to be ready for sales.
It automates processes that bring prospects to a point at which they can be directly approached by sales personnel to close the deal and begin an ongoing relationship. The data it collects will determine your marketing strategies.
Marketing automation can do this by vastly increasing the effectiveness of the sales funnel and quickly converting a large number of leads into satisfied customers by combining various techniques.
In the beginning, for instance, during the lead nurturing process, education and awareness may be the most important task.
Marketing automation could provide valuable content that swiftly and effectively builds trust and respect for your brand, helping customers understand what they're receiving.
When prospects have narrowed their search to the kinds of products they're interested in, you can send out targeted messages specific to those who can be most beneficial to growing your brand.
What is the value of marketing automation?
Generating leads is a crucial step for any company's expansion.
Through automating various processes, from selling to marketing, the team will have more time to concentrate on the overall strategy and nurture the real potential leads. This means more prospects and more customers.
Marketing automation can also provide you with a more complete and more precise picture of the behaviour of your potential customers.
By using behavioural tracking strategies, like tracking the path of a visitor on your site, marketing automation software can aid your marketing team in identifying the needs of prospective customers and the stage they're at in their buying journey. Then, they can tailor any follow-up to suit these action points.
Let's say, for instance, that the customer is studying a broad range of goods. This could indicate that they're at the beginning of their buying process, researching and comparing before putting together an initial shortlist.
If they download later white papers about a particular product, this could signal an increased focus and willingness to be approached by a member of your sales team.
The fusion of data from different sources like website visits, downloading, social media activities, and direct marketing allows for automatic scoring, qualification and prioritising of leads.
This can, in turn, help to create larger marketing campaigns, such as:
- Marketing messages that are triggered
- Frequent ‘drip-feed’ emails to maintain interest
- Personalised emails
- Messages on Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms
Prioritise leads and increase marketing ROI
Apart from automating the lead nurturing process, marketing automation software can be used to create specific, objective indicators of the progress made throughout the customer's lifecycle.
While in the past, the readiness of a specific prospect for sales strategies could be attributed to the individual's intuition, now it is guided by established and measured results.
With these analytics at their core, marketing automation could aid in determining the best time to spend with sales personnel to measure the efficacy of contact points with potential customers and assess the campaign's overall effectiveness.
It also removes the guesswork from the process, especially when determining when a prospect gets transferred from sales to marketing.
Closed-loop reporting can allow you to accurately calculate the cost per opportunity and the return on investment of your marketing campaigns.
B2B Marketing automation
The B2B market is the most common location for marketing automation. This is because B2B customers and prospects comprise a small, targeted market.
This is typical of a B2B transaction:
- Participating in a multi-stage purchasing process
- A part of a long-term connection of repeat clients
Because of this, B2B is a relationship-driven setting where awareness and education about product development are crucial.
It's also where purchases aren't made exclusively by an individual. Instead, they are considered rational and require several people.
The decision to buy under these conditions will also take time in the form of weeks, months, or even years between the process' start and its end.
In general, business purchases require an extended process of lead nurturing as opposed to B2C marketing. This is because prospects will have completed extensive research before they talk to a salesperson or are ready to purchase.
This characteristic – a lengthy transition from marketing to sales, and customer research producing many information points that can be analysed.
The above characteristics makes marketing automation software ideally suited to the B2B environment.
EWM is a globally renowned agency offering state-of-the-art solutions to businesses of all types and sizes. Contact our team today to discuss some of our many solutions.