Marketing automation is a term that is gaining popularity in the online marketing space today. The thing is a lot of marketers and business owners have no clue what it means or what it is all about. If you are one of such people, then today is your lucky day.
Within a very short time, the marketing space has changed drastically. consumers now have easy access to content, products and services. As a marketer, you need to constantly be in touch with your audience so as to quickly engage prospects and provide content that will make them paying customers. With so many prospects out there, there is so little a marketer can achieve with just manual processing and tracking. What if marketing automation can help you with all of that?
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation a subset of customer relationship management (CRM) that focuses on the definition, scheduling, segmentation and tracking of marketing campaigns. The use of marketing automation makes processes that would otherwise have been performed manually much more efficient and makes new processes possible.
Marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions. Features of this software include email marketing, landing pages and forms, campaign management, engagement marketing, prediction and scoring, customer lifecycle management, CRM integration, social marketing capabilities, mobile marketing capabilities and marketing. This platform allows you to carry out specific marketing task in large volumes. It is the dream of every business owner that his business grows and his customer base grows.
The customers are first an audience and then prospects. As they grow in number, it becomes quite difficult to engage all of them on a one-on-one basis. Hence, marketing automation is employed. It enables you to quickly track down prospects no matter the scale, engage and serve them relevant content to make them paying customers.
Why Should You Adopt Marketing Automation?
ENHANCED CUSTOMER AQUISITION AND RETENTION: The first and foremost benefits of marketing automation is the ability to generate more and better leads.
Marketing automation lets you track how a potential customer interacts with your brand. The frequency of email clicks. Ad clicks, website views, downloads e.t.c gives away clues that he might be ready to buy. Thus allowing you to provide adequate and well-timed marketing messages/incentives to accelerate his decision to buy. Of the top performers in B2B, 69% use Marketing automation for Customer acquisition and 50% for Customer Retention. – ACT-ON and Gleanster Research. “Rethinking the Role of Marketing “ (2015)
IMPROVED CUSTOMER-BRAND RELATIONSHIP(QUALITY LEADS): Marketing automation also builds a stronger customer-brand relationship (customer loyalty). Automation makes interaction with every prospect, lead and customer personal. This allows them to feel noticed by the brand. Personal interaction with your potential and current customers allows you to provide value just the way they like it. 74% of B2B marketers surveyed consider lead quality over quantity as a prime focus.
IMPROVED SALES AND ROI: Marketing automation yields higher ROI as it allows brands to track prospect behavior before and after buying. This allows for optimised marketing and deployment of highly relevant campaigns that will cause sales increase and faster. Increasing sales revenue (53%), lead nurturing (43%) and customer engagement (37%) are the most important objectives of a marketing automation strategy. – Marketo & Ascend2 “Marketing Automation Strategies for Sustaining Success” (2015)
IMPROVED ANALYTICS: It also provides a central marketing database where all your marketing data, prospect behaviours, and interactions can be tracked. In B2B Access to customer data (95%), Marketing alignment with sales (90%), fragmented marketing systems (83%) and limitations with current technologies (80%) are the 4 top challenges for reaching current marketing objectives. ACT-ON and Gleanster Research “Rethinking the Role of Marketing “ (2015)
Two-thirds of companies that use marketing automation believe it’s critically important to their business, yet 75% haven’t maximized its benefits. SMBs may feel as though this isn’t for them but in fact, they’d be wrong. Both Large Scale businesses and SMBs (Whether B2B or B2C) are all advised to adopt this software for its real-time, engagement-oriented approach to maintaining and extending customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle. It works.
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