The role of marketing automation in the B2B landscape is crucial. It has been seen that automation makes the task easier for marketers; it helps streamline the marketing approach and connect with potential customers on time. Marketing automation helps organizations leverage each marketing approach and bring them closer to success.
There are other benefits of marketing automation, which we would be discussing in this blog.
As known, marketing automation is the technology that helps organizations rightly promote their services or products on different channels to reach their desired business results. You can say, the technology takes off the burden from the employees and injects the accurate mechanical steps into the process for an efficient workflow and excellent marketing results.
How is Marketing Automation Helping B2B Marketers?
Marketing automation is automating the repetitive tasks that let marketers focus on other tasks that cannot be automated. The tasks that are automated with the help of automation tools are, creating better email campaigns, enhancing the digital marketing process, enhancing the social media posts, and obtaining the relevant content. Almost 95% of companies are using marketing automation to leverage email marketing for their process.
Email marketing is a useful channel for earning revenue and is rigorously implemented in the marketing approach to achieve the target. Marketers are tempted to use marketing automation as they know with the implementation of this technology, they can make their email marketing campaign successful.
With a good percentage of marketers relying on marketing automation in organizations, 58% of organizations that did not adopt marketing automation are planning to adopt this technology in their future business process.
This is the crucial reason that the technology is growing at an annual rate of 20%, while in the current scenario, almost 75% of the marketers are using at least one type of the automation tool.
Recommended for you: Best 5 Automation Tools for Google PPC Ads You May Try.
Marketing automation is also helping nurture the leads, like sending educational emails or informing customers about any new product or service at planned intervals. The more the customers become accustomed to your brand, the more they would be attracted to your brand and purchase the product. The marketers are also thinking in the context of the marketing and sales funnel, which is the reason why they are adopting marketing automation. This solution is a total combination of strategy and technology. It is the reason why marketing automation gives ultimate customer experience resulting in a good rapport with customers. Also, marketing automation helps in personalization and improves the alignment between departments by 21%.
The other crucial tasks that marketing automation can execute in your organization are lead scoring, management of the marketing campaigns, the right structuring and organizing process of the data, analysis of the campaign performance, lead management, analysis of the marketing campaign, integration of the multiple touchpoints, etc.
The important features of marketing automation are having real-time sales alerts, visitor tracking, scoring of leads, nurturing of leads, and others.
Find the below infographic that supports the above statements:
Infographic source: tdinsights.com.
Know more about Sales Cycle and generating Sales-Ready Leads
Organizations are facing a major hurdle nowadays that is they could not earn the right revenue at the targeted time. This is because of the elongated sales cycle. B2B decision-makers are taking their own sweet time to finalize any deal. So, if they do not sign up for a new deal, the sales representative could not close the deal, and the organization could not have the needed revenue in that quarter. Marketing automation, to a great extent, helps reduce the sales cycle as it helps with the quality communication with the business customer accelerating the process and facilitating organizations to achieve their target.
B2B marketers integrating marketing automation saw a 10% increase in the pipeline.
The proven statistics to show marketing automation is highly effective for organizations:
If one wants to see quantitative results of the effectiveness of marketing automation, then some of the chosen ones include:
- Almost 53% of marketers have a belief that automated CRM & email are effective matches.
- While 27% of them find marketing automation difficult for implementation.
Techniques used by B2B Marketing Automation and Barriers to its Adoption:
Other than email automation, the techniques used by marketing automation are profiling and targeting and using dynamic content. With so many advantages, there is still a certain percentage of organizations that have not adopted marketing automation. After a good research, it is found, there are specific barriers to the adoption of the marketing automation such as developing a successful strategy, properly streamlining the marketing process, delivering the personalized content, having a successful reporting and measuring process, enhancing the experience of the user, integrating all the marketing systems, among others. So, when these challenges are addressed at the right time, you would be seeing an increasing number of organizations adopting marketing automation to reach their target.
Some of the top marketing automation trends that you need to look out for are integrated behavioral-based email workflow, personalized content recommendation, and predictive lead scoring.
You may also like: Powering Email Marketing Strategy with Marketing Automation and CRM.
Final observation:
Marketing automation had made a mark of its own in the marketing process of organizations. It is helping organizations achieve their target convincingly. The technology is highly powerful and helps generate quality leads, doubling the revenue, saving the budget, and time on the marketing.
Organizations would see the spending on automation tools to increase to 25.1 billion by the year 2023, with 1 out of 4 marketers using marketing automation for creating the right personalization process.
This article is written by Kristin Mortis. Kristin is a Marketing Manager with 7+ years of experience at TDInsights based out of Plano, Texas. She helps businesses deliver the strongest marketing turnaround with cutting-edge digital strategies and tools. She writes about B2B Marketing, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and other technological innovations. Connect with Kristin on Twitter to learn about the emerging practices being implemented in the B2B segment.
