Before we get into the details of marketing automation, let’s take a quick look at the basics. As we know, Marketing and sales are two crucial pillars of any business. While sales close the deals, marketing is what facilitates the inflow of leads. Though it was stated in just one line, the actual responsibilities and efforts of the marketing department are much bigger.

The purpose of Marketing

Marketing is essential to

• Increase brand awareness
• Generate quality leads
• Grow and maintain though leadership
• Increase customer value
• Ensure customer satisfaction

All these rounds up to two important things; Revenue and Brand.

Revenue and Brand is an expression of customer satisfaction which in turn is driven by customer experience. This means the best customer experience is what leads you to success.

• Are you able to pay enough attention to your customers, individually?
• Now that you know customer experience is the key, are you able to provide a highly personalized experience to each of your prospects/leads/customers?

Personalization is not just about adding their name and company name in your emails. The best personalization comes through data, knowing who they are, what they need, when they need it, etc. If you know such details you will be able to deliver a tailor-fit experience to each of your targets based on their actual requirements rather than being generic.

Suppose you have real-time access to such data and have assigned people to focus on each of your target customers using these data. Can you imagine the difference that can bring in your business?

But, Is this possible?

Yes, It is possible. To some extent, manually but with the right tools and strategy, this can be achieved at scale. And that is what Marketing Automation is all about.

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation can be defined as a software platform that helps you streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows. It helps you provide a very personalized experience to each of your prospects/leads/customers, at scale. Automation also enables you to be efficient, increase revenue, and grow into a more powerful marketing team.

Why should one use Marketing Automation?

As you know, the basis of any personalization is data. A proper marketing automation platform will help you handle all your data and marketing tools in one place. A good marketing automation platform can keep track of many data points that you actually can’t handle manually but can help you personalize your interactions with your visitors. It also helps you use the data from all your marketing tools to deliver the best personalized and timely messages across various channels, auto-magically.

What all can be automated?

• Email marketing
• Landing pages and website personalization
• Cross-channel marketing campaigns
• Account-based marketing
• Ads Management
• Segmentation
• Lead Nurturing
• Lead scoring and rotation
• Live chats
• User onboarding
• Customer Service

All these and more can be automated to manage 1:1 connections with your prospects, leads, and customers. Interesting, right?

Do I need Marketing Automation?

Beyond the above-mentioned facts, the answer is pretty simple.

Marketers who implement marketing automation properly, tend to outperform the marketers who don’t. If you need to win your customers and stay ahead of your competition, then yes, you need Marketing Automation.

Also, here are a few questions you should try answering yourself, honestly before you finalize your decision.

• you must have invested your money and effort in multiple channels to drive quality leads to your website/landing page. Are you able to identify, track, and engage these individual online visitors?
• Can you send emails to your leads, who is in your CRM and visited your pricing page a few minutes ago?
• Does your sales team get alert when their target account is on the website?
• Are you able to pull a list of contacts/accounts from your CRM and prioritize them based on fit and likelihood to buy?
• Can you filter your leads based on the level of engagement and interest?
• Are you able to measure the ROI of every single one of your marketing campaigns?

If you want to do these and more, you need proper marketing automation.

Alright. Is it worth the investment?

See the stats and decide for yourself.

• Marketers who implemented marketing automation for the first time have seen a productivity increase of up to 21%.
• Marketo says for every 1$ you invest, there is 6.6$ return on investment
• 93% of organizations with an advanced personalization strategy experienced revenue growth in 2018.
• Companies with proper automation see 14% overall growth in marketing revenue.
• Marketers using automation contribute more to the sales pipeline with 57% of sales-accepted leads converted to the sales-qualified pipeline.
• 87% of top-performing businesses are using marketing automation.

Also, read a few case studies on how some of our customers benefited from marketing automation.

• A deeper dive into marketing automation.
• How a Georgia based startup generated more sales qualified leads through marketing automation?
• How a B2B Company achieved marketing efficiency through marketing automation?

Impressive, right? What now? What are you waiting for? Automate your marketing tasks and workflows to deliver the best customer experience to convert more and to win over your competition. Good luck 🙂 Happy Marketing!