Why B2B Marketers Need To Implement Marketing Automation?
Marketing Automation is the latest buzzword in the business world. With everything getting automated right from toothbrushes to automobiles, marketing automation was an expected advancement. Marketers face a number of challenges to achieve the desired results, one of them is to repeat the same marketing act or process every time they deal with their target audience. Marketing Automation is a software tool aimed at automating repetitive marketing actions such as emails, social media & other website actions.
If you have ever been part of a marketing team of a corporate, you will know how hectic the work can be. Along with focusing on industry needs, the marketers are also supposed to concentrate on day-to-day tasks which are generally repetitive in nature. Imagine spending your time on sending the same welcome mail every time a new customer logs into your portal, sending emails on discount offers to existing customers every time a clearance sale happens or directly engaging with every new individual who enters into the company’s social media profiles. There is no point in blaming the marketers if they get fed up with doing the extra work and loose their focus on the original task. This is where the importance of Marketing Automation comes into picture.
WHY MARKETING AUTOMATION?
The chances that you have heard the term before but do not exactly have a clear idea about what it is-Can happen. In simple words, marketing automation refers to the software that can be used to execute marketing actions without manual effort. So why should you be interested in having marketing automation software? The answer is simple. In today’s corporate world, marketers who use the software tend to outperform the ones who don’t use it for performing their tasks.
THE ORIGIN OF MARKETING AUTOMATION
Marketing automation emerged as a way for marketers to reach out to potential customers through multiple marketing channels. The origins of marketing automation can be traced back along with the origin of CRM platforms. Majority marketers will agree that marketing automation & CRM platforms go hand in hand.
The marketing automation started taking shape and became more distinct during the middle of the 2000s and in the past few years, it has become a $1.62 billion industry garnering over 142,700 users worldwide.
Moreover, the cost of marketing automation tools has become affordable in a way that nowadays even start-ups who have just entered the market have started using them. Earlier, it was only accessible to large multinational corporations and their likes.
Previously marketing automation mainly revolved around email marketing but it was the time when the internet was just getting popular among the general public. Later it developed as an amalgamation of much-needed marketing technology, namely web analytics, email and marketing resource management. With the arrival of social media channels, mobile commerce, and landing pages, marketing automation tools started developing themselves to become an all-in-one marketing and sales platform.
MARKETING AUTOMATION IS HIGH TECH BUT TECH FRIENDLY
One awesome feature of marketing automation is that even if it is developed as per the most sophisticated technology, it’s very simple to handle. The best marketing solutions are designed specifically to overcome the need for a technical team to run it. A marketing manager with basic digital knowledge will be enough to properly handle the marketing automation tool.
Possibilities in marketing Automation
- Email marketing
- Landing page creation
- Cross-channel marketing campaigns
- Lead generation
- Segmentation
- Lead nurturing and scoring
- Cross-sell and up-sell
- Retention
- Measuring ROI
- Website personalization
These strategies are familiar to all the marketers out there, but without the right equipment, they can be hard to accomplish. When a company’s marketing team grows above the primary level, there comes a point where it won’t be possible to manage 1:1 connections with customers using the manual tools available. That’s when automation comes in handy.
6 BENEFITS OF MARKETING AUTOMATION:
BETTER LEADS
One of the best benefits of marketing automation is that it can help you reach out to potential customers at the exact point in the sales funnel, for example, where they’ve expressed an interest in your newsletter or browsed your blog for long enough, etc. This means that the lead list will be more targeted, and potentially useful instead of just a list of random email addresses.
BETTER CLIENT RELATIONSHIPS
Marketing campaigns carried out through the automation software would be done at regular intervals and at a specified frequency. Marketers can use it to gain the trust of the customers through repeated efforts and by maintaining consistency.The software will play an important role to fill up the communication gap between the business and the customers.
MULTI-CHANNEL CAMPAIGN AUTOMATION
Marketers understand the need to coordinate their campaigns across multiple platforms, channels, and devices, because today’s customers often jump from one to another, spontaneously. Marketing automation can make this omnipresent status significantly easier for marketers to achieve.
Marketers can target customers with hyper-relevant product recommendations, conditional content, and smart segmentation, not just through email, but also social interactions, SMS messaging, push notifications, targeted ads, and more with the help of marketing automation.
CUSTOMER RETENTION THROUGH AUTOMATION
Customer retention is one of the easiest ways to raise profits. Certain automation tools such as win-back and abandoned cart campaigns can have a huge impact on customer retention.
Automating those retention programs, prompted by an abandoned cart or a defined period of inactivity, constructed with timely and relevant messaging, can be the approach to bring the customer back and re-engage them with the product.
AVOIDING HUMAN ERROR
One of the most useful marketing automation benefits is that software can’t make the same kind of mistakes that we humans sometimes make. This ensures avoiding small, silly manual errors that sometimes have large, catastrophic results.
UNDERSTANDING THE CORRECT MESSAGE AND APPLYING IT
Through the help of marketing automation, marketers can instantly understand which message is suitable for each target audience, as well as where, when, and how to send them for best results. Marketers can continuously test, optimize, and re-test messages, creative executions, and even subject lines. This type of information is needed to optimize content, resulting in getting the job done in less time and money not going to waste.
The potential of marketing automation is endless and it is the future of digital for brands. Marketers around the world are pursuing marketing automation tools as it is essential for attaining that competitive edge over the rest. Marketing Automation not only benefits your business but, it also helps in improving the relationship with your customers.